To The Person Who Has Always Wanted to Read Poetry But Doesn’t Know How— Here Are 3 Pointers
When I was a kid I obsessively read every Goosebumps. Later, while studying in Prague, I took nights off of beer drinking to come home early and dive into The Road, Lonesome Dove and more. Despite my lifelong love of reading; poetry never hooked me.
Poetry was too archaic. Too complicated. Too hard.
As I got older I found myself wanting to write. Randomly, I rediscovered poetry. Its short form, which forces you to capture the complexities of a time, place, or feeling, in too few words, won me over. But, even as I began to write poetry, I still didn’t read poetry.
Finally, this last year I took a class on modern poetry. Like teaching a miner how to tin for gold, the class helped me learn the tactics needed to explore a poet’s perspective and extract more from their writing.
For anyone interested in poetry here is a three step process to get more from your reading:
1. Consider the author and time period:
Because poems don’t directly tell you their setting, you need to use all the clues you can to contextualize the piece. Understanding the author, and the major literary and social movements of the time, will help you place the themes and content.
For example, the classic “Boy Breaking Glass” was written by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black author to win the Pulitzer. She wrote this poem in the late 1960s, at the tail end of the civil rights movement, while racial tensions still raged in cities. Through this lens you can understand why the boy in the poem is breaking windows and why this act of vandalism is also an artistic expression.
Or for example, Gertrude Stein’s poem, A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass is far less cryptic if you know that she is a contemporary of Picasso and you view the poem as a written complement to cubism.
2. Consider the form:
Another window into a poem is its form. For example sonnets are simple, rhyming and often used to write about love. That said, this classic form has often been usurped by modern writers to mock the sonnet’s flowery sound — showing that a form should not looked at in isolation, but within the context of a poem and poet.
Other forms include the ballad, a haiku, a cento and more.
Meanwhile, some poets transform the actual shape of a poem to emphasize or contradict a point, such as Prageeta Sharma’s “Glacier National Park and the Elegy.” In general, NEVER neglect form when reading a poem. It’s part of the map to a poem’s heart.
3. Consider the words/phrases:
Finally you should do a deep reading of a poem. This is one of the most enjoyable and interesting ways to explore poetry.
What’s a deep reading? On a second or third reading of a poem, find words or phrases that stand out. Play with those words. Does the word have multiple meanings? Does the word have religious, scientific or social significance? How does the word fit into the historical context of the poem? This process will give rise to new interpretations of the poem which you can indulge (or reject), but all of which will give you a stronger sense of the writing.
For example, take a look at Langston Hughes’ famous “Dinner Guest: Me.” As you read the poem, the word, “friases du bois” stands out. A quick Google tells us this is a forest strawberry, but at the same time, the word conjures up a fancy dinner party and at the same time it reminds us of W.E.B. Du Bois. Next, you should ask why the words “Negro Problem” and “Probe” are capitalized. With a deeper reading, the word probe means to ask questions, but is also used in intense government investigations, such as “a government probe”, and it also refers to space probes. Given that this was written in 1968, eleven years after Sputnik launched, space probes is an interesting interpretation.
Anyways, you get the point.
So that’s the formula for getting more from poetry. Consider the context, consider the form, and consider the language. At this point you should be a poetry reading expert.
And if you still don’t like poetry, you can go Frost yourself.
