How 2 Read Poetry
Uh-oh, you don't know how to read poetry? Dummy alert!
1. The Article Assumes You Want to Read Poetry.
Maybe you do not actually want to read poetry. Maybe you clicked this link by accident, or somebody sent it to you by text and you didn't really read the URL before tapping it. Perhaps you hate poetry and you searched up on Google "How to Read Poetry" so you could leave hateful comments. If this is the case, I regret to inform you that the article assumes you want to read poetry.
Okay, you are still here. This means that you believe that you want to read poetry. I think it is likely that you feel that you ought to enjoy reading poetry because you see yourself as a particular type of person. Or perhaps, you think that by reading poetry you might become a different person. A better person! Or at the very least, not the person that you are that doesn't read poetry. Yikes!
Lesson number one, don't read poetry because you feel like you should read poetry. Don't read poetry because it seems like a cozy upper-middle class type activity to engage in over Christmas break. Go bake cookies or something.
Still here? Okay. That is good, I am glad. I am happy to inform you that the article assumes that you want to read poetry, and you are in the right place.
2. Reading poetry should either be: fun, joyful, or fill the existential need of your soul.
Really it is kind of stupid to be writing this essay. Why does anyone read a novel? Because they like novels. It is an optional activity. Reading poetry is the same. You do it because you like it. Don't like poetry? Great, stop reading it. I would suggest trying pickleball, or rock climbing, or scuba diving, or baking cookies.
Okay, but you want to like poetry but sometimes it seems like a dizzying dance of words on the page? Ah, I see, those damn poets are at it again. The reason I read poetry is because it is fun. It gives me joy. And often, it fills the existential need of my soul. I guess, a little bit, that saying that poetry should be fun is like saying that weight training should be fun. It is fun, but saying it is fun can give the wrong impression.
I guess I'm not really asking you to find poetry fun (at first!), I'm asking you to find it serious. But also don't take it too seriously! It's type 2 fun. The kind of fun that while you're in it you are gritting your teeth and telling your partner (who took you on a nearly vertical hike up 3,000 feet of rock) that yes, I really am fine, stop asking, and also I resent that you seem to think that I am not fine. But then afterwards you feel a little pride telling the story at a party the next week and can laugh about how not okay you were. But it is also type 1 fun. The kind of fun that is your three-year-old niece running full speed across the kitchen and slamming into an open cabinet door. The kind of fun that makes her cry. You are also crying but from laughing at her pain.
Okay, I will use an actually useful metaphor now. Reading poetry is a little bit like learning a new language. You start by mapping the words of the new language onto words in a language that you already know. Fromage = cheese. Then you try to get a handle on subject-verb-object order, maybe learn how to conjugate verbs in different tenses. That is the easy part. Then, you must try to inhabit the mind of a French person. You need to know the culture, the history, the food, the dances, the mythology. Because language is just a set of rule-bound sounds that somehow capture a shared world of things that actually exist somewhere out there in France. French, the language, really is only for capturing the sea-spray of the Mediterranean on Croissant that sits on a beach-side table at a small cafe. If I have never seen that scene before, how could I even think of saying that I actually "know French"? Yet, in some mysterious way, by knowing French (the language) I can know something about the French and France. Even though I've never been!
Anyways, you love poetry the same way you love anything else: by spending time with her. Take poetry out for a fun night on the town sometime. If you don't like the way she complains about the waiter break up with her, it was nice while it lasted. If you find she gets you like nobody else ever has, maybe put a ring on it.
3. Why Does Nobody Ever Write: "How to Read a Novel"?
Mostly because novels aren't written by annoying twats. Well, some of them are, and those special people get MacArthur grants. The actual reason is that mostly, we never grow out of stories. When you're a kid poetry, novel, movie, and music all blend together in a cacophony of lovely sounds and symbols. Children's media really does fuse together all genres! Beautifully! As we get older, music becomes music, and movies become movies, and books become books. Poor poetry gets forgotten about, except for that one class in school that you kind of hated. That poetry was weird, the lines didn't make any sense. It didn't rhyme either.
The poet Kim Addonizio has a simple system for thinking about poetry: surprise, music, detail, sufficient thought, syntax, wholeness, and mystery. AHHHH that's too many things. Lucky for you, you are already familiar with these things. This is how you judge all art. The movies you watch, the music you listen to. You want to be surprised by it, you want it to sing to you. You want it to have incisive insight into something you don't understand. You want it to feel whole. You want to be able to unravel it without its luster dissolving.
Poetry is annoying because you are not familiar with the form. This is natural. If you had not been watching movies since you were born you would find them confusing and hard to follow. But since you have been watching them since forever, you understand the rules of how they work, and the director and the writer and the actors all know this. They skip steps, and you skip right along with them because everybody knows how to skip right along with them. Poems are the same, they were written for people who read poetry. You are not someone who reads poetry. To become someone who can read poetry, you must read poetry.
4. What Then Shall I Read?
Where should you start? Well, you could start with that collection of poetry that somebody bought you this last Christmas which had you Googling "How to Read Poetry" within five minutes. But if that's too hard (which, lets face it, it probably is), you could start with Shakespeare's sonnets. It's a boring suggestion, but its a safe one. Because they're damn good, but also pretty approachable.
Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. //
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. //
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. //
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long. //
The poem above is one of the poems that made me fall in love with poetry. It's also a poem about love. And how a young person loves an older person without reservation as the elder approaches death. What makes this poem special? Well, I think there are three reasons why. First, it is a sonnet. Second, it sounds cool. Third, it helps me understand something about love I didn't know before.
What does it mean that this poem is a sonnet? It means that it follows a very specific form: there are quatrains, followed by a couplet. Let me explain:
Stanza = one section of a poem.
Quatrain = a stanza of four lines that rhyme.
Couplet = a stanza of two lines that rhyme.
Does it matter that you know the names of these things? No, but also yes. It does not matter for your enjoyment of the poem that you understand what things are called. But if you want to be able to talk about poetry with other people who read poetry, it is important to know the terms.
However, I don't want to rest too much on the form of the poem. Form matters because repetition legitimizes, when you know roughly how a poem is supposed to sound then your brain isn't so focused on understanding what is being said but focuses more on what is meant. This is why I like Shakespeare's sonnets. They are all sonnets! They all sound pretty similar, when you read a lot of the same form over and over, the form begins to dissolve and instead what the poet is trying to say comes to the front.
What do I mean when I say it sounds cool? Poetry, at its core, is supposed to capture your interest on an aesthetic level as well as a rational level. When you read a poem out loud the sound of it on your tongue should feel good. "That time of year thou mayst in me behold", feel the way that it bounces from the tip of your tongue. The "T" sounds hold this line at the front of your mouth, until at the very last word, "behold", suddenly your tongue shifts to the up and back in your mouth. This strikes me as very pleasant. Say the line a few times, what do you notice about it as a shape in your mouth? The aesthetic of a poem lies partially in its imagery, but also in large part is a function of how it feels in your mouth and on your tongue. Poems are made of stanzas and stanzas are made of lines and lines are made of words. Words have a shape when you say them. Poets are very often obsessed with the shapes of these words, and how these shapes form a coherent whole.
How a poem sounds is a key part of what makes poetry fun. Poetry is an ancient form of art that began as an oral form. People just memorized, told, and retold poems over and over again. Poetry must be able to stand up to that kind of abrasion. Words that feel out of place when said out loud will be replaced by better words. So, naturally, poems should be satisfying to say out loud. This is what is meant when people talk about the "music" of poetry.
Last, but not least, this poem helps me understand something about love that I did not understand before.
5. This Poem Helps Me Understand Something About Love that I Did Not Understand Before
This is the section that I've been dreading writing. Because it's very hard to write about why a poem teaches you something. Poetry teaches you indirectly. Good poems just give you data about the world, somebody's perception of what has happened or is happening. From this data, you can draw conclusions. Poems are, in some sense, experiments in being human.
I want to go through the poem line by line, but this post is already too long and I can tell you're bored. I'll speak in broad brush strokes. In the first four lines of the poem (the first quatrain), the narrator is creating the setting of the poem. It's situated in the time between fall and winter, as the leaves have fallen and the birds have already gone south. There's no snow yet, but it is coming. This is a metaphor for the narrator, set up in the first line: "thou mayst in me behold...Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
The next stanza makes the metaphor more emphatic. "In me thou see'st the twilight of such day", and in the next two lines twilight is quickly giving way to night, which is "death's second self that seals up all in rest." The narrator is moving quickly, he is in the twilight of his life and night (which is death) is at the door.
The third stanza makes the point yet again, but with a different inflection. "In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire", a fire which is now being extinguished by the ashes it has created. It reinforces the point that the narrator is at the end of life, but it is also telling us something about the nature of life. That we consume ourselves, that our bodies use up our youth until we are old all of a sudden. This is a little different than the metaphors of the first two stanzas, which are driven by the march of time (night slowly overtaking day, fall changing to winter, natural processes that are irreversible and move forward at a fixed rate). Fire is dynamic and multivariate, it may burn brighter but consume its fuel faster. It could also burn more slowly, and stay alight for longer. This stanza emphasizes a different aspect of aging, not its physical inevitability but its spiritual contingency--more to say on this but I'll leave that for another time.
If the first three quatrains are the setup, then the couplet is the punchline. It is not a metaphor like the three stanzas above it, it is just a succinct statement. But its meaning lands more forcefully because of the beautiful metaphors before it. "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long." In other words, you see all these aspects of how I (the narrator) am aging, and yet you love me anyways, and this makes your love more true. One could say that statement alone and understand the point of the poem. But because of The Rest Of The Poem before that final line, we (the readers) internalize it in a special way.
What this poem taught me about love is small and simple: that love could be strengthened by death's impending visit. That could be unpacked in so many different ways, but I think that also is another post. But this revelation was new to me when I read this poem for the first time eight years ago. It is a revelation I come back to frequently, because it is not reinforced by a lot of culture or media. This poem leaves many questions and implications on the table. How does a younger person love an older person? How does an older person love a younger person? How do you actually love someone as they are dying? These are questions that can only be answered by living. Or by wrestling imaginatively with the poem (more on that in another post). It helps with these kinds of questions to see someone else's active wrestling. Poetry is one way that the wrestling can be expressed.
6. Love and Its Discontents
Reading poetry is an act of imagination as much as it is an act of receiving. Yes, you receive a set of words and a world to inhabit from the author. But reviving that world from dead words on a page is its own act of creation, albeit within some tight boundaries. Fundamentally it is the same action as writing, just much easier. You cannot imagine faculties that you have not cultivated in real life. Being a good reader is as much a task of learning how to live as it is learning how to read. But learning how to read makes learning how to live easier. It is a mutually reinforcing system.
My final lesson, in this paragraph, I will not say much about. Books could be written about this. But in the action of reviving the poem from its desiccated status as words on a screenpage, you gain the opportunity to imagine it differently and to put it next to every other thing that you've read. You can stack it next to a memory from your life and see if it compares. You can disagree with the author. Or you can say "Yes! Yes! I finally have words to give to this experience." Poetry should become alive to you, as if the author were sitting across from you in a coffee shop; you were just chatting about life; the words on the page tumbled out of them as naturally as water off a fall.
If you learn to read poetry, you will open up new worlds of learning. These new worlds of learning will allow you to access new faculties of emotion, rationality, and perception. By becoming the kind of person that reads poetry, you will become the kind of person that lives better, and hopefully loves life more.