Tools for Reading Poetry

**Fenny West** Thu 30 Oct 2008, 4:56 am

A few simple tools can help to transform any poetry reading experience from a bout with incomprehension to an
enjoyable study on the way words, lives, emotions, souls, and experiences move through the eyes, minds, and
hearts of the women and men who wrote these works.

Read more about the source of the poet’s inspiration.
If you can discover what’s in the poet’s soul, heart, and mind,
you can unearth his or her motivation for putting pen to paper.

Try reading each line aloud. See if you can feel the
energy and emotion as each word forms upon and releases
from your lips. Pause accordingly at each punctuation mark.
Take another breath. Sense the musical rhythm. Imagine the
poet reading the work through your voice.

Study the movement. What is the meter? How are
punctuation marks used – if they’re used at all? How do
syllables and meter work together? This movement defines
the inner experience of the poem.

Consider a poet’s word choices. Picture the nouns and
try to envision yourself in that place or holding that thing.
Feel the verbs and look at how they move the poem forward.
Interpret how and why the poet matched nouns and verbs in
such a specific way. Take these noun-verb match-ups from
the opening of Gary Snyder’s poem, "High Quality
Information." Watch how Snyder uses the verb-noun
combination as gerund phrases to move the poem and create
an economy of words, which are reflective of two of Snyder’s
feeding-pool traditions, Zen and haiku. Note
lines three through five:

A life spent seeking it
Like a worm in the earth,
Like a hawk. Catching threads
Sketching bones
Guessing where the road goes.

Study the structure. Chances are, there’s a specific reason why
a poet chooses a particular form to write a particular poem. If
you can learn more about the form from this exhibit, the books
listed in additional resources, or another source, it may be easier
to interpret a poem written in that form. Then ask, Why did the
poet choose that form? How does that form bring out the subject
or mood of the poem? For example, a poem written in free verse
conveys a more open relationship between a poet’s voice and the
experience than a poem written in tightly rhyming quatrains.

Explore additional layers. Poems are the world’s greatest
extended metaphors. For countless centuries, poets were vital
information links to citizens in repressed societies. If a poet didn’t
write metaphorically, he or she faced the wrath of the ruling
regime. Since poems draw from the souls of their authors, they
usually transmit the experience at different physical, emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual levels, creating an exciting atmosphere
of discovery for the reader. When scanning a line of poetry, see
how it feels. Does the line relate to your core truths and beliefs? If
you feel happier or sadder – or any other emotion – after you’ve read it,
you’re probably uncovering the poem’s deeper layers.

Read from inside and outside the poet’s cultural context. One
of the best ways to gain perspective on the vastness and richness of
a poem, particularly a poem from yesteryear that still commands
attention today, is to read from within and outside the poet’s
cultural context. Learning more about a specific poet’s life, interests,
home, circles of friends, and his or her social and cultural setting gives
you hints so you can more clearly interpret the work. For instance, a study
of Walt Whitman’s life indicates that he lived at the onset of the
Industrial Age, he was an ardent naturalist and a lover of America, he
believed in individual freedom of expression at all costs, and he suffered
from blindness as an older man – all of which come out in the keen inner
observation, wonderful tomes on nature, and alternating periods of conflict
and co-existence between nature and industry in his poems. "O Captain My Captain,
" perhaps Whitman’s most famous poem, is a salute to a man he admired above
all – Abraham Lincoln. It was written after Lincoln’s assassination.

Don’t worry if you don’t get it. Some poetry is very dense and
obscure. That’s why academics spend years analyzing poets and the
meaning of their work. If you can’t get through an 18th-century sonnet
without tearing your hair out, put it down and try another form. You
may even find that you enjoy writing poetry more than you enjoy reading it.
Why not give it a try?

http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/home_reading.html