How to Read a Poem

By Carl Sewall

Why Read a Poem?

Despite the fact that Maya Angelou and William Shakespeare are mercilessly foisted upon nearly every high school student, I suspect that fewer people nowadays are enjoying poetry than once did. Yet, to my way of thinking, reading poetry remains worthwhile. It teaches us that words and ideas are powerful yet workable, profound yet malleable--puissant vessels of the emancipated imagination. Plus, reading poetry doesn't even take very long. So why not try some?

Here’s how:

1. Select good material
This step is crucial. Even the most enthusiastic lover of poetry doesn’t love all of it, and if you start out with the wrong selection (William Carlos Williams, for instance) you’ll end up having all your negative preconceptions reinforced.

If you're fond of pithiness, let me suggest some haiku by Basho. If that's not your thing, what could be better than some gushy love sonnets by Elizabeth Barret Browning? Or, if you’re looking for something long and misogynistic, you can’t go wrong with Milton’s Paradise Lost. If you're interested in depressive verse concerning ancient ceramics, then John Keats is your man.

Many great poems can be found through Project Gutenberg.

Just start reading; you’ll figure out what you like. And remember, be sure to avoid the odious William Carlos Williams, whose very name is hopelessly pretentious.

2. Find your location
A good place to sit while reading poetry might be more important than the reading itself. After all, direct and unmediated experiences always outweigh those transmuted through language and text.

If you cannot rid yourself of other people, then at least make sure you find a great number of them, enough to constitute a crowd, so that their voices will commingle into a harmless, easily-ignored field of white noise.

Try some of these places:

• A sunny meadow, beneath a tree, preferably a fruit tree, preferably one that’s in blossom
• A shaded forest grotto along the banks of a trickling brook
• A loud, urban Cafe with grafiti'd bathroom stalls and tattooed, goateed baristas
• A high back, leather, wing-chair in a musty book-lined study, before the hearth, atop the bearskin rug
• A large, corporate megabookstore with flourescent lights, espresso drinks, and no more than twenty volumes of poetry all in crappy paperback editions

3. Ruminate. Ponder. Reflect.
The most common mistake committed by novices is reading too fast. A poem is not a newspaper. Practice what Nietzsche called “the art of slow reading.” And be forewarned: you are sure to find unfamiliar words. Poets are notorious for using them, and when they cannot perform the anamnesis of an unusual word, they’ll often just make one up in order to defy perspicuity. Don’t be discouraged; it’s part of the fun! These words are the cud upon which you’ll ruminate. Just circle them with your freshly sharpened pencil (never a pen, unless it’s a fountain pen), and look them up in a fat dictionary whensoever you get the chance.

4. Congratulate yourself
You've read a poem. But be careful, you're not finished yet.

5. Read it again.
If this doesn’t help, it’s probably because the subtle metrical vagaries and clever philosophical allusions in the poem are lost on you. To remedy this, you’ll have to memorize the art of scansion and take an introductory philosophy course. Alternatively, pretend that you liked it, then read it again to enhance and reinforce your laudatory view. Usually there will be at least one line therein that will strike you as serviceable; focus on that.

The History of Poetry:
A Timeline

c. 15,000 -- c. 5,000 b.c.e.
Spoken language emerges out of a complicated system of grunts and gesticulations.

Long and important stories become carefully structured to be more easily memorized. This structuring arrangement took the form of various mnemonic cues such as rhyme, alliteration, and--most importantly-- meter. All of which made possible the common memorization and recitation of very, very, very long stories. This patterning came to be called "poetry."

c. 5,000 b.c.e.
Ancient Babylonian accountants use sticks to scratch pictorial tabulations of livestock into mud; writing is born.

c. 3,000-- c. 1,000 b.c.e.
Alphabets emerge, hence writing really is born, instantly obliterating the pragmatic need for poetry.

360 b.c.e.
Literary character Socrates earns his reputation as "the wisest man who ever lived" by theoretically banishing poets from his theoretical Republic, believing a poet to be a mere imitator of reality, "and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth." (Read the Jowett translation at M.I.T.) Farewell, William Carlos Williams!

1564--1616 c.e.
William Shakespeare struts and frets.

1855 c.e.
Walt Whitman publishes his Leaves of Grass. For the first time in "poetry," any attempt at versification is abandoned as prose is arbitrarily lopped into lines, furthering the degradation of poetry towards utter uselessness.

1920 c.e.-- 2004 c.e.
"Free verse" and "prose poetry" are widely employed by "poets" who lack the skill to arrange words into pleasant sounding metrical patterns and instead just write prose. In "free verse," they chop it up into lines, while in "prose poems" they don't bother.

c.1985 c.e.
"Poetry Slams" reintroduce the long lost grunts and gesticulations. The circle makes a wheel.