Suggestions for reading a poem
1.Find a quiet space without
distractions (ipods, cell phones, tv, etc).
Read the syntax literally: read the poem
straight through without expectations:
It is best to read it aloud first; then read it
silently. Perhaps even jot down a “first
impression.” Some poems are complex.
Take in as much as you can.
Suggestions for reading a poem
2. Focus on the title: try to articulate
its significance, especially after having
read it carefully, perhaps twice.
“Jabberwocky”
“A Martian sends a Postcard Home”
“Out, Out--”
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”
Suggestions for reading a poem
3. Identify the poem’s situation:
What is going on? Who is the voice?
What is the tone? Is someone being
spoken to? Is a story being told?
Pay attention to particular sound patterns:
alliteration, assonance, consonance,
onomatopoeia, and figures of speech:
simile, metaphor, personification
Suggestions for reading a poem
4. Use a dictionary, other reference books,
and/or reliable web sites. Also pay attention
to the poet’s use of diction, syntax, and
punctuation (or lack thereof)
Suggestions for reading a poem
5. Remember: poems exist in time and times
change. Reference the time it was written;
research the poet.
Poets.org
Poetry Foundation.org
Suggestions for reading a poem
6. Take a poem on its own terms.
Live with it, and try not to get frustrated.
It is supposed to bring you pleasure,
not make you run for the Prozac.
Suggestions for reading a poem
7. Be willing to be surprised.
You Fit Into Me
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Suggestions for reading a poem
8. Assume there is a reason for everything.
Suggestions for reading a poem
9. Argue: jot down your varied
thoughts about its thematic value.
Suggestions for reading a poem
10. Paraphrase the content:
interpret what you think the
poem means, the poet’s purpose.
What is poetry?
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its
own melting. ~Robert Frost
What is poetry?
One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a
well-made verbal object that does honor to the language
in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something
significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived
from a unique perspective. What the poet says has
never been said before, but, once he or she has said it,
readers will recognize its validity for themselves.
- W. H. Auden
What is poetry?
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
What is poetry?
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture.
- Simonides
What is poetry?
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill
and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the
timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
- Pablo Neruda
What is poetry?
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting
to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the
barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a
phantom script telling how rainbows are made and
why they go away.
- Carl Sandburg
What is poetry?
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet
believes to be interior and personal, which the
reader recognizes as his own.
- Salvatore Quasimodo
What is poetry?
Write drunk, revise sober.
- Miller Williams
What is poetry?
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that has run wild ...
- Boris Pasternak
What is poetry?
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't
mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
- Edward R. Murrow
What is poetry?
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the
steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov
What is poetry?
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point
at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the
world, and stop it from going to sleep.
- Salman Rushdie
What is poetry?
A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in
thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
- Randall Jarell
What is poetry?
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal
down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis
What is poetry?
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven
to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth
the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes,
and gives airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
- William Shakespeare
What is poetry?
Poetry allows us to delicately unravel the fabric of its being
to see the beauty of form and function, truth, and the infinite
manifestations of humanity’s emotions.
Poetry is the evocation of innumerable truths through the
artistic arrangement of emotive words.
Professor Robert Mugford