Reading poetry well is part attitude and part technique. Curiosity is
a useful attitude, especially when it’s free of preconceived ideas
about what poetry is or should be. Effective technique directs your
curiosity into asking questions, drawing you into a conversation with
the poem.

The goal of careful reading is often to take up a
question of meaning, an interpretive question that has more than one
answer. Since the form of a poem is part of its meaning (for example,
features such as repetition and rhyme may amplify or extend the meaning
of a word or idea, adding emphasis, texture, or dimension), questions
about form and technique, about the observable features of a poem,
provide an effective point of entry for interpretation. To ask some of
these questions, you’ll need to develop a good ear for the musical
qualities of language, particularly how sound and rhythm relate to
meaning. This approach is one of many ways into a poem.

Getting Started: Prior Assumptions

Most
readers make three false assumptions when addressing an unfamiliar
poem. The first is assuming that they should understand what they
encounter on the first reading, and if they don’t, that something is
wrong with them or with the poem. The second is assuming that the poem
is a kind of code, that each detail corresponds to one, and only one,
thing, and unless they can crack this code, they’ve missed the point.
The third is assuming that the poem can mean anything readers want it to
mean.

William Carlos Williams wrote a verse addressed to his wife in the poem “January Morning,”:

     All this—
                           was for you, old woman.
     I wanted to write a poem
     that you would understand.
     For what good is it to me
     if you can’t understand it?
                           but you got to try hard—

Williams
admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. He also suggests
that a poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must
“complete” what the poet has begun.

This act of completion begins
when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your
experience and point of view. If a poem is “play” in the sense of a game
or a sport, then you enjoy that it makes you work a little, that it
makes you sweat a bit. Reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many
other things, it takes practice, and your skills and insight improve as
you progress.

Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of
experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and
dying. Successful poems welcome you in, revealing ideas that may not
have been foremost in the writer’s mind in the moment of composition.
The best poetry has a magical quality—a sense of being more than the sum
of its parts—and even when it’s impossible to articulate this sense,
this something more, the power of the poem is left undiminished.

Poems
speak to us in many ways. Though their forms may not always be direct
or narrative, keep in mind that a real person formed the moment of the
poem, and it’s wise to seek an understanding of that moment. Sometimes
the job of the poem is to come closer to saying what cannot be said in
other forms of writing, to suggest an experience, idea, or feeling that
you can know but not entirely express in any direct or literal way. The
techniques of word and line arrangement, sound and rhythm, add to—and in
some cases, multiply—the meaning of words to go beyond the literal,
giving you an impression of an idea or feeling, an experience that you
can’t quite put into words but that you know is real.

Reading a Poem Aloud

Before
you get very far with a poem, you have to read it. In fact, you can
learn quite a few things just by looking at it. The title may give you
some image or association to start with. Looking at the poem’s shape,
you can see whether the lines are continuous or broken into groups
(called stanzas),
or how long the lines are, and so how dense, on a physical level, the
poem is. You can also see whether it looks like the last poem you read
by the same poet or even a poem by another poet. All of these are good
qualities to notice, and they may lead you to a better understanding of
the poem in the end.

But sooner or later, you’re going to have to
read the poem, word by word. To begin, read the poem aloud. Read it more
than once. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the words make. Do you
notice any special effects? Do any of the words rhyme? Is there a
cluster of sounds that seem the same or similar? Is there a section of
the poem that seems to have a rhythm that’s distinct from the rest of
the poem? Don’t worry about why the poem might use these effects. The
first step is to hear what’s going on. If you find your own voice
distracting, have a friend read the poem to you.

That said, it can
still be uncomfortable to read aloud or to make more than one pass
through a poem. Some of this attitude comes from the misconception that
we should understand a poem after we first read it, while some stems
from sheer embarrassment. Where could I possibly go to read aloud? What
if my friends hear me?

The Line

What determines where a line
stops in poetry? There is, of course, more than one answer to this
question. Lines are often determined by meaning, sound and rhythm,
breath, or typography. Poets may use several of these elements at the
same time. Some poems are metrical in a strict sense. But what if the
lines aren’t metrical? What if the lines are irregular?

The
relationship between meaning, sound, and movement intended by the poet
is sometimes hard to recognize, but there is an interplay between the
grammar of a line, the breath of a line, and the way lines are broken
out in the poem—this is called lineation. For example, lines that end with punctuation, called end-stopped lines,
are fairly simple. In that case, the punctuation and the lineation, and
perhaps even breathing, coincide to make the reading familiar and even
predictable. But lines that are not end-stopped present different
challenges for readers because they either end with an incomplete phrase
or sentence or they break before the first punctuation mark is reached.
The most natural approach is to pay strict attention to the grammar and
punctuation. Reading to the end of a phrase or sentence, even if it
carries over one or several lines, is the best way to retain the
grammatical sense of a poem.

But lineation introduces another variable that some poets use to their advantage. Robert Creeley
is perhaps best known for breaking lines across expected grammatical
pauses. This technique often introduces secondary meaning, sometimes in
ironic contrast with the actual meaning of the complete grammatical
phrase. Consider these lines from Creeley’s poem “The Language”:

     Locate I
     love you some-
     where in

     teeth and
     eyes, bite
     it but

Reading the lines as written, as opposed to their grammatical relationship, yields some strange meanings. “Locate I“
seems to indicate a search for identity, and indeed it may, but the
next line, which continues with “love you some-,” seems to make a
diminishing statement about a relationship. On its own, “eyes bite” is
very disturbing.

Hearing Creeley read his poems can often be
disquieting, because he pauses at the end of each line, and these pauses
create a kind of tension or counterpoint in relation to the poem’s
sentence structure. His halting, hesitant, breathless style is
immediately recognizable, and it presents writers with new ideas about
meaning, purely through lineation. But many poets who break lines
disregarding grammatical units do so only for visual irony, something
that may be lost in performance. Among metrical, free verse, and even
experimental poets of today, there are those who do not interrupt
grammatical sense when reading a poem aloud as much as they interrupt it
in the poem’s typography. What to do as a reader? Try a variety of
methods. It’s fun to “Creeleyize” any poem, just to hear what the
lineation is doing. But if the results seem to detract from the poem’s
impact, in terms of its imagery or concept, drop the literal treatment
of line breaks and read for grammar or visual image. Reading a poem
several ways allows you to see further into the poem simply through
repetition.

With poets who use techniques drawn from music—particularly jazz, such as Michael S. Harper or Yusef Komunyakaa—or poets like Walt Whitman
who employ unusually long lines, there may be another guiding
principle: breath. Some poets think of their words as music flowing from
a horn; they think of phrases the way a saxophonist might. Poems
composed in this way have varied line lengths but they have a musicality
in their lineation and a naturalness to their performance. They may
have a recognizable sense of measure, an equivalent duration between
lines, or, for the sake of contrast, one rhythmic pattern or duration
that gives way to successive variations.

For some poems, visual
impact may also be important. In “shaped poetry,” as well as many other
types of writing that are meant to be seen as a painting might be seen,
the line is determined by its placement in space. Some visually oriented
poets present real challenges in that the course of the poem may not be
entirely clear. Visual choices presented by the poet may be confusing.
Sometimes the arrangements of words on a page are intended to represent
different voices in a dialogue, or even a more complex discourse on a
subject. Overlapping and layering might be the poet’s intent, which no
single voice can achieve. It’s best to be aware that poems with multiple
voices, or focuses exist and, again, looking for the inherent rules
that determine the shape of the poem is the best approach.

Remember
that the use of these techniques, in any combination, pushes the words
of the poem beyond their literal meanings. If you find more in a poem
than the words alone convey, then something larger is at work, making
the poem more than the sum of its parts.

Starting the Conversation

We
mentioned earlier that encountering a difficult poem is like a game or
sport, say rock climbing, that makes you work a bit. The idea of finding
handholds and footholds and ascending one bit at a time is apt. But
some climbs are easier than others; some are very easy. You may enjoy an
easy climb for a while, but you may also find that you want a bigger
challenge. Reading poetry works the same way, and, fortunately, poets
leave trails to help you look for the way “up” a poem. You’ll have to do
some work, hard work in some cases, but most of the time, the trails
are there for you to discover.

The best way to discover and learn
about a poem is through shared inquiry discussion. Although your first
experience of the poem may be private and personal, talking about the
poem is a natural and important next step. Beginning with a focus
question about the poem, the discussion addresses various possible
answers to the question, reshaping and clarifying it along the way. The
discussion should remain grounded in the text as much as possible.
Responses that move away from what is written into personal anecdotes or
tangential leaps should be gently urged back into analyzing the text.
The basis for shared inquiry is close reading. Good readers “dirty the
text” with notes in the margins. They make the inquiry their own.

Talking Back to a Poem

It
would be convenient if there were a short list of universal questions,
ones that could be used anytime with any poem. In the absence of such a
list, here are a few general questions that you might ask when
approaching a poem for the first time:

• Who is the speaker?
• What circumstances gave rise to the poem?
• What situation is presented?
• Who or what is the audience?
• What is the tone?
• What form, if any, does the poem take?
• How is form related to content?
• Is sound an important, active element of the poem?
• Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment?
• Does the poem speak from a specific culture?
• Does the poem have its own vernacular?
• Does the poem use imagery to achieve a particular effect?
• What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use?
• If the poem is a question, what is the answer?
• If the poem is an answer, what is the question?
• What does the title suggest?
• Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way?

You
can fall back on these questions as needed, but experience suggests
that since each poem is unique, such questions will not go the necessary
distance. In many instances, knowing who the speaker is may not yield
any useful information. There may be no identifiable occasion that
inspired the poem. But poems do offer clues about where to start. Asking
questions about the observable features of a poem will help you find a
way in.

We’ll now bring inquiry to bear on two very different poems, each of which presents its own challenges:

• “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams
• “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich

Text and Context

Some
people say that a poem is always an independent work of art and that
readers can make full sense of it without having to use any source
outside the poem itself. Others say that no text exists in a vacuum.
However, the truth lies somewhere in between. Most poems are open to
interpretation without the aid of historical context or knowledge about
the author’s life. In fact, it’s often best to approach a poem without
the kind of preconceived ideas that can accompany this kind of
information. Other poems, however, overtly political poems in
particular, will benefit from some knowledge of the poet’s life and
times. The amount of information needed to clearly understand depends on
you and your encounter with the poem. It’s possible, of course, even
for someone with a deep background in poetry to be unaware of certain
associations or implications in a poem. This is because poems are made
of words that accumulate new meanings over time.

Consider this
situation, a true story, of a poet who found a “text” at the San Mateo
coast in northern California. As she scrambled over rocks behind the
beach, near the artichoke fields that separate the shore from the coast
highway, she found a large smear of graffiti painted on the rocks,
proclaiming “La Raza,” a Chicano political slogan meaning “the
struggle.” She sat down and wrote a poem. Why? her poem asked. I
understand, she wrote, why someone would write La Raza on the
side of a building, or on public transport. There it would be seen and
would shout its protest from the very foundations of the oppressive
system. But why here, in nature, in beauty, so far from that political
arena. Couldn’t you leave the coast unspoiled? Then, one evening while
reading the poem in Berkeley she got her answer. A man came up to her
and asked her, “Do you want to know?” “I beg your pardon,” she said.
“Those fields,” the man went on, “were where Chicanos had been virtually
enslaved, beaten, and forced to live in squalor for decades.” The
landscape was not innocent of political struggle. The text was not out
of place.

Embrace Ambiguity

Here’s a tricky issue:
the task is to grasp, to connect, to understand. But such a task is to
some degree impossible, and most people want clarity. At the end of
class, at the end of the day, we want revelation, a glimpse of the
skyline through the lifting fog. Aesthetically, this is understandable.
Some magic, some satisfaction, some “Ahhh!” is one of the rewards of any
reading, and particularly the reading of poetry. But a poem that
reveals itself completely in one or two readings will, over time, seem
less of a poem than one that constantly reveals subtle recesses and
previously unrecognized meanings.

Here’s a useful analogy. A life
partner, a husband, a wife—these are people with whom we hope to
constantly renew our love. Despite the routine, the drone of
familiarity, the daily preparation of meals and doing of dishes, the
conversations we’ve had before, we hope to find a sense of discovery, of
surprise. The same is true of poems. The most magical and wonderful
poems are ever renewing themselves, which is to say they remain ever
mysterious.

Too often we resist ambiguity. Perhaps our lives are
changing so fast that we long for stability somewhere, and because most
of the reading we do is for instruction or information, we prefer it
without shades of gray. We want it to be predictable and easy to digest.
And so difficult poetry is the ultimate torment.

Some literary
critics would link this as well to the power of seeing, to the
relationship between subject and object. We wish the poem to be object
so we can possess it through our “seeing” its internal workings. When it
won’t allow us to “objectify” it, we feel powerless.

Torment,
powerlessness—these are the desired ends? Well, no. The issue is our
reaction, how we shape our thoughts through words. We have to give up
our material attitude, which makes us want to possess the poem. Maybe
we’ve bought the book but we don’t own the poem. We have to cultivate a
new mindset, a new practice of enjoying the inconclusive.

Embracing ambiguity is a much harder task for some than for others. Nothing scares some people like the idea (even the idea) of improvisation as a writing or analytical tool. Some actors hate being without a script; the same is true of some musicians. Ask even some excellent players to improvise and they start to sweat. Of course, actors and musicians will say that there is mystery in what they do with a script or a score, and it would be pointless to disagree. The point, after all, is that text is mysterious. Playing the same character night after night, an actor discovers something in the lines, some empathy for the character, that he or she had never felt before. Playing or listening to a song for the hundredth time—if it is a great song—will yield new interpretation and discovery. So it is with great poetry.

Culled from Poets.org