“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”
Poetry is best read as it is best written: first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind. This holds true whether one is speaking of formal or “informal” poetry (free verse), whether traditional or experimental. An impediment gets removed as well when one tries not to discern immediately what is going on behind poetry, whether that is symbolic content, literary references of the kind signaled by the many footnotes in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, or any other type of intertextual decoding. Do those aspects of it exist? Of course they do. But when they become obstacles to reading, that is to say, experiencing poetry, they are best left alone until one is ready. You can always get to esoterica later, if you get comfortable enough to want to nerd out on poetics. If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity. I snorkel the coral reef, brimming with brilliant schools of small, radiant fish, rather than scuba dive to the black expanses in the lower depths of the sea.
Basic technical knowledge of how poetry works is as useful to the casual reader as to the poet, however informally and unsystematically that is acquired. Often it can be gleaned through the sheer experience of careful, patient reading, inductively. Many things in life we learn intuitively and by exposure. For yes, that is the one thing poetry requires—patience—whether we are speaking of the epic verses of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson or Hart Crane’s The Bridge, or the modest yet indirect musings of Emily Dickinson. Poetry is a somatic experience, enlivening the body as well as the mind, the way love does, or excellent food, or a single, delicious glass of wine.
What is a line? What is a stanza? What is the difference between a couplet, a tercet, and a quatrain? (Stanzas of one line, two lines, three lines, four lines.) What is each apt for? What can it do? If you figure out from listening to the blues that its stanzaic structure consists of one line, which then gets repeated as the second, followed by a third line, a “zinger” that puts a punctuation point on the emotion expressed, and you understand such a song consists of a series of tercets that can go on for any length of time, but usually for five or six minutes with an instrumental break in the middle, you will have no trouble listening to a blues tune and enjoying it without complicating your life unnecessarily. You have more or less figured out, in terms of stanzaic form, what makes a blues song simultaneously down to earth, and philosophical. The music helps you feel the poem and keeps you from overly intellectualizing or stressing that you do not get what it is “really” about.
Anyway, everybody knows what the blues are. The blues taught us that, the same way poetry taught many of us what love is, gave us better words than the ones we were using to try to describe it. The good news is that you have spent your entire life listening to popular music that you find to your taste and have thereby given yourself a head start on poetry, given that most pop music uses familiar poetic forms such as the ballad and simply adds music. You have been a poetry critic for years, by mere virtue of letting your ear and mind sift down the songs you tolerate from the ones you do not. The next step is to figure out why you like what you like, formally speaking, and go about refining your ear.
Once you adopt this relaxed but attentive posture toward poetry, and again, with patience, you can read with moderate comprehension anything from Green Eggs and Ham to the baroquely oblique ideation of Louis Zukofsky’s gigantic opus A, to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. The latter two look forbidding, but those high mountains want to be scaled. It may help you to realize that poets do not always comprehend their own poetry entirely, having composed it out of intuitive states of consciousness. Or merely to amuse themselves or keep from lying in bed all day. I myself have said in interviews, not facetiously, “Just because I wrote something doesn’t mean I understand it.”
Fear of poetry, not poetry itself, is the enemy. I often remark to my beginning students on the first day of Poetics class, “Don’t be afraid of poetry, because poetry never did anything bad to you.” (We tender amnesty to those K-12 teachers who for obscure reasons felt compelled to teach their students the Themes and Deep Hidden Meanings and Weighty Symbols of poems, thereby missing the point entirely.)
Approach a poem with an open mind, a fresh expectation, with no hostility on either side. You have nothing to prove. Nor does it. On a first read, you get what you get. On a second read—one always hopes there will be a second read—you go a little deeper into the experience—again, with ear, eye, and only then mind. If you visit a car dealership and take a test drive in a new automobile, do you truly understand that vehicle, its inner workings, or know whether it is for you? No, you do not. You only pretend to and perhaps even buy it for a lot of money, taking out a loan you cannot afford. You go ahead on gut instinct, trusting that you and the car will grow into a compatibility worthy of tens of thousands of dollars spent. Extend to a poem the same courtesy. It does not cost anything! Generally speaking, poems are free. Nevertheless, they are worthy of your respect, your time, even, eventually, your love, as much so as a shiny black BMW with leather seats. Develop a relationship with a few poems, returning to them several times over, say, a year. Then see how you feel about them—and one hopes, how you think about them.
As for ear and eye, it is convenient to develop an essential understanding regarding such matters as rhyme and meter, consonance and assonance, caesuras, and enjambment. With those and the line and stanza, you have acquired a significant part of the needed equipment. A few more terms understood, and you are in the game as a reader.
A caesura, for instance, is a pause in the line: the place where it “breathes.” There can be more than one in a single line.
Here are two identical ones from a couplet in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo”:
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
In both lines, the caesura falls in the middle, right where the comma appears, thus is called a “medial caesura.” Her choice in this case is logical, as the poem is about two young people who “had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” The dividing of the line into halves simulates the back-and-forth of that ferry. But a caesura may fall anywhere in a line, depending on the emphasis the poet wishes to make.
Ezra Pound, in #4 of his Cantos, wants his lines to feel punchy and startling, so he gives us three rapid-fire hard caesuras followed by an exclamation point.
…the swallows crying
‘Tis. ‘Tis. ‘Ytis!
Then there is enjambment. Enjambment means you run the grammatical phrase or sentence over the end of one line into the next rather than ending it at the end of the line. That working of line against sentence creates drama. In “I Have Wasted My Life,” Justin Phillip Reed uses surprising line breaks to present the situation of a young woman in imminent danger.
“Horror/scene,” with its abrupt snapping off of the line between the adjective and the noun it modifies helps us feel the situation of risk. Likewise, “roped/between,” “pistol/presented” and “engine/clutch.”
We are being kept off balance, so that our state of being, for a moment, resembles that of the “you.” Reed wishes for his lines to feel jerky, violent, unpredictable, which will perhaps elicit our compassion by surprising our senses.
Consonance is exactly what it sounds like: clusters of the same consonant sound in a short space. Assonance is the same thing, except that it is for vowel sounds.
There are plenty of both in any of the poems of the musically eared Gerard Manley Hopkins, such as in “Pied Beauty.”
The g’s in “glory,” “God” and “things” pop; the c’s in “couple,” “color’ and “cow” provide a crackling consonance as well alliteration—strings of words beginning with the same letter or sound. There is also consonance in the s’s in “rose” and “moles,” and in the t’s in “stipple” and “trout.” This strategic bunching up of sound makes the glory offered to God shine brighter; puts the two-color stamp on the sky; and lets us feel the movement of the varicolored trout. (I wish he had also added “supple” to modify the trout.)
Meter takes a little more time, as there are many kinds. The good news for the newer reader is that there are four main types: iambs, trochees, anapests, and spondees. These alone account for probably 80% of what one sees in poems.
Iamb: da DUM
John Keats:
Of late/two dain/ties were/before/me plac’d.
Trochee: DA dum
William Blake:
Tyger/Tyger,/burning bright,
In the/forests/of the night;
The first two feet of each line here are trochees.
Anapest: da da DUM
Sara Teasdale:
I would live/in your love/as the sea/-grasses live/in the sea.
Dactyl: DA da dum
Tennyson:
Half a league, /half a league,
Half a league/onward.
Reading such lines aloud multiple times will help you become more skilled at hearing each of these meters. Remember, ear before eye before mind.
Ideally, meter, like caesura and enjambment, like assonance and consonance, draws the weave of the poem closer, and clarifies its meaning—creates its meaning. It is true that a significant portion of modern poetry does not follow strict meters. However, almost all verse features iambs, trochees, dactyls, and anapests scattered throughout. It is not all or nothing. And you will benefit from noticing it. Even spoken everyday language is often rhythmic. Written poetry, more strongly so. At the least, learn to recognize these rhythms even when you are reading poems that progress naturally yet do not be afraid to jump into meter’s more structured aspect. That will make your ear better, no matter what your reading preference.
Everybody knows what a rhyme is. What is less understood is that there are exact rhymes and off rhymes (also known as slant rhymes). Oar/shore is an exact rhyme. Oar/sure is an off rhyme. The ear hears it as tending toward rhyme. If poets use both kinds, they will likely never run out of decent words to pair. Rhymes ought to make sense in the given context, as would be obvious with oar/shore. But if a poet can plausibly rhyme “oar” with “snare,” she or he might come up with a whole unexpected couplet, with a less predictable effect. Sometimes I pick out two rhymes and write toward them, rather than spinning out a line and hoping the line will skid to a sudden stop in exactly the right place at which point a great rhyme will pop into my head. When you come up with possible rhymes beforehand, the rhyme creates the line, in a sort of reverse engineering.
As for imagery, it is your friend. It gives you a direct path into a poem’s heart. Nobody goes to a poem to hear a sermon or a lecture. Vivid images and metaphors are the lifeblood of poetry.
I will leave you with the briefest of poems to show how an image may resonate. In “A Dent in a Bucket,” the brief title almost as long as the poem, Gary Snyder leaves us with a single image to contemplate, one that reverberates beyond its few words, suggesting the sympathetic interplay between a man and a bird.
The speaker does not even bother to say “I.” Rather than manifest as a specific person, he prefers to keep the focus on the hammer and the woodpecker’s beak (not directly mentioned either). This micro-poem is all about motion, call and response, and getting lost in that rhythm.
This has been a short introduction to a long subject. There is much more to be said. However, when trying to sneak up on poetics, as in approaching a wild horse, it is better not to try to corral it on the first go. Instead, build mutual trust. Remember that these aforementioned aspects of technique are here to help you, not to make it hard on you. Like molecules, they exist for a reason.
Anyone can read a poem. Anyone can write a poem. Quite a few people can write a pretty decent poem with a little effort. And a handful, or possibly several handfuls of writers, can write an exceptional poem. You, reader, with practice, might become one of them.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
