(“Spohie SLIMANE – Universal Poetry”)
If you’ve ever sat through a poem and struggled to understand what it’s trying to say, what its author is trying to tell you, and wondered why you, out of everyone else who has read this poem, cannot grasp the concept of the words, then there are eight simple tips for you. These are valuable to keep in mind when reading poems;
- Poetry is nothing special. It’s a collection of words like any other piece of writing, so there’s no need to be scared of it, or to be overly expectant of it. A collection of an author’s scattered thoughts is not and cannot change you life.
- No poem has a hidden meaning, only stories and taught values, and ‘meanings’ that haven’t yet been revealed to your eye. Subtlety and the detection of it takes practice, not some prodigal gift.
- Separate the poet from the speaker of the poem, and the poem in general. While the words are of course influenced by the poet’s hand, a writer always wears a mask of differing degrees of thickness when writing.
- Everything in life is patterns, and poetry is no deviation. Even anti-poetic poetry depends on pattern and variation, and the finding of these elements is key.
- While the “Kill The Author” concept stands up in conversations surrounding novelists and other types of authors, poets may be exempt from this idea. A poem cannot mean anything a reader wants it to mean, but it can bend to accommodate.
- Poetry is a collaboration, as a poet depends on the effort of the reader to complete the thought in their own head, the thought that the poet has begun.
- The way a poem looks at first glance is always important, though it may not seem that way. If the lines are continuous or broken into stanzas, if there is obvious repetition, or if there is a rhyming scheme or not. Those choices are deliberate.
- Poetry is an attempt to put into words something that cannot be. To evoke a feeling or a memory, so the experience may not be the same or even similar across readers. If you cannot say how a poem makes you feel after reading it, you may still be reading it correctly.
Academy of American Poets. “How to Read a Poem | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, 2014, poets.org/text/how-read-poem-0. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
Yakich, Mark. “The Atlantic.” The Atlantic, theatlantic, 2 Nov. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/how-to-read-poetry-a-step-by-step-guide/380657/. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
“Spohie SLIMANE – Universal Poetry.” Thejasmincollors.com, 2020, thejasmincollors.com/?p=2187. Accessed 14 Apr. 2021.
