At one time or another, when face-to-face with a poem, most everyone has been perplexed. The experience of reading a poem itself is as likely to turn us off, intellectually or emotionally, as it is to move us. Unless patronized by celebrities, set to music, accompanied by visuals, or penned by our own children, poems do a terrible job of marketing themselves. All those ragged lines and affected white spaces make them appear as though they should be treated only as pieces of solemn art. Look but don’t get too close, and definitely don’t touch.

But what if the fine art of reading poetry isn’t so fine after all? What if the predicament about poems is precisely our well-intentioned but ill-fitting dispositions toward reading them?

– Mark Yakish, “Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies: A Guide for the Perplexed,” The Atlantic (Nov. 2, 2014)

Challenges

One of the primary reasons I came to Georgetown University, as I told friends puzzled at the strange turn my life was taking, was to read the works I would never read on my own – not in a book club, not on a beach, not before bed, not on a train, not on the metro. I had visions of reading The Portrait of a Lady, some Dickens, maybe some Trollope, Shakespeare certainly. But poetry – of any school or movement or century – just didn’t enter into my picture. So when I found myself in a classroom on the third floor of the New North building in September of 2015, enrolled in a course on Romanticism for the completely uninspired reason that nothing else fit my schedule, faced with a thick anthology of the poems of Wordsworth and Keats, Shelley and Coleridge and Byron, a painting of Napoleon in full regalia on its cover, I experienced a mild sense of doom. What was poetry, I thought, other than high-flown, windy, incomprehensible phrases, antique ideas, fusty imagery?

During that first class I was gradually drawn in a bit, enticed. But then came a short in-class writing assignment, which set me back once again. I am very rarely, in either my professional or personal life, at a loss for words. Words are the coin of my realm, the things I can mold, make dance; using them is the thing I can do. So it was deeply distressing to me to find that I had nothing, nothing, nothing (nothing!) to say about the lines of Keats we were given that first day. I almost got up and left the room. I stayed, envying the young undergraduate who’d been told she should actually have been in the undergraduate version of the course: She, I thought accusingly, she got to leave! I felt about 12. An interesting sensation – horrible in the moment, but quite fruitful on later reflection. After all, it’s a very interesting thing to feel powerless in the one arena in which you have always felt at least somewhat adept.

But once I managed to eke out a few sentences on “Ode to Melancholy” – it didn’t matter what they were, really – I began to feel better. As the course progressed, I began to find tools, ways in.

Most daunting to me was – and I suppose, remains – scansion. Like the 12-year-old I felt I was, I made notecards (notecards!), one for “IAMB,” one for “TROCHEE,” one for “SPONDEE,” et cetera. It wasn’t until much later in the course that I found, much to my delight, that two unstressed syllables were Pyrrhic. A foot with so little stress that it barely makes a mark upon the world? A Pyrrhic victory, perhaps. Or just a Pyrrhic moment. (The OED says that a Pyrrhic victory is one that is “gained at too great a cost to be worthwhile.” So is a Pyrrhic foot one that has given up on having an effect on readers before it is even read or spoken? Food for further thought.)

One important inroad to understanding, to ease with the poems, came when I realized that scansion was an art, not a science – or perhaps more accurately, a partnership of art and science. Another major inroad came when I began to see that meter was an integral, intentionally constructed part of the effect the poet was trying to create. From there, it wasn’t a long leap to perhaps the biggest epiphany of all: the comprehension that form really is content, that the sounds of certain letters, the resonance of certain rhymes, the choice of a particular rhyming pattern, an oddly long or out-of-place short line, the use of enjambment, the placement of punctuation all contribute to a poem’s meaning. Looking back at my notebook, I see that I wrote “form = content” quite early in the semester. But the idea didn’t fully sink in until some weeks later, and of course not all at once. Previously, it had seemed to me that form was the vessel, the carapace, the pitcher, to be filled water, poetry, the preferred substance du jour. And later still, I came upon Terry Eagleton’s revelatory contention in How to Read A Poem (2006): “Form is not a distraction from history but a mode of access to it …. [T]he thickness and intricacy of the medium … makes us what we are.”

Meeting the challenges

A great help in beginning to be able to read these poems was surrendering to what I think of as an incrementalist approach. In the past, I would read a novel or nonfiction book, a long essay or journal article, and form an opinion – perhaps slowly, but all too often, quickly. But with these poems, since I had no immediate “take,” I learned to content myself with increments, with building blocks. I would look for a rhetorical device here, a repeated word there, an image that struck me, a sound pattern that caught my ear. Instead of my usual multicolored Post-Its or marginal scribblings in pen, I made faint, tentative notes in the book in pencil (Pyrrhic marks?). As the weeks went on, the increments began to add up, the building blocks often coalesced into architecture – I could see something taking shape. I began to be able to have a coherent thought or two – a wild or not-so-wild surmise[1] – articulated only to myself, then out loud in class, then on the page. Eventually the poems (well, most of them) came alive to me – ideas, imagery, sounds, all.

I learned to use a couple of great, practical tools: reading aloud and the OED. I’d always read out loud from time to time, from Greek plays in high school to Dante in college to Shakespeare at Georgetown. But with these poems, as an aid to understanding meter, sound, and meaning, the physical act of pronouncing the words, the sound of my own voice, was a wonderful device. (I also tried listening to audio recordings as I drove from home to campus – not as helpful.) And the online OED: what a boon, what a luxury! One could get lost for hours. Using the OED is something like looking at historical maps, layer upon layer: Etymology, usage examples, use of the word as a verb vs. use as a noun, quotations from writers who have used the word in question (often the very poet whose work I was reading – an odd bit of circularity).

Lastly, the outside readings were a great auxiliary to the poems themselves. While I loved the freedom in this particular class from required critical or theoretical reading (so completely unusual in 2016!), it was at the same time wonderful to be able to dip at will into the readings posted on the class Blackboard site. I printed them all, and kept them in a stack on a chair in my dining room. Whenever I was sick of holding the weighty anthology, it was a pleasure to pick up a lighter-than-air copy of a myth-busting essay or a piece of criticism. Similarly, I took a few of the historical and context-providing books out of the library and because they weren’t assignments, I felt liberated simply to do a little browsing – the French word grignoter comes to mind, although I’m sure the French don’t usually snack on their books.

Reading into the Future

I notice that I read differently now. I was finishing Moby-Dick at the same time as I was taking this Romanticism class, and the word “effulgent” seemed to keep reappearing in Melville’s novel. I don’t think I would have seen that previously, and I want to keep noticing and remarking on language in this under-the-microscope way. I’d like also to retain my new-found sensitivity to the music of language.

And when (if) I start teaching, I hope to find ways to bring along my students (or at least a few of them) in the way I was brought along in this class. For although it may ultimately be up to the student to meet the challenge of the subject, the great alchemy of good teaching is to lay out the material and the tools in a way that makes it possible for the student to rise to that challenge.

Something Resembling Love

The poet and novelist Ben Lerner recently published a small volume titled The Hatred of Poetry (2016). I decided to take a look, even though I’m not a huge fan of Lerner’s (one of my most beloved teachers at Georgetown, the writer Dinaw Mengestu, sings Lerner’s praises; perhaps I’m coming around, since I’m citing Lerner here). As his title makes plain, Lerner assumes an intense hostility to poetry. He’s as witty and contrarian and annoying as his previous work would lead this particular reader to expect: “What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within. What kind of art has as a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt?”

Although poetry is widely dismissed and disparaged, I don’t buy Lerner’s assertion that it is hated. But perhaps this is semantics. Certainly, I myself began my Romanticism class at Georgetown (and this essay) with lack of interest, fear, dread – all negative feelings that, while perhaps not as strong as “hate,” fit well enough with Lerner’s thesis for me to go along with him on his ride (his small book produces a feeling similar to surfing a wave). It is at the end of this ride that he emits the lines with which I’d like to close these thoughts on reading poems: “All I ask the haters ­– and I, too, am one – is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.”

 

[1] Cf. Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “all his men/ Looked at each other with a wild surmise”