Hello, I have just stumbled upon Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I’m never been a reader of poems, This or other books of poems. I don’t know how to approach them, how to read, process and comprehed them.
Just for reading, a poem finishes in a jiffy and actually to appreciate it you have to ponder over each before you can move to next.
There comes the trouble. Many times the poems are not directly linked with each other those which follow each other. How do you do it?
For fiction and non fiction prose works there is a thread running through the narrative to hold on to, can’t be said the same for a string of poems.
What are your thoughts, how should I engage with a collection of poems without either being overwhelmed or ignorant by speeding through?
by vaikrunta
5 Comments
Some books of poetry are more like collections of individual poems. Sometimes these are curated around a theme or an idea. Other books of poems are meant to work together as a cohesive whole.
Upside down, starting from the end.
> can’t be said the same for a string of poems.
It often can!
Anyway, you are overthinking it. Read a poem. Think about it if you want to, or don’t, who cares, you’re doing this for your own enjoyment. Then read another poem if you feel like it. If you don’t feel like reading more, maybe you aren’t enjoying what you’re reading, just like with any other kind of book?
You could try annotating your copy (or making notes in a journal). Reflect on what you liked, what you think it could mean, if it reminds you of another poem in the collection, stuff like that.
Poetry can be challenging because there may be hidden symbolism or meanings, or the writer may be doing something with meter that is significant. For someone like Whitman, I am sure there is a lot written about meaning to his poems, so you could try reading those and then rereading the piece with this context in mind.
I also like to read the poems out loud to myself, or you could try finding an audiobook/video of the author (or whoever) reading the poem out loud. I find that the spoken word can make a poem more impactful, even if I’m whispering it to myself.
One of my favorites. 🙂
https://poets.org/poem/poetry
Poetry
Marianne Moore
1887 –1972
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Slowly and repeatedly.