We’ll now bring inquiry to bear on two very different poems, each of which presents its own challenges: 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. While analyzing the poem, the students need to do in-depth research as to its content, taking into account the effect the poetry … Poems speak to us in many ways. Children’s poetry teaches us to be brave, to be thoughtful and caring, to be imaginative and curious. Most poetry books are around 80 pages, and you can read them in about 2 hours. "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. Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying. Poems and articles about poetry for young adults, ages 13-18. Remember that poetry is very subjective so what you like can be quite different from what others like. When it won’t allow us to "objectify" it, we feel powerless. Read More. If you don’t enjoy the reading, it might just be a shitty poem, or maybe it’s just not for you. Teens. Circle important, or striking, or repeated words. Reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many other things, it takes practice, and your skills and insight improve as you progress. What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use? A life partner, a husband, a wife—these are people with whom we hope to constantly renew our love. Mark difficult or confusing words, lines, and passages. Maybe most importantly of all, children’s poetry makes reading more approachable. This approach is one of many ways into a poem. Read Article. Try a variety of methods. There is, of course, more than one answer to this question. The link below is to an article that provides tips on how to read more poetry.For more visit: First, read the poem aloud, just experiencing the sound and rhythm of the words as a kind of music. 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. Before launching a science, social studies, or math unit, I often used poetry to set the … This is the best place to publish poetry. For the upper grade reader, these elements of the book may serve well as … Beginning with a focus question about the poem, the discussion addresses various possible answers to the question, reshaping and clarifying it along the way. Find out what you like and what you want to emulate. We’ve built some fantastic little poems this way, many of them no more than four or eight lines long. Aesthetically, this is understandable. When you read a poem for the first time, read it all the way through without stopping. Visual choices presented by the poet may be confusing. is one of the rewards of any reading, and particularly the reading of poetry. Robert Creeley is perhaps best known for breaking lines across expected grammatical pauses. Familiarity with the space and equipment can be extremely useful. Cloudflare Ray ID: 639d40615aec04d4 Reading poetry well is part attitude and part technique. Choral Reading Join Poetry Poem today. Why? Consider these lines from Creeley’s poem "The Language": Reading the lines as written, as opposed to their grammatical relationship, yields some strange meanings. Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way. Before you get very far with a poem, you have to read it. Is there a cluster of sounds that seem the same or similar? 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. Playing or listening to a song for the hundredth time—if it is a great song—will yield new interpretation and discovery. Edit. He also suggests that a poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must "complete" what the poet has begun. Draw lines to connect related ideas. Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment? Torment, powerlessness—these are the desired ends? But poetry is fun. Others say that no text exists in a vacuum. © Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038, "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. Here’s a useful analogy. As you read, keep the following considerations in mind: Read the poem twice in a row. Visualize the poem. 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. Read it more than once. A poem might offer you a stack of images, but there are plenty of gaps to fill. Some actors hate being without a script; the same is true of some musicians. Know the logistics beforehand. 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. The place to start for university students and older poetry lovers. Set a scene. Read the poem. 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." Scanning the poem helps you understand its structure, which helps you more easily recognize the poet's ideas and imagery. Read the words. The discussion should remain grounded in the text as much as possible. The same is true of poems. 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. Performance & security by Cloudflare, Please complete the security check to access. The goal of careful reading is often to take up a question of meaning, an interpretive question that has more than one answer. Listen to the sound of the poem, and notice how the poet uses rhyme, if at all. But such a task is to some degree impossible, and most people want clarity. What determines where a line stops in poetry? I read poems that I really loved, and some that simply made me upset for various reasons — core reasons being things like sexism, or intentionally vague and … What if my friends hear me? "Those fields," the man went on, "were where Chicanos had been virtually enslaved, beaten, and forced to live in squalor for decades." This time read it out loud. Don’t worry about why the poem might use these effects. Read the poem out loud. Reading Clearly and Effectively Slow down. Write down what you think the poem means as a whole. Is there a section of the poem that seems to have a rhythm that’s distinct from the rest of the poem? Then, one evening while reading the poem in Berkeley she got her answer. Read the good and the bad. Other poems, however, overtly political poems in particular, will benefit from some knowledge of the poet’s life and times. A man came up to her and asked her, "Do you want to know?" Is sound an important, active element of the poem? Overlapping and layering might be the poet’s intent, which no single voice can achieve. Read More. If the poem is a question, what is the answer? This situation is all the more embarrassing for poets because there is an undeniable public appetite for the things poetry is supposed to provide: verbal artistry and words of wisdom. But what if the lines aren’t metrical? The most natural approach is to pay strict attention to the grammar and punctuation. 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. Try answering these questions when reading a poem: 1. 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. Williams admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. On its own, "eyes bite" is very disturbing. Notice how many lines are in each stanza, as well as how many stanzas are in the poem. As with other forms of writing, good poetry is often found in the edit. Published in partnership with the Great Books Foundation. 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. Does the poem speak from a specific culture? Post your poetry and poems to get free feedback from readers and other poets. The third is assuming that the poem can mean anything readers want it to mean. Effective technique directs your curiosity into asking questions, drawing you into a conversation with the poem. Once you’ve read it once in this fashion, read it a second time. We wish the poem to be object so we can possess it through our "seeing" its internal workings. Most poems are open to interpretation without the aid of historical context or knowledge about the author’s life. When you read out loud, particularly if you're reading … It’s fun to "Creeleyize" any poem, just to hear what the lineation is doing. The issue is our reaction, how we shape our thoughts through words. Curiosity is a useful attitude, especially when it’s free of preconceived ideas about what poetry is or should be. Please enable Cookies and reload the page. Curiosity is a useful attitude, especially when it’s free of preconceived ideas about what poetry is or should be. But sooner or later, you’re going to have to read the poem, word by word. There may be no identifiable occasion that inspired the poem. If the poem is an answer, what is the question? We have to cultivate a new mindset, a new practice of enjoying the inconclusive. I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. Your IP: 209.236.71.117 Some literary critics would link this as well to the power of seeing, to the relationship between subject and object. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Some poems are metrical in a strict sense. The point, after all, is that text is mysterious. His halting, hesitant, breathless style is immediately recognizable, and it presents writers with new ideas about meaning, purely through lineation. The basis for shared inquiry is close reading. 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. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the words make. It would be convenient if there were a short list of universal questions, ones that could be used anytime with any poem. But lineation introduces another variable that some poets use to their advantage. Ask even some excellent players to improvise and they start to sweat. You may enjoy an easy climb for a while, but you may also find that you want a bigger challenge. 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. 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. "A beautiful poem, which resonates more and more as you get older." Sometimes reading aloud to yourself can help make it more understandable. 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. In that case, the punctuation and the lineation, and perhaps even breathing, coincide to make the reading familiar and even predictable. The first step is to hear what’s going on. 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. Do you notice any special effects? This technique often introduces secondary meaning, sometimes in ironic contrast with the actual meaning of the complete grammatical phrase. Reading poetry works the same way, and, fortunately, poets leave trails to help you look for the way "up" a poem. The best way to discover and learn about a poem is through shared inquiry discussion. In fact, you can learn quite a few things just by looking at it. Some visually oriented poets present real challenges in that the course of the poem may not be entirely clear. Good readers "dirty the text" with notes in the margins. Couldn’t you leave the coast unspoiled? Here’s a tricky issue: the task is to grasp, to connect, to understand. Consider this situation, a true story, of a poet who found a "text" at the San Mateo coast in northern California. (“How to Read a Poem,” excerpted from Modern American Poetry) There is no one right way to approach a poem, but if you are new to poetry, these guidelines may be helpful. But poems do offer clues about where to start. Ezra Pound says the poem ought to work on the level of a person for whom a hawk is simply a hawk. Poets may use several of these elements at the same time. Poems composed in this way have varied line lengths but they have a musicality in their lineation and a naturalness to their performance. Embracing ambiguity is a much harder task for some than for others. Reading poetry well is part attitude and part technique. "I beg your pardon," she said. So it is with great poetry. HOW TO READ A POEM Reading poetry often requires significant effort. Poetry Poem is a website with thousands of poets from around the world. The title may give you some image or association to start with.
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