hi! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on the books you read in 2023. since that includes a fair few books of poetry I was wondering, how do you, or how does one, read a volume of poetry? as in, at what pace, do you read them all the way through or dip in and out over time, read “out of order” &c? I’ve found I get stuck not knowing how to approach reading whole poetry collections on a practical level which means I end up reading none! and I’d be interested and grateful if you have any method, advice, or other thoughts. thank you!
oh yes, totally, thank you for asking!!
my actual favorite way to read poetry is to encounter individual poems in the wild - I feel like certain poems find you at the right time and hit you exactly when you need them to. but alas, this is an unpredictable and highly inconsistent way to encounter poetry!
as far as reading chapbooks or full-length collections go, personally, I find the best way to read them is to think about the experience you want:
experience one, the whole shebang: I read the collections I looked at this year in page order, and relatively quickly, because my intention wasn't necessarily to savor each poem - though I did savor some of them! - but to get a sense of how various poets ordered somewhat disparate work, and to think about how each collection worked holistically. I spent most of my time with the poems thinking about the emotional (or narrative) arc of the book as a whole, and I found this method was pretty useful for that purpose.
experience two, the deep dive: if you would rather get to know a particular collection well, I think reading the poems, more or less in order, one poem per day or week - especially if you make, like, a special time to do it where you're engaging with the language/imagery/form of each poem - is a nice way to do so. (especially nice is if you sometimes share this time with someone else! poetry feels different when you read it alone than with others, in my experience.) my favorite method of really sitting with a poem is to read it aloud, think about it for a while, put it away, then read it aloud again a day or a week later, seeing what changes in my understanding - of course you can use typical literary analytical tools, but with poetry I also like trusting my sub- or unconscious to do a fair amount of the work for me.
experience two point five, the deeper dive: you really need to buy into it to do this, you can't feel too skeptical to allow yourself to be vulnerable to the poetry or it won't work, but if you find a poem within a collection that you really want to dive into, like maybe a poem that you think will help frame the entire collection for you, you might read the same poem aloud, perhaps with someone you love, one time each, several weeks in a row. don't talk about it until after the fourth or fifth reading. just try to focus on the feeling.
(I'd liked individual poems but I didn't really consider myself into poetry until I was introduced to the reading-the-same-poem-aloud-over-and-over method through the Dodge Poetry Foundation's free six-week professional development program for teachers, Spring & Fountain, which I think the pandemic has unfortunately torpedoed. Priscilla Orr was my first facilitator; the transformative atmosphere she created was the reason I started writing seriously again despite deciding to "put away childish things." IDK, it feels important to credit the program and to credit her specifically, because poetry is so...relational. like, when you (I) read a novel, you're (I'm) mostly spending time with the characters and the narrator, in a mediated way with the novelist; when you (I) read [contemporary lyric] poetry, you're (I'm) mostly spending time with the poet and then, excruciatingly, with yourself (myself), you know? so I think sometimes the thing about reading poetry isn't so much the poem, though obviously the poem is part of it; it's also about the experience of reading the poem, about it, talking about it, thinking deeply about it with someone whose thoughts and feelings you trust and care about too.)
experience three, the scatterplot: if you own or have long-term access to a collection - like, you're not taking them out from the library - I think dipping in and out or opening books at random can be a really beautiful way of making your way through them! this comes closest to mimicking the ephemeral, unexpected encounters that are my preferred way of finding poems, and that feels most like writing poetry to me (when a long string of observations suddenly coalesce into a point of clarity). you are under no obligation to finish a collection, but if you want to, why not just mark which poems you've read already and open to another page if you come across one of those? you can do this with several books at once, too, if you want. try six months to read one collection and two weeks to read another, see what's different about it, see which kind of engagement you get more out of.
experience four, the backstitched chain: something else introduced by Spring & Fountain that changed my relationship to reading poetry - for context, we all brought four poems of varying lengths on the first day (literally on paper! 2015 was a different time) and created a kind of ersatz anthology packet that we used for the rest of the program - was reading a poem (aloud) in reaction to another poem. one person would start reading a poem from the packet, another person would hear a connection to a second poem and read that one next, on and on, until everyone at the table had read. you can do this with collections, too, on your own, especially if you're dipping in and out and/or reading more than one at once; after reading one (new) poem, you can think about the flavors/textures/ideas that remind you of the other poetry you've recently encountered, and go back and reread the earlier piece. pay attention to how you feel while you do it - maybe try doing this as, like, a restorative practice or an invigorating practice once a week or month until you've finished the book.
experience five, light some herbs on fire and call it witchery: flip through a book and leave it open at the page that for some reason calls to you; read the poem, pull a tarot card, write about it. repeat as needed. :^)
I hope those might be some useful strategies to try, but overall, I think the most important things are:
despite cultural messaging to the contrary, there is in fact no single correct way to read poetry!
unless the poetry collection includes specific reading instructions, but EVEN THEN! what's the poet gonna do, e-mail you about it???
you're allowed to dislike whatever poetry you want, and you never have to finish a book that you're not getting something out of
BUT! it might help to figure out why you don't like it, and what you want to get out of the reading experience
also, if you ever get stuck in the poetry pretension slump, funny poets help break it up - they're a little thin on the ground, but off the top of my head I recommend trying Joanna Fuhrman, Dorothy Parker of course, sometimes Sumita Chakraborty....
I hope that helps - please let me know if you have any clarifying questions, you want different kinds of strategies, or if you read anything cool!
