Unlocking the Beauty of Poetry: A New Approach to Reading

1. Do you find Poetry difficult?Do you struggle with reading poems?Do you consistently miss the point of poems?Do you think your teachers are the only ones who know how to read and find “deeper” meanings in poems?If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, the chances are that you may have been unintentionally misguided in your reading of poems. If you really want to “get” poems, really understand their power and their beauty and what they can potentially offer, then I ask you to simply try a new approach to reading poems. Yes, I know this sounds like an infomercial, but honestly this method works.The reason is simple: to get the most out of poems, we need to get back to immersing ourselves in the beauty of language and its nuances. Getting back to such basics can be taught. Reading Poetry must begin with reading differently, becoming attune to poems’ language itself as art. It must begin with retraining you in a method of reading and experiencing poems.

2. It must begin with you developing your abilities to

3. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, what is Poetry anyway?I’m going to make this simple for you by discussing the other genres and showing you how Poetry is different. According to Lewis Putnam Turco in his The Book of Forms,Fiction = the art of written narrative.Drama =the art of performance narrative.Nonfiction = the art of written exposition or argumentation and rhetoric.So what’s left?Poetry = the art of the language itself. Here’s what that means: Poetry can either be narrative (telling a story) or lyric (describing a condition or arguing a position). To paraphrase Lewis Turco in his The Book of Forms, poetry can do anything the other genres can do. The difference is in its hyper-focus on the levels of language. It’s not enough to tell a story, convey an argument, or describe something. Poetry is when the exact sounds, senses, visual layouts, and ideas work in concert with one another in the most harmonious of ways. The fictionist is concerned with story, but the poet is concerned with the syllable, the comma, the line break, the combination of the smallest choices that when combined reshape and reinvigorate the language itself. These choices are called aspects/levels/elements.

4. Why is this important?

5. In order to truly engage with poems, we need to know what they are and what they require from us as readers.Too often teachers have you read poems like they ask you to read anything else. However, if poems are made up of the smallest, most exacting choices of language, it doesn’t make sense for you to read poems like you do a novel or a memoir or an essay. Reading Poetry is itself a skill that can help you become a better reader of everything else. Poetry reading can be learned, practiced, and reimagined with each new poem, but in order to do it well, you have to understand how reading poems can be a different skill from reading other genres.It’s all about one thing: improving your abilities and capacities to

6. So what should I do? Pay attention to 4 levels of language that work together in varying degrees in all poems. These are aspects of language, and they are always present. However, for the poet, these levels are the raw materials over which he/she obsesess. These are the poet’s tools and substance, and their combinations determine so much about the ways each poem functions. Yes, that’s right. Each poem functions differently, and as many ways as there are to think, there are to write (and read) a poem. This method focuses on reading poems, and it works for any and every poem you may encounter. It helps you experience the poem and moves you closer to understanding by immersing you in the language itself. By immersing yourself in the poem’s language levels, you will have a better idea of what the poem is and where it’s going and what is artful or beautiful about it. A failure to notice is not necessarily a failure of the poem. Responsibility for noticing rests with the reader. So let’s get to it, shall we? What are these 4 levels?

11. Okay, so how do I apply these? Take it slowly, focusing only on one level at a time. I’ll be guiding you through this process of noticing. At first, it’s just about how much you can notice.