Taking Notes

In 2002, I had taken a poetry course with a teacher named Professor McDowell at Portland Community College. The following post is from notes I had taken while attending his course.

HOW TO READ A POEM

• Read it all the way through.

What if you don’t get it? Its form is strange, the language isn’t familiar, the imagery is abstract- don’t worry about it- let it go, and don’t stop reading. Read it all the way through from beginning to end. Try to relax your mind and just read.

• Read it again, but this time read it out loud.

Poetry, like a play, is meant to be heard. There are always exceptions to every rule and form, but go ahead and read it aloud for the purpose of the exercise. Of course, some poets may feel that their poem is meant to only be read internally, but so much poetry is meant for the voice. The sounds that the words make can sometimes reveal meaning that the quiet mind may have missed.

I hated Shakespeare till I had a very passionate theatre professor teach a course on Shakespeare. It was an acting course, but he could not impress more that Shakespeare was meant to be heard not read. Once I began reading it out loud, slowly, and without attempting to “ACT” I finally began to understand much of the language.

• Word by word

A trick in writing poetry is the idea of taking away. Imagine that the poet’s first draft is filled with tons of words swimming aimlessly on the page. With each reread the poet removes out each unnecessary word that may take away from or slow down the meaning of the poem. There is a definite art to this and I am often awed by the work of a clean and crafted poem. How does the poet find the perfect word or image to convey a thousand meanings or one single thought or idea ? Where so many of us end up writing three sentences or more to try and say the same thing? What I am attempting to convey here is that a poet’s breadth of vocabulary will allow them to pick the prefect word to say so much with so little.

However, you may not have the same vocabulary, therefore you may not understand the meaning of the word. If you don’t know a word look it up. That word, that one word could be a secret key in revealing the truth of the poem. Also, doing the work will help increase your own vocabulary and help you write better poems.

• Look for the Imagery

I love imagery. For me, imagery is what grounds a poem and turns it into a living breathing experience.

Read this stanza from Dylan Thomas’s, “After the Funeral”:

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.

Thomas, Dylan. “After the Funeral.” PoemHunter.com, 2003. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-the-funeral-in-memory-of-ann-jones/. Accessed 30 March 2016.

For me that description is so vivid- I can see her hands, her face and also get an idea of the kind of woman she was in life. The poems I enjoy reading the most are often filled with vivid imagery.

• Read for Organization

Who is speaking? Who is the poem addressing? Is there a pattern? What is the pattern? Does it have anything to do with the meaning? What is the tone? How are all of these elements put together?

Take the puzzle apart.

I’ll be honest with you, this is pretty much where I stop and my mind decides I’ve had enough of dissecting of a poem. Unless forced by a grade, I’ve often neglected this part of the process, but I missed out. If you love poetry and you want more out of the poem going through this process can be very rewarding.

When I read the poem, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell with these questions in mind, I felt so much was revealed to me. I knew the poem was about war, but after reading it with these questions, I saw birth in the poem. The ball turret like a womb, and the plane pregnant with the soldier and with bombs. The visual image of there being so little left of a person, physically, that what is left, can be washed away with water. That’s powerful and horrifying.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in it's belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jarrell, Randall. “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Poets.org, 1969, 1996. https://poets.org/poem/death-ball-turret-gunner. Accessed 30 March 2016.

• Read for Technique

The tools of the writer’s craft: metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, meter, rhyme scheme, adaption, adaption of sound to sense, and use of symbols.

If I didn’t get through step five you know for sure I didn’t get through step six unless assigned for a course.

My mind fought this process until I took a course with David Biespiel at Portland State University. As a teacher he was able to teach his students to truly read poetry and make it accessible. It was after his class that I suddenly could see technique. If you happen to live in Portland, Oregon and have the money and the time, I recommend taking a course with him or any of the teachers at The Attic Institute. I don’t if he is still teaching at PSU. He has a wonderful way of removing the fear of trying to understand a poem out of the poem. He is also an accomplished poet with several published works of poetry.

Find the techniques, and make some very rewarding discoveries.

• Read it with all the above

I’m just going to quote McDowell’s lecture point here:

“Often a poet will go through dozens of drafts of a poem before allowing it to be read by anyone else, much less published. Dylan Thomas often went through 80 or 100 drafts. You can be assured that if you are alert, you’ll gain more from another reading. Poems aren’t like newspapers, to be read once and then tossed into the recycling bin. Each year, you’re a different person; you’ll find that when you return to poems read years before, the good poems will seem to be telling you exactly those things you learned in the interim; they’ll seem like different poems. Every poet, every age, every country, every emotion, every climate, every language, every temperament produces different types of poetry. If you don’t like a poem, do it the justice to find out what about it you don’t like, and then move on to a different kind of poem.

Don’t Give Up

If you are new to poetry find a poem you like, and put time into discovering why you love it. Then if you go on to be a lover of poetry maybe one day you will stumble across that poem you turned away, and perhaps this time you will see it differently. In the interim maybe you’ll learn some new things that make you feel that you want to put your energy into finding out why it doesn’t appeal to you or maybe you still just don’t like it.

What I’d like to emphasis is don’t let go of the idea of poetry even if you’ve read a hundred poems and you never liked them maybe somewhere out there is a poem with your name on it. Remain open to the art form, one day it will speak to you, and to you alone.