How to Read a Poem

Welcome to Poetry Camp!

A scene from Alice in Wonderland [1951], before she enters the rabbithole

Let me tell you why you are here.

You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.

The person in front of you opens their hands. Cupped inside is a violet-coloured pill.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.

(Thanks, Morpheus. I’ll take over now.)

Your mind inches forward. This is just an email, isn’t it? An email is not just an email. A click is not just a click. Words are not just letters put together. Every action is part of a larger machine, the machine that makes up your world.

Welcome to Poetry Camp!

For the next five days I’ll be guiding you through the wonderful world of poetry.

Kinda iffy about it? Have no clue about this whole poetry thing? Want to see what the fuss is all about, why something as unproductive as poetry has captured hearts so ardently that those who pursue it knowingly give up all hopes of making a viable career?

Let’s start here: Have you ever described something as poetic? Maybe a movie, a dress, a foreign language, perhaps a food?

You’re not alone. It’s a bit of a catch-all for something.

Like basketball:

Basketball is like poetry in motion, cross the guy to the left, take him back to the right, he's fallin' back, then just J right in his face. Then you look at him and say "What?". —From the movie, He Got Game [1998]

Or outer space:

Some celestial event. No... no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea. —From the movie, Contact [1997]

Or people:

When I think of her, of Elisa, the only thing that comes to mind is a poem, whispered by someone in love hundreds of years ago. —From the movie, The Shape of Water [2017]

So when people say something is like poetry, do you think they mean that it’s pretentious or difficult or unduly sentimental? They usually don’t.

When something is described as poetry or poetic, it’s a good thing. This here is so wonderfully touching and profound that there are no words other than “poetry” to describe it. Which is, of course, an irony because poetry is made up of words. When someone says something is poetic they mean: It’s really, really good. Not just normal good. Speechless kind of good. Smouldering feelings and simmering fires and burning pictures kind of good.

So why, then, is poetry so divisive? It’s usually short and sweet, and aren’t marketers always obsessing over trying to make things shorter so people will actually read them? Shouldn’t we all be eating poetry up?

Sometimes the most accessible things seem like they have the most invisible barriers and rules. Like food and fashion, things that arguably everyone participates in and yet sometimes feel the hardest to get right when it comes to what’s good and what’s bad—for “the rest of us”, at least.

But these things, common, human, and universal, often contain the most potent and powerful of all experiences.

Poetry is one of those things. Well, it used to be—and in a way, it kind of still is.

Poetry is often the first way children experience literature, though we call it nursery rhymes. Poetry has taken over pop culture and connected experiences, though we call it music. Experts among us may argue that these things aren’t really poetry. But we can agree that they are some iteration of poetry, whether sibling, cousin, or descendant, and were adapted to fit new mediums, technologies, and utilities over time. So where does that leave poetry poetry? A.k.a. “real” poetry.

Ah, the big question. What is real? What is a poem? I’ve done my research. Read dozens of books, including one that did not sugarcoat: “The Hatred of Poetry”. I’ve read what the experts say, a lot of them, some of them asserting their opinion of how poetry should be written usually based on previously established (but to be clear, wholly invented and mostly arbitrary) rules. But the surprising and delightful thing is that most of them are just so in love with poetry, they write entire books about poetry to share their love with other people.

I’m endlessly fascinated by chicken or egg scenarios and the opportunities they present: Who’d read a book about poetry if they weren’t already interested in poetry? No one, really. Therein lies a problem, and part of the fun.

Today, on Day 1 of Poetry Camp, it’s time to take the violet pill. Told you it was coming, didn’t I? Not a book, not a lecture. Just some words and some poems. A way in without making it a big deal. It’s just camp, a temporary thing you can check out of anytime.

Every day during camp, you’ll receive an assignment as well as a poetry reading list. Assignments always optional but highly encouraged for best results and a memorable trip.

So, let’s learn how to read a poem, the “rest of us” way. Are you with me?

Camp Assignment #1: How to Read a Poem

It’s not that complicated or deep, contrary to popular belief.

There’s only three things you need to know about reading a poem in order to maximize enjoyment. And to be clear, these are not rules, just suggestions.

In order from easiest to hardest:

1. Read it out loud. (Level = Easy)

Remember how you first learned how to read? Out loud. There’s something about involving more senses that seems to do the job better, and poetry itself is very much an auditory art. Yes, there’s rhyme, the obvious. But read out loud and you may discover non-obvious tickles and twinkles. Not every poem takes full advantage of sound, but the ones that do are like ASMR to the ears. And all you have to do is read like you once did.

2. Read it one word and one line at a time. (Level = Intermediate)

Because we’re so conditioned to skim content and keep the scroll moving in pursuit of the lightbulb moment takeaway, you may find yourself resisting reading each word and each line as it was designed. Here’s the secret: You can’t really digest a poem by shoving it down your mouth. You have to savour the precision of language and form cut from an inventory of imagination, metaphor, and the raw material of words and space.

Poetry is, upon first glance, not a visual art. But it’s best read when the eyes take on an active role in allowing a poem’s form—and therefore, its experience—to shape. A line break is a pause designed by its creator, so pause.

3. Don’t try to “get it”. (Level = Hard Mode)

But what does it mean?!?!

So much of the distaste for poetry seems to stem from not “getting it”. It doesn’t help that a lot of poetry awareness and education is centred around analysis.

This one was the hardest for me but when I got this, I got it: You’re not supposed to get it. You’re supposed to feel it, move through it, experience it.

The more and more I think about and read poetry, the more I liken it to the point of technology, which it feels like we miss all the time: It’s supposed to be a tool for living, not for making life an endless wheel of takeaways and hacks we pursue all while the point is sitting next to us.

I love listening to poets talk about how they write poems and I love hearing what people think of poems, but I can’t think of anything more boring than sitting around trying to dissect the meaning of a moment that was meant to be passed on and has since passed. I feel like that’s the equivalent of asking why they broke up with you. To save you the trouble, it was them, not you, or you, not them. And that’s that.

(I’m sure there are plenty of people who get a thrill from analyzing poetry. This is not to say that’s not allowed or that it’s wrong, just that there are many ways to enjoy a poem.)

So give yourself permission to experience something without having to figure out what it means.

I can confirm unashamedly that I do not understand everything I read. That doesn’t matter. I don’t understand everything that happens to me in life and I find myself mostly having a grand time anyway, as long as I make good choices and let happy accidents (read: adventures) happen once in a while.

Poetry is highly subjective, so instead I’ve come to judge the success and effectiveness of poetry by this metric: How did it make me feel?

Feelings are more real than most of our facts. The Insta-poetry so many poetry experts hate and call “not real poetry”? It’s very real to a lot of people.

So as you start dipping your toes in, avoid the urge to judge. You, brand new to this world and way of seeing, are bound to have feelings. Pay attention not to degrees of preference which are often informed by conditioned ideas, but instead to what captures your attention. These are clues to the puzzle poetry is trying to solve for you and specifically you.

What lines stir you, break you, shake you up?

In the world of dulled texture, what captures your attention is the success metric. Attention is your entry back into the world of the living, not just romance and nature but agency and wonder and healing. Attention is everything.

And with that, you’re ready. Let’s dive into the rabbithole.

Today’s Poetry “Reading” List

• Let’s start off wide, and dare I say, risky. If you’re brand new to poetry, the only modern poet you might be able to name is probably Rupi Kaur. If you don’t quite get the buzz, don’t yet love her or hate her (which seems to be the way the pendulum swings), start not with her Instagram account or her books but with her performance of I’m Taking My Body Back. If you are a fan, you’re not alone. There’s a reason Rupi’s selling out poetry readings like concerts. If you’re not a fan, ask why? What about it did you not like? More than anything, that clues you into what you will. Keep going.

• For another “pop poet” but venturing more closely into the arena of the universally respected (though never there; such a thing is impossible with poetry), watch Amanda Gorman perform her poem, The Hill We Climb, at U.S. President Biden’s inauguration.

• Who knew poetry and politics were such great friends? Makes sense if you think about it: Both use language to manipulate our worlds. Speaking of presidents, Barack Obama was once a published poet at the age of 19. See/read/listen to: Pop.

• Sometimes the path into poetry is through poetic perspective. If you’re already a big reader, try Margaret Atwood (Three Desk Objects) or Ross Gay (Ending the Estrangement). Then read their books and essays and notice the through-lines, how poems communicate the same themes in entirely unique ways. That is to say, poems aren’t just short sentences broken up into lines.

• Mary Oliver comes highly recommended almost across the board as an accessible poet who is also widely regarded as a “real” poet, having won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. (Highly recommended for actual camping trips.) A taster: The Moths, and The Geese, one of her most well-known and beloved poems. Dive deeper with Owls and Other Fantasies, her collection containing a mix of poems and short essays including one of the favourite things I’ve ever read.

• If you’re looking for something a little bit more fun, Milleniallisms and all, try the Instagram poetry account @maryoliversdrunkcousin by comedy writer and marketing agency owner Lyndsay Rush, starting with She’s A Bit Much. Speaking of Instagram, you may remember Maggie Smith’s poem Good Bones, which went so viral in 2016 that it was declared the poem of 2016. (Not the dame, by the way.)

• And for poems with a vibe in between Mary and her drunk cousin, I recommend: Catherine Pierce’s High Dangerous, Anthropocene Pastoral, and Party. Liked these? Here’s more.

• Savannah Brown just came out with her third poetry collection, Closer Baby Closer which IMO tops her second, Sweetdark. Tip: Try her poetry reading as short film rendition of A Growing Thing on Youtube first.

These last few are a bit meta. You’ll see what I mean.

• An excerpt from Angie Sijun Lou’s poem, Tropical Melancholy.

• Trying poetry for the short-and-sweetness of it all? Here: Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger (Not by Heath Ledger, by Frank Bidart).

• Not a poem but poems inside movies which, when well done, are the epitome of “a little something extra” done right: My favourite, Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas, narrated by Michael Caine in Interstellar. And of course I have to mention the 1989 film about poetry, Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams. Come to think of it, there are actually a lot of poems in movies.

• Crossing over into the land of TV, we have Dickinson about poet Emily Dickinson starring Hailee Steinfeld, which ran for three seasons on Apple TV+. The New York Times called it “ridiculously brilliant”. If Bridgerton or Little Women is your jam, then this could be your way in, via a loose retelling of the life of a poet in the same way that seeing an artist at work (ish, again, loose retelling) can sometimes be the ultimate inspiration.

• Finally, the Poetry Foundation put together this essay collection, Who Reads Poetry, if you’re the type who needs a bit more convincing from people who read a lot of poetry. What are they like? Why the heck do they do it, anyway?

See you tomorrow for Day 2.