One way to read poetry
Guest writer Fred Tally-Foos brings you some tips and some recommendations
Today’s issue is brought to you by my dear friend and poet Fred Tally-Foos. Because I am fairly new at reading poetry and because reading a poem is a personal affair, I’ve recruited a few friends who I know have good taste to write a couple of issues for you! You’ll remember Fred because he recommended me a great book of poems that I shared with y’all a few weeks ago!
Poems are meant to be re-read. You will experience them differently each time. If you’ve ever gone back and listened to a mix you made in high school, you understand how context can change lyrics. You are transported to the way it made you feel the first time, but with new experiences under your belt. This happens with poems. The same trigger but with different contexts.
Many of us have an unprecedented amount of time right now and an unprecedented amount of disasters to mentally fixate on. Frankly, reading poetry takes some mental energy, at least enough to focus. If you find you’re not able to make the space, that’s fine. On the other hand, if you are able to give your time to reading a poem, it will likely take up your whole brain. And that can feel good right now.
If you think you don’t like poetry or you don’t get poetry, then *extremely artboy voice* you’re probably just not reading the right stuff. The right stuff for you at least.
I don’t remember for sure which poem I first read and thought “Oh, that’s why poetry is,” but it might have been Sappho’s Fragment 4 as translated by Stanley Lombardo:
I do not expect my fingers
to graze the sky
fr. 4, Sappho: poems and fragments, translated by Stanley Lombardo
It’s simple, it’s a fragment of what Sappho originally wrote, and it’s ripe for you to pile onto it your own feelings and your own experiences. It’s also not in verse really, it’s not metered, and because Stanley Lombardo is a very good translator, it’s in language that feels like me. It’s a good poem.
Many people have argued much better than I could why poetry still matters or why the loss of poetry from public conscious means we’re dumb or why instead of downloading another pulpy Danielle Steel novel to your Kindle you should read Ezra Pound (don’t listen to them! read the Danielle Steel!).
Very possibly you are one of the millions who feel unaffected or disenfranchised or left out by poems. Few people read poems these days! In 2017, only 11.7% of American adults had read a single poem. And that number was up from 6% in 2012. I think that distancing from poetry comes down to expectations. Reading a poem will not feel like reading anything else you read. Prose tends to have points on a timeline, or points in physical space, that it moves the reader between.
Poetry is… pointless. Poetry is more like a series of triggers put together to bring about a series of thoughts, feelings, experiences. You probably aren’t meant to “understand them”, just experience them.
Below is a rough approximation of how I pick poets to read. It may help you find your poets.
Pick a poem. Any poem at all. Pick based on title, author, form, length. Anything. If you don’t know where to start, check out Poetry Foundation or buy a copy of Best American Poetry.
Read through your poem.
If you hate it, don’t care about it, whatever. Find a line, collection of words, a single word that did something to you, say “Thanks” and move on. This is important in my opinion because reading poetry takes practice and part of that is noticing what works for you. And anyway, noticing good things is a transferrable skill.
Repeat this process until you find a poem that you like. Generally, you’ll know you like it because it surprises you or delights you in some way. As an example, the below poem by Margaret Atwood is one that I think generally delights, shocks, surprises.
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
[you fit into me], Margaret Atwood
Find a few more by that poet you enjoyed, from the same collection if possible. Not all poets operate this way, but usually a collection is put together something like an album or a good playlist. The pieces will work best together.
Enjoy!
Some recommendations:
If you want to know about all the different Beyoncés in the world and grapple with whatever your privileges are: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker
If you like feelings and crisp details and a lightly Southern flavor: Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon
If you remember really liking “Sideways Stories from Wayside School”: Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg
If you ever talk to your therapist about parental trauma, like bone/bruise/body imagery, and feel like you crawled into being: Satan Says by Sharon Olds
If you like big pretty words and need some positivity: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
If you’re looking for more of an essay than poems but by a poet and you’re kind of mad: Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer
If you are addicted to Twitter and need off but don’t want to lose the endless scroll: IRL by Tommy Pico
If you want the energy of that one kind man you know who’s funny and pretty quiet: Surrounded by Friends by Matthew Rohrer
If someone else’s rich self-examination and family traumas would comfort you right now: When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
If you want to read an addiction book that isn’t an addiction book that is also my favorite I read last year: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
If you like the band Pavement and want something beautiful and wry: Actual Air by David Berman
Today’s poem is ‘Comparison’ by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
I have made a list of all the books of poetry mentioned in this newsletter so that you can easily buy them on bookshop.org here and support local independent bookstores.