Listening to Poetry

An Introduction for Readers and Writers

Jeremy Trabue

• Publisher: Chemeketa Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781943536801
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A sad thing happens to most people somewhere between preschool and college: we unlearn our natural love of poetry, a love rooted in sound and surprise, pattern and play, discovery and delight. That loss is a tragedy that this book aims to reverse.
Based on fifteen years of teaching, and dedicated to the belief that rigor and accessibility are compatible, Listening to Poetry takes nothing for granted, and builds students' confidence and skills from the ground up. It uses innovative, student-centered, and process-based approaches, including practical how-tos and skill-focused exercises for every subject covered.
Poems don't have to be approached like riddles to be solved, codes to be cracked, or prisoners to be interrogated. There is a better way, and it starts right here. Don't take our word for it, though. Listen to students who've read this book:
"I need to give full appreciation to this book for my new-found love of poetry... I have found myself a new hobby."
"Before this book I was overwhelmed by poetry and felt I would never be artistic enough to create or analyze it. Now I feel very comfortable... and am excited to continue my appreciation for the art."
"I have found my love for poetry from reading this book. I have learned how to read poetry and how to understand it."

Chapter 1

Welcome Back to Poetry

Key terms: prose, form, understanding, appreciation, analyze, element, analyze/analysis, basic reading, paraphrase

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

5 I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

10 across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

15 They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, 1988

If you read a nursery rhyme to toddlers, they won’t interrupt you to ask what it means. They certainly won’t tie it to a chair and begin beating it with a hose. Instead, they’ll laugh and clap and ask you to read it again—and again. They respond to the poem as people respond to songs, not as people respond to stories. The poem is delightful because of the rhyme, rhythm, and sound of the words, even if the words make no sense to toddlers—or to anyone.

Let’s fast-forward fifteen or twenty years and check on those delighted toddlers as they sit down to take their first college literature class. If they now read a poem that makes no sense to them, they’re not likely to be delighted by the rhyme, rhythm, and sound of the words. They want to know what it means. They don’t respond to the poem as a song anymore, but as a story—or worse, as a problem to be solved, a code to be deciphered.

Something sad happened between preschool and college. The toddlers became students who unlearned their natural love of poetry, a love that is rooted in sound and surprise, pattern and play, discovery and delight.

This is sad because life can be dull and gray enough without cutting ourselves off from those amusements that are our natural birthright. And poetry is certainly one of those amusements. It’s also sad because, to slightly misquote Robert Frost, if poetry begins in delight, it ends in wisdom. Poetry is not only one of our primal amusements, it’s one of the best tools we have for rendering our lives comprehensible and meaningful.

Let’s try to reverse this tragedy. Let’s stop beating poems with hoses and relearn how to listen to them, have a conversation with them, enjoy them the way those toddlers did. This book will help you take the first few important steps in that direction. We’ll start right away with a closer look at what poems are and how you can learn to really listen to them.

What Is a Poem?

Not knowing what to expect can be difficult. If you go to a football game without understanding the rules or that there are frequent and often long breaks between plays, you’re going to be confused and bored.

It’s the same with any art form. If you don’t know what you’re getting, or if you expect something different from what you’re getting, then you’re likely to be frustrated or disappointed. Your first job, then, is to make sure you know what you’re getting into when you meet a poem.

A Poem Has Form

The first quality most people notice about a poem is the shape of the poem. When they see a poem on a screen or piece of paper, the look of the poem is what makes them think, “Oh. This is a poem.”

Look again at the Billy Collins poem at the start of the chapter. It just looks different from the way most books or magazine articles or letters look. It’s arranged in lines that don’t run all the way to the right edge of the page. Normal prose writing—like the text you’re reading right now—is shaped into paragraphs and made up of lines that run from one margin to the next. In the poem, however, some lines are longer and some are shorter, and they all stop and start according to some invisible, internal rule instead of reaching the end of the available space and wrapping around to the next line.

The shape of the poem is called its form. However, that term encompasses more than just the visual shape on the page that makes such an immediate impression. There are other elements of form that you might not notice as quickly. For instance, does every line start with the same word? Does every other line rhyme? Is each line only ten syllables long? The answers to those and many other questions are also part of the poem’s form.

The rules that create the form of a poem often come before the poem is ever written. There are many traditional ways to arrange and limit the length and shape and sound of the poem. Sets of rules are passed down over time, imported from other cultures and languages, and reinvented from time to time. These sets of rules are called “forms,” too, and they have names like “sonnet” or “haiku.”

Even if a poem is composed free from prearranged rules and even if it isn’t in a recognizable form, it still has form. It still has a shape of some sort on the page, in the mind’s eye, and in the ear. The number and range of forms a poem can take is almost limitless, but all poems have form.

A Poem Is Like a Story, a Song, and a Picture

One of the first ways most students try to understand a poem is by reading it as a story.

The opening poem is not especially storylike, but it still tells a very short story. A teacher talks about the goals for the students and then explains how things really go. The students don’t understand or appreciate the poems in the way that the teacher intends. The goals are never reached. It’s sad. The poem tells this story by comparing the experience of reading and thinking about a poem to looking at a color slide, listening to a beehive, watching a mouse in a maze, walking into a dark room, waterskiing, and, finally, torturing a confession out of a prisoner.

Everything that defines a story is there. But is this a story? No. If for no other reason than the form, you instinctively recognize this is something other than a true story.

So, what is a poem?

You might have noticed how many poems are like songs. Like songs, poems may have verses, rhyme, a regular rhythmic pattern, repetition, and a variety of other sound patterns. Look at and listen for all the ways that this poem seems like a song:

The Yak

As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.

You will find it exactly the thing:

It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,

Or lead it about with a string.

5 The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet

(A desolate region of snow)

Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,

And surely the Tartar should know!

Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,

10 And if he is awfully rich

He will buy you the creature—or else he will not.

(I cannot be positive which.)

Hilaire Belloc, 1896

It wouldn’t take too much effort to set this poem to music. It’s organized into sets of four-line “verses.” All the lines are roughly the same length and rhythm without being monotonously identical. Repetitions of all sorts of sounds, including lots of rhymes, create a musical effect and remind you of the language of song lyrics.

But again, although the poem shares some qualities with song, it’s still something other than a song. To begin with, you’re reading it on a page. That means you can read, reread, pause, or skip ahead. These possibilities affect not only your experience in reading the poem but also the author’s experience in writing it. Even if the poem is performed aloud, it’s spoken, not sung. There’s no instrumentation or accompanying music, no singer to create meaning or feeling with changes in tone or pitch, and even on the page, there’s no score. It’s only made of words.

This poem also makes use of elements that songs don’t use. White space—those blank lines between lines of text—and the arrangement of the lines on the page are part of the poem. It tells a story, which some songs do but some do not. Once again, then, we recognize that while a poem can be songlike, it’s something else, something other than a song.

So, what is a poem?

For hundreds of years, most poems have been written for the page and are read alone in silence. They are visual objects that often use the tools and techniques of design and even illustration.

Notice how the opening poem uses white space—those blank lines between lines of text—to emphasize transitions in the story? Each description of reading a poem is isolated by it. Sometimes the white space coincides with the end of a sentence, but sometimes it interrupts one. These visual elements are not overpowering or dramatic, but they are a part of the overall presentation and impact of the poem.

Some poems even use the printed words to create an actual picture on the page that in some way corresponds to the language content of the poem, as you can see in the following:

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

*

O

fury-
bedecked!

5 O glitter-torn!

Let the wild wind erect

bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect

frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn

all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn!

10 It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect

tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect;

bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born

now

now

15 while ox and ass and infant lie

together as poor creatures will

and tears of her exertion still

cling in the spent girl’s eye

and a great firework in the sky

20 drifts to the western hill.

George Starbuck, 1978

However, even this very picture-like poem of Starbuck’s is not really a picture. Its essence is language. What these words mean and how they sound are both more important than how they are shaped to create an image on the page. Poems share many qualities with pictures. Unlike a picture, however, a poem can exist without the image of what it describes. Unlike a poem, a picture can exist without language.

What then is a poem?

A Poem Is a Poem

We know now that a poem has form. We know that it can be like a story, like a song, and like a picture. In the end, though, we have to conclude that while a poem is like all of these, it remains different from all of them. It remains a poem and must be understood and appreciated as a poem.

As the opening poem wishes for us, we must be curious about what each poem is. We must talk to it and ask it what it is. We must sit with it and let it be itself. Most importantly, we must be quiet and listen carefully while its story and sounds and shape reveal themselves to us.

As a student of poetry, your greatest challenge will be to allow yourself to simply notice and enjoy all the ways a poem decides to act like a story, song, or picture—whether or not it makes sense in any of those ways. When you do that, without feeling the need to torture a confession out of it, then even if you don’t understand it fully, you’re off to a great start.

Common Mistakes

The first goal for this book is to give you the tools you need to understand poems no matter whether they choose to act like stories, songs, pictures—or all three. The second goal is to help you learn how to appreciate and enjoy the poems that you come to understand.

When most students first think about “understanding” a poem, they—like the students in Billy Collins’s poem—assume that it’s a riddle they must solve in order to get a decent grade. And to be fair to those students, that’s not an unreasonable assumption. They’ve probably been trained to think that way by previous English classes. However, it’s time for you to unlearn that lesson.

In fact, most poets write poems because they want ...