The Mechanics of Reading Poetry
Siobhan Phillips has an interesting blog post on the mechanics of reading poetry.
When I wrote The Poetics of the Everyday, I wanted to learn how quotidian experience could foster rather than frustrate poetry: how twentieth-century poets turn everyday life, so often a chore or requirement, into a creative activity. More specifically, I wanted to learn how poets ground creativity in everyday time, that over-and-over in which each morning seems both the same as and different from the one before. My investigations focused, then, on repetition and verse writing. Recently, though, I’ve been thinking also about verse reading. How do I and others read poetry, ordinarily? I don’t mean how we comprehend or analyze it—rather and more basically, how do we take it in? How does this reading fit among other everyday activities? How should it?
Phillips proposes including a little poetry in your everyday routine, an idea that at least sounds attractive. It might also seem a wee bit unrealistic, akin to the eternal repetition of resolving to get more exercise (and Phillips warns against treating poetry as if it were a form of therapy).
This may sound entirely too obsessive, but I usually keep a book of poems on my desk and I read one or two when I’m waiting for my computer to boot up or to download something: the slower my computer gets, the more verse I read. It takes me a month or two to work my way through an entire volume. I normally read each poem twice, and I try to voice them aloud.
There are a handful of poets whose work I read exhaustively, purchasing every new volume they publish. One of those is Bill Holm: at this moment, the poetry collection on my desk is his posthumous book, The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems. From his poem, “Ars Poetica“:
Shakespeare, Tao Chien, Homer, Pushkin,
Basho, Gilgamesh, Walt Whitman,
Anonymous–all wastes of time.
Your practical uncles were always right.
Still, if we move this word over here–
take out a line there–make it sing better–
there may be a surprise in it–though maybe not.
But we’ll do it anyway, to pass,
as Buddha says, the time–
to thicken the plot. What else
have we got to do until the end?
Then there are the oddball books I pick up because something about them attracts my hand. After finishing Holm, I will move on to a faded 1935 collection I stumbled into at a used bookstore last year, The Works of Li Po, The Chinese Poet, translated into English by Shigeyoshi Obata. After that, maybe it will be time to reread one of the big modernists, Eliot or Yeats.
How (where, when, why) do you read poetry? And, after all, what else have you got to do until the end?
