Stephanie Burt - Dont Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems

She isnt making noise for the sake of making noise. Shes letting me inside her head, and for the first time in my life, I feel I can almost imagine itwhat itd be like to exist as a completely different person, to have their thoughts and feelings instead of my own.

KHERYN CALLENDER, HURRICANE CHILD

Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that?

VIRGINIA WOOLF, BETWEEN THE ACTS

She needed a way to be sure it was her inside the machine.

APRIL DANIELS, DREADNOUGHT

O F ALL THE KINDS OF ART THAT PEOPLE MAKE, POEMS are, or should be, the easiest to share, maybe even the easiest to find. They need not be read live, or on stage, or by their authors, or even aloud (though it helps); they require no musical instruments or playback devices. Some can be memorized; most can be collected, reprinted, copied out by hand, or shared via email; and most of them dont take very long to read.

So why dont more of us read more poems? Why do some people care so much about poems that baffle the rest of us? Why do the same people often loathe poems others like? Are poems from five hundred years ago really the same thingscan they work on us in the same waysas poems by living authors now? Do all sorts of poems work the same way? Have they always? How can the poems that are out there all deserve the label poetry when they seem so far apart?

This book tries to answer those questions. It gives not just ways to read poems but reasons to read them, and ways to connect the poets and poems of the past, from Sappho and Li Bai to Wordsworth to some poems being written right now. And it starts from the ideawhich took me a while to realize was not obvious, or universal, or widely recognized in schoolsthat poems are like pieces of music: by definition they all have something in common, but they vary widely in how they work, where they come from, and what they try to do. Various readers like various poems for various reasons, just as various listeners like various genres of music, various artists, and various songs. And the same listener (you, for example) can care about different songs for different reasons, at different times in your life or even at different times of day.

I came to write this book in part because Ive been teaching people how to like poems, and how to see why others like poems, since the early 1990s; Ive also been writing about old and new poems for magazines since then, in what now adds up to several hundred essays and book reviews. But this is not a book of book reviews; it is, in a sense, an alternative to them, a way to show what Im looking for (which may not be what youre looking for) when I flip through the hundreds of books of poetry that I get in the mail each year and the dozens I still go out of my way to buy, and when I findas I do, more often each yeara poem I like a lot, by an author Ive never heard of, on Twitter or Facebook or in a glossy quarterly or in a brand-new journal that exists only onscreen.

But its not just me. Consider all the things that the word poetry can mean, and all the things that the various sets of words called poems can do.

Two teenagers in Singapore open their web browsers to a social media site and find there eight lines written four hundred years ago in England, quoted yesterday by another teen in Tasmania, about the persistence of friendship across time and space.

A superhero in an X-Men comic reads verse by Percy Bysshe Shelley aloud at her daughters funeral; the superheros colleague, a teacher, relaxes by rereading Robert Frost.

Dozens of lines in the alliterative meter and in the approximate style of the Old English heroic epic Beowulf adapt the plot of a television commercial for Old Spice deodorant, to hilarious effect; the parody achieves some popularity online.

At a funeral, a rabbi reads the Twenty-Third Psalm in a modern English version designed for Jewish liturgical use. Five time zones away, a pastor reads the same psalm to her congregation in the 1607 translation sponsored by King James; one of her congregants, fluent in both languages, considers the differences between the English and the biblical Hebrew.

A graduate student counts the number of times that William Butler Yeats uses the words blood, love, and moon in all his poems. Another proposes to her future wife by reading a Yeats poem out loud. A third compares translations into English of thousand-year-old poem-songs about sexual love and devotion from the South Indian language Telugu.

An English professor delivers a lecture about Bob Dylan. Three doors down, another professor delivers another lecture about the rap artist and singer Angel Haze while, across campus in the music department, a third professor examines Lorenzo Da Pontes choice of words for Mozarts Cos fan tutte.

An inquisitive polymath admires the pattern of synonyms and antonyms and the contrasting pattern of ascending and descending lowercase letters in three pages of prose that make no literal sense.

An administrative assistant spends his lunch hour copying down Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; another writes I, too, dislike itthe opening line of Marianne Moores poem called Poetryon a napkin during a meeting.