Hello and welcome to our podcast on how to read poetry. We are going to be reading a lot of this this year since it is, you know, an English class and there are some pretty important things that we can learn from poetry. Unfortunately, I think poetry often gets a bad rap, and that people, once they hear that word, kind of tune out and think that it's all sort of goofball, mushy, rhymey, has to deal with love, why can't they just listen to it? they just say what they mean kind of writing. And so people oftentimes just check out when we talk about this.
But I think there are some good connections between our love of music and potentially our growing fondness for poetry. So let's go ahead and see what we mean here. We've said this a lot throughout the class, we're going to go ahead and say it again, but everyone has a story to tell.
And so again, some authors choose to just tell us their thoughts on the world, maybe through an essay. Some people may do it through a short story. Some may try to teach us a lesson through a novel, through a song, through a play.
Others, though, choose to teach the world their message through poetry. And so our job, just like any other piece of written or visual text, is to kind of figure out what is the author saying, what is their point, and then whether we agree or disagree with that once we have figured out what they're saying. So I truly believe that reading poetry is a skill that deserves practice.
Of course, if you're not very good at something, you tend to not like it. But many of us have passions and excitements, and we choose to do sports or activities, musical things, acting things, and the first time we did them, we weren't very good. But as we have continued to practice, we have gotten better and better at them, to the point where they become second nature.
We don't think so much about the mechanics of shooting a basketball, we just do it. I think reading poetry is very similar to this, and that at first it's very difficult. It's challenging because we're missing the practiced part.
And so just like any other skill, we are going to need to practice this. We are going to repeat it. We're going to try and start on easier scenarios and then work our way up to more difficult ones, poems that may require a little bit more interpretation. And so just like any skill in activity, sport, whatever, reading poetry is a skill that can be practiced and learned. One thing I will push you guys to do is to read poetry with what I call a three-read system.
There's no secret code here, but we're going to read each poem three times. But the better we get at reading them, the better we get at interpreting them, the better we get at seeing the nuances, those numbers of reads may decrease. So in this system, three reads is a good number for us to try and get the things that we'll look at in the next slide. But as we get better... we can certainly read them fewer times if we are making each read a little bit more efficient.
So here's what I suggest we do for each of our reads. So our first read is going to be just to get an overview of the poem. What's the general impression we are left with?
Happy? Sad? Confusing? What's its topic?
Nature? Love? What are they writing about? Our only job at this point is to just give it a once over, try and get an overview of what we're reading.
So the second time we read a poem, we're going to be looking for more details. We're going to be looking at what we can observe in terms of the literary elements that the author might have included. We're going to look at the rhyme scheme, see if we can pick up a rhythm, try to look at similes, metaphors, allusions, puns, assonance, consonance.
And these are all literary terms we will teach you or have taught you already, but we're trying to just identify what do we see here. From there... We can then move on to our third read, which is the hardest one, but after a couple rounds of practice we'll get better at this. That third read is to really figure out, well, so what?
So I observe that this poem is about a tree, and I observe that they are rhyming every other line, and I observe that they're using a simile. Oh, and here they're using imagery, and here they're using a pun. Great. Now I need to take all of those puzzle pieces and put them together.
and come up with my interpretation of this. This is the so what, and this is the part that really freaks people out. Because oftentimes there isn't just one right answer here. Many interpretations of poems can be valid.
We're looking for the one answer, the one that's in the back of the book. We may not be finding it. But this is what the heart of poetry is. The author is giving us their opinion on life, their opinion on something, but they're not just coming out and saying it.
They're hinting at it. They're giving us a bunch of pieces, and we need to connect the dots. So this is where we need to spend a majority of our time when we're reading these poems.
We've observed the topic. We've observed the lit terms. Now we need to spend some brain time and go, well, what do they mean? What are the patterns we've seen before in literature when things are compared to an evil snake or to a flowering tree?
Do those things apply here? If not, what's the author trying to say there? So this is where we need to spend our time moving to that interpretive level and trying to figure out what is the poet saying? What is the poet trying to teach us?
Needless to say, as we continue to read over and over, We're probably going to see more things jump out at us. We should be annotating these poems. We should be making notes in the margins, circling things, putting question marks by parts we don't understand. That will help us as our second and thirds and maybe fourth and fifth reads come about.
We can go back and say, hey, last time I got this part, now I'm going to focus on this part here and see if I can interpret what he or she is saying. And ultimately, we want to be able to come up with an understanding or an interpretation of the theme of this poem. And again, that's what the author is trying to teach us about life through this text.
So when we read a poem like Two Roads Diverging in the Yellow Woods, we have to ask ourselves, is that really just about roads? Or is there something deeper in there? Is this about life choices? Is this about making the right choice or the wrong choice or the challenging choice?
When we read something about how death might be following us in a carriage, well, what does that mean? When we read something about how an evil monster called a Jabberwocky is chasing after people, what might the author really be saying about that? Oftentimes with poetry, we need to move from the literal level to that interpretive level a little bit faster, because the author's trying to tell us something, trying to teach us something a little bit more indirectly.
And so we need to move from just, wow, this poem is about two paths. One is shady, the other is sunny, and move to that interpretive level and go. What do they mean by this?
They wouldn't want to just teach us that. Of course we understand that sometimes paths are sunny, sometimes they're cloudy. What are they really trying to get at?
And so we need to put our brains to work, pull upon all that background knowledge we continue to accumulate, and try and put all those pieces together so that we can kind of figure out a basic meaning of this poem, a basic interpretation of this, and how this relates to us as readers. So that's about it for this one. Relatively short, but the point we're trying to make is that we're going to read poetry a couple times each. First time for overview, what's our general impression. Second time, we're going to start labeling those devices that we see.
And then the third time, which is the most difficult, we're trying to put all of these random pieces together. It's like getting a puzzle, pulling it out of its box, throwing the pieces everywhere, and not going back to look at the box to see what you're actually making. We have a bunch of random pieces in front of us.
We have a rhyme scheme, we have a meter, we have similes, we have a metaphor, we have whatever. Our job then is to try and put them together and see what we can come up with and what we can interpret. That's the joy of poetry.
You do have to work for it. But that is fun. That is a good mental exercise. And it does reveal some really nice emotions and thoughts and lessons. When we start to assign poetry, please don't be freaked out.
We'll definitely practice it. We'll give it a couple reads each. And we'll go from there.
As always, if you have any questions, please bring those in the class. And we will see you soon.