Turns out my answer to this is manifold and this got long lol. Each paragraph is kind of a different answer to this question.
Slowly, in comparison to other kinds of reading I do. I like reading poems in physical books better than on screens, and I prefer reading whole collections to individual poems. Rarely do I read more than half of one poetry book in one sitting, and often I'll read a few poems at a time and take short breaks in between. When I can, I read poems out loud, but if I can't I at least try to imagine what they would sound like as I read.
The physicality of reading poetry is important to me. Poems are often trying to capture intangible, imagined, intense, incredibly specific moments and thoughts and experiences, but they use a very physical, tangible toolset to do so (language! sound and space and punctuation and arrangement on a page etc!). Poems are made of words!! That is so STRANGE when you stop and think about it!! Like, impossible!!! Poems are full of holes and failure but oh how interesting it is that poems can touch us anyway and oh how interesting those points of failure can be!!! Love a point of failure in a poem!! Love brushing all the way up to something and trying to touch it and not being able to but still pulling back your hand and getting something, even if it isn't what you were reaching for. I got a whole lot better at reading poetry (or at least I liked reading more) when I stopped treating poems like perfect word puzzles with one secret correct meaning-solution each and treated them more like...idk little rubbing rocks or sketches or thought packages or arguments or dreams or stained glass windows or postcards or bits of pretty string or or or. idk. stuff you fiddle with and turn over in your hands and feel and fight with and drop and pick up and touch and let touch you back.
But also also from a "formal" (as in forms) standpoint I did get a lot out of being able to recognize and contextualize forms and genres and poetic/rhetorical devices. Bc now I can sit down and tell which aspects of language are More Important to this poem. And that knowledge helps me figure out how to read them. Here is what the sonnet has been, here is what people do with it now. Here is what chiasmus is, here is how it operates on a few different scales. Just to give 2 examples. What are these poems talking to and what are they using in order to do it? What do they care about? Such questions as these. I don't always agree with his findings and I think his examples leave out a lot of interesting contemporary stuff, but I got a lot out of Robert Hass's A Little Book on Form when I first read it. It was a helpful starting overview.
There's an essay I love called "Ah" by Marianne Boruch where she's talking about mystery, poetic closures, and the lyric impulse. It goes a lot of places and has a lot of great lines.
- "poetry's Vast Archive of the Humanly Possible"
- "That crucial trapdoor secreted away in all great work opens inward...Does it open or close? // I want to stay longer at that door, the lyric impulse in poems..."
But my favorite line in that essay is perhaps when she's talking about an Adélia Prado poem. Boruch says of its ending, "Finally there's this way to end on both hardcore image and spirit-drift that in the grand tradition of poetic closure actually opens. To mystery, to strangeness. To joy, that's what, and an alchemy to savor." And yeah. Yes. In summary, that.
