This is the final post in my “Sunday night poetry” series, which also coincidentally marks the end of National Poetry Month. Rather than post one last poem, I point to some resources for those who enjoyed some of these poems and want to read more, and learn more, about poems, poets, and poetry.
For an art that today has a relatively small audience and relatively little cultural impact, there’s a surprisingly large number of people happy to explain poetry to you. For example, searching the Internet Archive for the title How to Read a Poem turned up books from (in alphabetical order) Terry Eagleton, Edward Hirsch, Nancy C. Millet and Helen J. Throckmorton, Molly Peacock, Burton Raffel, and Tania Runyan. There are other books with slight variations on that title, and others on the same general theme.
Rather than overwhelm you with my opinions on these and other books (most of which I haven’t read), I would point you to two people whose thoughts on poems are worth consideration and may be helpful to you, Stephanie Burt and Helen Hennessy Vendler.
Burt’s book Don’t Read Poetry has a catchy and paradoxical title, which can be explained by an analogy: suppose you had never had the opportunity to listen to music, or much interest in doing so. However, one day you happened to catch a song on the radio or on the Internet, were captivated by it, and wanted to experience that same sensation again. It would be pointless to tell you, “listen to music,” without being more specific. “Music” as a genre encompasses musicians from Bach to Boards of Canada to Beyoncé, and works from “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” to “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” to “Single Ladies” and beyond. You can love the work of one musician without loving that of another, and love a song by a particular musician without liking any of their others.
So it is with poetry: don’t read poetry, read poems. Sample widely enough that you can find something you like, and — if you want to go further — read people who can enhance your enjoyment of a poem by exploring how it works. This is Burt’s task in Don‘t Read Poetry and her anthology Poem Is You, a task that she approaches with a contemporary sensibility that I think will be congenial to readers of this series.
Helen Hennessy Vendler, who died this past Tuesday at the age of 90, was the most famous, respected, and deferred to American critic of poetry of the last few decades. (I should add that the respect and deference were not universal; she had strong opinions that often provoked strong disagreement.) She wrote specialist tomes on particular poets, general essays on poetry for the general public (of which the most recent is The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar), and (most germane to this discussion) an undergraduate textbook Poems, Poets, Poetry (note the order!) that combines an introduction to poetry and its various genres with an anthology of various poems of the past few centuries.
Poems, Poets, Poetry doesn’t assume much knowledge on the part of the reader (it even includes footnotes for common terms like “swastika” that any high school student should know), and Vendler dives into how poems are put together much more thoroughly than Burt does. She is very confident in her readings, and that can sometimes be quite off-putting (is hers really the only way to interpret a given poem?). But if you’re looking for a more tutorial approach Vendler may fit the bill.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation:
- The “Learn“ page has pointers to a variety of resources for poetry readers, including “How to Read a Poem,” by Edward Hirsch, a reprint of the first chapter of Hirsch’s 1999 book (mentioned briefly above).
- Searching for “101” on the Poetry Foundation site produces articles providing introductions to the work of various poets (e.g., “Langston Hughes 101”).
- Internet Archive:
- Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, by Helen Vendler. This is the first edition, from 1997.
- Bookshop.org:
- Don’t Read Poetry, by Stephanie Burt.
- Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them, edited by Stephanie Burt.
- Bookshop.org does not have new copies of Poems, Poets, Poetry; it appears to be out of print. You can often find used (and sometimes new) copies of the 1997 first edition (red cover), 2002 second edition (blue cover), 2009 third edition (green cover), or 2017 compact third edition (green line cover) on Biblio.com.
- Other:
- American Academy of Poets, “How to Read a Poem” and “Poetry 101: Resources for Beginners.”
Final thoughts
Thanks to you all for your indulgence as I posted this series. I’ve been gratified to see a few of you discover a favorite poem previously unknown to you. I hope these posts were at least intermittently interesting to the rest of you.
An important caveat: this was mostly a snapshot of my poetry reading in the concluding years of the 20th century, mostly taken from books in my library. It has lots of gaps in terms of representation, poetic topics, poetic traditions, and the languages in which poems were written. But writing this series has lead me to start reading poetry again, and I am slowly beginning to fill some of those gaps.
If any of you have poems and poets that you love, I encourage you to post them in future. And for those of you were inspired by this series to seek out poetry yourself, whether by the poets I featured or by others, I am happy to have played a small part in that.