ILB, How Do You Read Poetry?

Sad to say, although my shelves are full of poetry my reading of poetry has slowed to a trickle for several years now. It takes a quiet heart to sit with good poems and that has been lacking for some time. Perhaps I can revive the habit in the next year or so.

don't think I've ever understood or enjoyed any poem I've ever read and therefore haven't read any poetry at all since I was 17.

I think "poetry dilettante" is not such a bad thing -- poetry has its place, but that place is usually only central for the poet! for me, when I do make the time for it, I often go through a process of resistance -- maybe I'll read a poem that draws me in, and then ten pages later I'll be thinking, this is really a lot, none of it ever really gives me the resolution of big sturdy paragraphs; but if I stick with it over a few days, it opens up. that's what I like about poetry, and maybe about poets -- they make a very firm demand that what they're doing be allowed enough space, enough attention, for the magic to happen.

We're in a mind-meld today, Joan. Yet I don't have that trouble with old favorites from Donne and Keats to Stevens and Kay Ryan.

yes -- I think there's a few things in play -- the stuff we absorb early on forms a connection, so we can get inside it easier -- but also, even with Stevens, the most difficult of those, the desire to communicate is high. after the 60s that's a less present element in a lot of poetry. I'm reading Anna Akhmatova right now -- given how opaque her peers could be, she's incredibly lucid, I really have to slow down to absorb such stark images & scenes. it's glorious

Standing up, stoned

No I do what you do Joan, I tend to take a volume, whether it's a collected or selected, and follow the Mad Hatter's advice to start at the beginning and read in order. Only time I won't do this is if there's a whole boatload of juvenilia barring access to the good stuff or something. Or of there are drafts at the end, as there are in the Faber Emily Dickinson collected, I left most of those, as they were variations on what had appeared earlier, though I intend to go back to them. But I agree about attuning your ear to the poet's style and development, it's exciting to follow those changes. I'm doing this with William Carlos Williams Collected Earlier Poems right now, and this deep dive following the chronology is very satisfying.

I'm actually reading two books of poetry right now. Dante's "Inferno" in the Robert Pinsky translation, and "The Simple Truth" by Philip Levine. As one might expect, I'm reading the first straight through, as one would read a novel, which is only slightly hindered by the fact that it tends to put me to sleep, perhaps partly a function of the steady rhythmic structure. The second I'm also reading straight through, but at a slower pace, usually a poem or two at a time.

Ooh that's my favorite Levine volume.

Yeah, it's great. I'm savoring it slowly.

I'm reading Anna Akhmatova right now -- given how opaque her peers could be, she's incredibly lucid, I really have to slow down to absorb such stark images & scenes. it's glorious

some good comments here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2016/03/a-peculiar-crossover-iris-dement-sets-18-anna-akhmatova-poems-to-music-with-surprising-results-

I struggle with Collecteds because often a single poem is enough to see me through a few days, perhaps even weeks and months (I find John Ashberry like this, for instance); returning to a collection, I just meet resistance.

I'm all for single volumes but sourcing them can be tricky and expensive. I have relied on serendipity in most cases - recommendations, stuff I've found in charity shops and secondhand bookshops.

I have the feeling I'll take the question in the OP to my grave, tbh.

I read Jay Griffiths's *Tristimania* a few years back and in there she talks about preparing to walk a section of the Camino de Santiago. I don't have the book to hand but a good friend put together a personalised book, a selection of their favourite poems to read along the way. I want someone to make me one.

often a single poem is enough to see me through a few days, perhaps even weeks and months

I read 'The Other Tradition' from Houseboat Days more than a year ago and still feel like I can't read any more Ashbery until this one has finished rewiring my brain.

Belated, confused and lazy poetry reader here - I’ve never been interested or felt like making the effort. But I recently enjoyed Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost, and Emily Wilson’s recent Odyssey translation, and obviously like everyone else I picked up some WCW after watching Paterson. Last week I bought a secondhand book of Peake’s nonsense poetry but only because the illustrations were so pretty. I remember reading a lot of of H.D. in college. Help!

I think the problem is I’ve come to see reading as a speedy goals-based exercise (read everything before I die!) and it’s hard to slow down, decipher, reread.

Also a sense of shame that I might be a wee bit middlebrow (enjoying Clive James poems etc)

If so, it's ok. mark s says the Beatles are middlebrow.