ILB, How Do You Read Poetry?

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.