Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies

A guide for the perplexed

Mark Yakich  - The Atlantic - Nov 2 2014, 

Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (Wikimedia Commons)

At one time or another, when face-to-face with a poem, most everyone has been perplexed. The experience of reading a poem itself is as likely to turn us off, intellectually or emotionally, as it is to move us. Unless patronized by celebrities, set to music, accompanied by visuals, or penned by our own children, poems do a terrible job of marketing themselves. All those ragged lines and affected white spaces make them appear as though they should be treated only as pieces of solemn art. Look but don’t get too close, and definitely don’t touch.

But what if the fine art of reading poetry isn’t so fine after all? What if the predicament about poems is precisely our well-intentioned but ill-fitting dispositions toward reading them?

Here are 20 modest proposals toward rethinking the act of reading a poem.