The following is a letter that I shared with my students at the beginning of my poetry unit last spring. It touches upon a lot of the points that I discuss in greater detail in yesterday’s newsletter (“How to Bake a Cake, How to Drive a Car, How to Read a Poem”), but it does so much more succinctly and is written specifically for an average 9th/10th grade reading level. Please feel encouraged to use it in your own classroom, either as is or revised as you’d like.
I’ll be back tomorrow with another newsletter on murder and close-reading. Saturday, we will dive right into a lesson plan about one of two poems that have, in my experience, always engaged high school students—yes, the kind of poem that has students cheering and laughing and talking—José Olivarez’s “Mexican Heaven.” Saturday will mark the beginning of weekly newsletters!
Thank you so much for being here—that anyone would take the time to read my writing on poetry means so much and I am truly grateful. May your coffee be strong and your sneakers bright.
How to Close Read a Poem
“By learning how to close read, students learn how to engage more deeply with the world. By becoming masters of language, students cease to be objects of language that aims to control them.” — Paul Tran, poet, from craft talk at the Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival
“It is not half so important to know as to feel.” — Rachel Carson, research scientist and writer, from nonfiction book The Sense of Wonder
“I hate poetry” is one of my favorite things to hear as an English teacher. It means to me that someone hasn’t discovered the right poems yet. It also delightfully echoes what the late poet Marianne Moore wrote of poetry—in a poem no less!—: “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.”
She’s not wrong. There are, probably, more important things than “all this fiddle,” or nonsense. But then again, what is more important than paying attention? After all, that is what a poem asks us to do, every time. Maybe that’s why so many of us hate it so much. (Me too, sometimes, more often than I’ll readily admit around other poets.)
The hatred could also be the result of that English teacher proclivity to hold a seance during every poetry unit. Perhaps calling upon the dead poets of yore has made poetry™ a kind of musty, funereal thing. I mean, I just did it myself, invoking Marianne Moore less than a few sentences in, like an English major on their second cup of coffee in the morning. I don’t know why we English teachers carry out so many of our poetry lessons in graveyards. Though I lived above a funeral home myself for the first 18 years of my life, I’m wondering if the fiddle could be better tuned by living players.
We could start from there. And then, too, we could drop the whole act of “getting” a poem. There is no way to “get” a poem. Get into it instead. Walk inside. Look around. There’s nothing to own here.
The word “stanza,” the “paragraph” unit of a poem, comes from the Italian for “room.” Whatever doors are locked, you have the keys. Go ahead, leave your shoes by the door and come on in. When Rachel Carson wrote that knowing matters less than feeling, she was asking us to stop ignoring the common sense of our lived experiences with nature. I’m asking us to do the same with poems. Use our common senses: yes, the “s” is on purpose. Look. Listen. Touch. Taste. Smell.
Close-reading poetry is what happens when we pay attention.
How? Look at content and form. Content is what a poem contains. Form is the container. A poem can contain many things and there are many kinds of containers.
When we talk about what a poem contains, we discuss what a poem is “about”: war; lost love; a snail gliding over a calculator; bubbling blueberry cobbler. When we talk about a poem’s form, we discuss what shapes or structures it: a sonnet (a fourteen-lined poem) in one stanza or a free verse poem (poetry without any standard rhythm or rhyme) in couplets (two-lined stanzas).
We could memorize the names for all of these things, and it is helpful, but sometimes I think learning all of this vocabulary first is a little like memorizing all the parts of a car engine instead of taking the keys and driving. I worry we spend too much time in English class reading the driver’s manual and too little behind the wheel. Sometimes, you have to take the keys and go.
Across content, form, the line, and the whole poem, we are using close-reading skills to pay attention. This means we look for repetitions, similarities, contradictions, the speaker’s message/purpose, and the author’s identity. Though I know some poets would like to smack me on the head with a thesaurus for telling you to go search for a message in some of their poems, here’s the inside secret: there’s a reason why the poet sent out their poem to be read by other people. Poets are writing poems that are in conversation with their readers; asking “what about?” or “why?” are valid questions. (Poets are all talk anyway. None of them are going around throwing thesauri at unsuspecting English teachers and I am not writing this as a challenge.)
And while many dead poets (and some living ones!) liked to pretend that their identities—race and class and gender and sexual orientation—had no effect on what and how and why they chose to write, I think that’s awfully convenient. It allowed (allows) them to pretend that they—mostly white, straight, male, rich, and straight—were (are) writing something universal and that the rest of us somehow aren’t. Hmm, it smells fishy and should be thrown out to sea.
Another thing to lose: the idea that there is one right answer or that a poem has any answers at all to give. Some are just asking questions, or asking you to ask questions. I think that’s another reason why people hate poetry. I think that’s fair. Narrative is comforting, and poems are often without it. Sometimes a poem doesn’t tell us a story. But almost always, it asks us: pay attention.
Pay attention: How many times is a word repeated in a line? Across a poem? Do the images speak to one another, blend, add on, build towards another image? Do they contradict each other? What emotions could this speaker want us to feel? What are they feeling? What is this poet—the living human being who created the speaker as the one who talks to us or describes in this poem—asking us to look at? Why?
Pay attention: What do we smell? What do we taste? What do we feel? What do we hear? What do we see? Look. Listen. Touch. Taste. Smell.
Pay attention.
My favorite thing that I have ever heard a student say about poetry isn’t, “I hate poetry.” While it delights me, I’ll admit: it also saddens me. I think about every circumstance in their experiences as a student that led them to that conclusion.
How do you kill the love for a living thing like poetry? Not just through dead poets and dead poems. But through dead ways of reading. Close-reading for certainty. To be dead certain. For solutions. For resolution. Close-reading to “get it.”
My favorite thing that I have ever heard anyone say about poetry is that “close-reading poetry is like a joyful scavenger hunt.” A former student said this during a Socratic Seminar and I wrote it in my notes and have reminded myself of it ever since.
It’s why when someone tells me, “I don’t get poetry,” I say, “Me too! Let’s go!” The scavenger hunt has begun. Pay attention.