Talisker Tutorial's How Should You Read Poetry?

How Should You Read Poetry?

There are three essential rules to begin with. There is much more to poetry, of course, but these are the critical principles: Read Aloud, Naturally, and Repeatedly.

1) POETRY SHOULD ALWAYS BE READ ALOUD, or at least mumble softly, moving your lips, if others are around and would panic if they heard actual poetry being recited--remember, don't alarm your family unduly; they're sensitive creatures and must be dealt with charitably. But I digress... You must hear and feel the sounds and rhythms of poetry, because poetry is like music. Would your soul be satisfied with just reading silently over the score of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? I think not, and in the same way, you're not getting the real poem until you hear its music by reading it ALOUD.

2) ALWAYS READ A POEM SEVERAL TIMES, then go away and think about it while you wash the dog (or cat/gerbil/hippo/anteater), then reread it again several times. If a poem is good enough to have lasted all this time, it's worth many repeated visits, just as a painting or symphony, if it's good enough to have lasted this long, deserves repeated visits.

3) POETRY SHOULD BE READ NATURALLY--that is, follow the natural rhythm of the words and punctuation, and don't worry about the line breaks and capital letters at the beginning of lines. Don't pause at the end of lines if there is no punctuation there. For example, Shakespeare's sonnet CXVI (page 7 in your book) begins this way:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

Don't read it this way: "Letmenottothemarriageoftrueminds admitimpedimentsloveisnotlove whichalterswhenitalterationfinds orbendswiththeremovertoremove " etc. No. That will not do. You need to go stick your head under the garden hose and then come back and try it again.

Now read it this way: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: " etc. See? Isn't that better? Now it actually makes sense. If the poet is any good (and Shakespeare is generally considered to have been relatively decent as a writer, trust me on this), he will write in such a way that reading naturally this way will result in you *also* automatically feeling the rhythmic pattern without having to force it into a singsong which destroys any natural sense.

4) After working at reading naturally, you can begin trying to introduce a balance between natural sentence cues and the cues of meter. In other words, make a very slight pause at the end of lines where there is no punctuation in acknowledgment of the meter, but be sure it is not as noticeable a pause as you would make if there *were* punctuation there. Let punctuation pauses be noticeable pauses, and let non-punctuation pauses be rhythmical and almost unnoticeable. We will practice this in class. Wear your crash helmet.

5) After reading a poem aloud a few times to get the feel of it and to understand the meaning, read it overdramatically. Overdo the drama of it. Wave your arms about (pretend you're Italian). Do this a couple times. Be so overdramatic that you would feel silly if anyone were around (which they probably are). Then, back off a bit on the histrionics and read it more normally again and this last reading will be your best yet.

Wes Callihan

"...[S]et an example...in speech, in life, in love,
in faith and in purity."St. Paul, First century,
I Timothy 4:12 New International Version