Dear Subscribers,
I have exciting news: I’m in the process of creating several online poetry courses! They’re based on the monthly instructive essays I’ve been writing here in lullabies & alarms for the last 18 months.
For each course, I’m greatly expanding the content, writing in-depth and detailed lessons, creating new exercises, designing helpful reference diagrams, compiling reading lists, and recording video and audio to accompany the written lesson texts.
There will be the option to purchase different versions of the courses—a completely self-guided version, or versions that involve feedback from me and/or other students. Pricing will be as equitable as possible, along a sliding scale.
I hope to get the first two courses up and running in the next month or two, and follow those with more! In the meantime I’d love to gauge interest. If you think you might want to take these courses, please fill out this quick three-question form.
If you have extra resources and you’d like to help support me as I invest time and labor into building these courses, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or a founding member subscription, or donate an extra paid subscription. I’d be very grateful!
And now on to today’s topic—glorious reading!
The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. […] Perhaps then more reading would only refine my singularity…
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins in a letter to Robert Bridges, September 25, 1888.
The Practice of Reading
Anyone may write.
An inspired hermit with zero socio-cultural contact can certainly write poetry by reaching inward for meaning, story, and value.
But if we are to be engaged in honing, growing, and maturing our poetic craft, it’s helpful to build a practice of reaching outward—a practice of reading.
Comfortably Mired
Even for the most well-read of us, it’s easy to get stuck—in a style, a movement, a demographic, an original language, a gender, a culture, a century, a decade. You may read a wide range of poets, yet still only give your attention to those poems with which you’re immediately comfortable, with which you easily understand/identify, or which you really just… like.
But as poets who want to expand our craft, more is required of us.
Here are the five poetry reading tactics I recommend:
Read widely
Read what you love
Read poetry that challenges you
Read what you loathe
Find poetry where it “isn’t.”
Canonical Confinement
A canon is a group of texts or writers whose work has been deemed valuable and/or representative of a culture or an age.
A canon may seem authoritative and complete, but it’s not. A canon is subjective—what’s included depends on who gets to place value, and who gets to decide what is “representative.” This means there could be many different canons.
It’s really helpful to endeavor to unstick yourself from any particular “authoritative” canon. Take a look at your books, or make a list of your favorite poets. What patterns present themselves?
For example, maybe you haven’t read many poems written after 1970. You might find that most of what you read uses traditional forms—or perhaps you stick only with more hip, contemporary forms. Maybe you tend to primarily read poetry by writers of a particular race, gender, class, country, or generation.
Maybe you’ve only read poems that were originally written in your native language.
Maybe you mostly read authors whose experiences and expressions you can relate to.
I get it. I constantly have to check myself, as I’ve often fallen into reading ruts that can sometimes last years. It takes work to stay alert—yet it’s well worth pushing ourselves. There are so many amazing poets, with so much to teach us.
Challenge:
Create a tiny-yet-expansive poetry anthology using five simple rules:
Your poetry anthology should consist of at least 5 poems.
You must have never read the poems before now.
It’s okay if you’ve heard of the poets’ names, but you should be unfamiliar with their work.
Only include poems you really like or are especially drawn to.
Each poet and poem should be as different as possible from the others – in author identities, cultures, styles, periods/decades, and in structure, tone, voice, original language, presentation, theme, topic, and so on.
My best advice is to wander—through a used bookstore, through a library, through anthologies—and open up books you wouldn’t normally open. Look through anthologies of eras, of types, or of poems translated from other languages.
Check out the list at Cave Canem of prizewinning books by Black poets.
Walk across the country using the interactive map of Native American poets which Joy Harjo, 23rd US Poet Laureate, put together.
Check out many older books online for free through the Internet Archive, a non-profit library.
Search for slam poetry on YouTube and other online platforms.
Search for the hashtag #instapoets on Instagram.
Look through the Poetry Foundation’s archive.
When you’re done, I’d love to see what you put together. Post the titles, authors, and links (if available) in the comments, or drop me a line.
“Irrelevant,” “boring,” or “incomprensible” poetry is helpful.
One of the best methods of growing your craft is to find poetry you dislike or don’t relate to and—crucially—to name and explore why you don’t like it.
The practice of naming is one of the first steps toward growth and change. It’s important to be able to give names to ourselves, to our identities. We work to give language to our psychological underpinnings or our trauma. We discover the names for the ways in which we unhelpfully support broader societal harms. We work to identify and describe the most helpful ways to support our children.
It’s the same with poetry (and any art practice). Finding the language, descriptions and names for subtle effects, impacts, or qualities is super constructive. Whereas we’re not being particularly constructive or helping our practice if we simply say “I don’t like this,” or “what a bad poem,” or “I just can’t relate to that,” and end there.
Instead, foster curiosity.
Ask yourself to explore the impressions and feelings the poem evokes.
Ask yourself to explore the mechanics and content of the poem:
Why isn’t it working for you?
(What can you learn from this poem about reader engagement that you could apply to your own writing?)What did the poet do, or not do?
(What can you avoid doing or not doing in your own poetry?)Are your own preconceived ideas, background, or experiences limiting your experience of the poem? How?
To be clear: You don’t have to like or relate to every poem. I’m not suggesting you should change your mind about poems you don’t like. I’m suggesting you learn from them.
Challenge:
Find 5 poems you dislike or otherwise find it difficult to relate to.
Analyze why you dislike each poem. You can do this in any way that works for you, including:
a chart
a list
a paragraph
a voice memo
a word cloud
in conversation with a friend
Dig as deep as you can, with a focus on craft:
What could the poem have done to be less X (where X = negative quality)?
How did the writer achieve that queasy/scary/uncomfortable/_____ effect?
Which aspects of the poem seem incomprehensible or unrelatable—the topic? references? phrases? punctuation? layout?
Why are these elements incomprehensible or unrelatable?
Do the reasons have more to do with the poem, the poet, or you (or all three)?
TIP: Try copying out the poem, reproducing it exactly. The act of writing it out can reveal aspects of the structure and the poet’s intentions that you hadn’t noticed. (This is a fun tip for poetry you love, too!)
Read poetry that “isn’t” poetry.
Above is a (slightly tinted) large format photograph I took of an old, much-used whiteboard. There’s a lot going on. Colors, words, diagrams, fingerprints.
It’s a layered, contemplative piece, or
it’s an intriguing, painterly piece, or
it’s a banal, incomprehensible mess.
Whether this photo is viewed through a positive or negative lens is all down to the individual encounterer (person who encounters the piece), and it’s even down to the time of day and the encounterer’s mood.
But the lens I chose to view it through is a productive lens (not positive or negative).
So much of what we encounter in our day-to-day lives can be a teacher for us. When I took the time to notice and photograph that whiteboard, I was reminded that poetry (and art) exists outside of books and stages—outside of canons entirely.
I also learned:
how evocative revelation and erasure can be
the ways fragmentation can capture interest
how words and ideas can dissolve and erupt
how an interesting layout can intrigue the eye and maintain attention
what embodiment can look like—being rather than saying.
The choreography and rhythm of construction workers, the unpredictability of a leaky faucet, or an advertising jingle’s use of phrasing; a sculpture or a novel or a painting— instructive elements can be found (read!) in almost anything if we just look.
Challenge:
Keep a “non-poetry poetry” sketchbook or journal.
Look around during your day. Listen around. What strikes you? What rhythmic complaint wafts over to you from the other side of the packed subway car? What misguided translation do you come across? When your view is blocked and you only see half of a poster or sign, does it make its own kind of strange sense?
What grammatically incorrect, yet strangely sensible comment came from your toddler? What did you witness in a dream? What song lyrics can you just not get out of your mind? What chaotic patterns in nature captivate you?
What narrative shape does that movie use? What elements of dialogue did you find most powerful in that scripted podcast? What can the scale, color, amplification, confidence, or any other quality of any artwork teach you that would be relevant to your poetry practice?Look for snippets and crevices and echoes of poetry. Look for half-buried, ignored, accidental art. Look for art made using other media. Notice form, depth, humor, pacing. And note it down, draw it, graph it, list it.
As you fill out the sketchbook, you can begin to refer back to it as a toolbox when you’re feeling stuck with your writing.
As ever, I’d love to hear from you!
Leave a comment below or reach out to me anytime.