I'm going to relay a little advice from poet John Ciardi as a way of, if possible, altering and enriching the way you read poetry. Too many of you tend to, in the immortal words of Billy Collins: "…tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it."
That way lies madness and, probably, an abiding hatred for all things poetical. I'm asking you to take an approach that is gentler on the poem and yourself. And to begin with, I'm going to cite these words of John Ciardi's from chapter one of How Does A Poem Mean?, his wonderful guide to poetry (alas, no longer in print):
"What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? The apology must at least be made. It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts. Though one must note with care…that passionate learning is full of very technical stuff…
"And in poetry there is the step beyond: once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being…
W. H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young man who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was 'because I have something important to say,' Auden would conclude that there was no hope for that young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like 'because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another,' then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.
"When one 'message-hunts' a poem (i.e., goes through the poem with no interest except in its paraphraseable content) he is approaching the writing as did the young man with 'something important to say'…The common question from which such an approach begins is “WHAT Does the Poem Mean?” His mind closed on that point of view, the reader tends to 'interpret' the poem rather than to experience it, seeking only what he can make over from it into a prose statement (or Examination answer) and forgetting in the process that it was originally a poem.…
"For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:
O body swayed to music, o quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
"What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself. The dance is in the dancer and the dancer is in the dance. Or put in another way: where is the 'dance' when no one is dancing it? and what man is a 'dancer' except when he is dancing?"
"And in poetry there is the step beyond: once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being…
W. H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young man who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was 'because I have something important to say,' Auden would conclude that there was no hope for that young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like 'because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another,' then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.
"When one 'message-hunts' a poem (i.e., goes through the poem with no interest except in its paraphraseable content) he is approaching the writing as did the young man with 'something important to say'…The common question from which such an approach begins is “WHAT Does the Poem Mean?” His mind closed on that point of view, the reader tends to 'interpret' the poem rather than to experience it, seeking only what he can make over from it into a prose statement (or Examination answer) and forgetting in the process that it was originally a poem.…
"For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:
O body swayed to music, o quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
"What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself. The dance is in the dancer and the dancer is in the dance. Or put in another way: where is the 'dance' when no one is dancing it? and what man is a 'dancer' except when he is dancing?"
From How Does A Poem Mean, The Riverside Press Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Company
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