Last week while on playground duty, I had a wonderful conversation with a Year 11 student about poetry. His enthusiasm for this form of creative expression and his joy in sharing it, was evident. We shared our fondness for the poetry of Mary Oliver who once suggested that ‘a reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars’. I like this comparison very much. Something stirs within us when we read a good poem. The experience often enables us to feel, taste, hear, think, and see in altered ways. Perhaps it is the compression and intensity of a poem that speaks powerfully to the listening mind. Perhaps it is the pattern on the page with its various line breaks and verse paragraphs which gives visual assistance to the reader seeking to ‘hear’. I think Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he described poetry as ‘the best words in the best order’. My advice to students engaging with poetry is to ‘listen’. Don’t try to work it out. Let it come to you. And even then, many poems refuse to give up all their secrets.

Last year, I stumbled on a wonderful guide to reading poetry written by the contemporary American poet Tracy K Smith. It is worth the read.

Like a stranger in somebody else’s home, I proceed gently with a new poem, taking things in rather than trying to bend them to my own habits, tastes or expectations. Along the way, I take stock of what I notice. What does the poem itself teach me about how to go about reading and responding to it? What information does the title contain? What kind of expectation does it establish? How does the first line of the poem go about responding to that expectation? Is there any effect of the visual shape of the poem? How does the poem use white space, and how do I move through the lines of the poem as a result of how they are formatted? In addition to following the sense of the sentence, I observe lines as individual units. Which lines seem to carry the most weight in the poem? Why?

Sometimes a poem’s literal meaning is less essential than the effect it produces. In addition to looking for what a poem is “saying,” I try doing the following: Listen to the music of the poem’s language. How do the sounds of words create drama, meaning and tone? Look at the images in the poem. From what kinds of contexts are they drawn? What do these images connote on their own and in conjunction with one another? What is the cumulative effect of the images in the poem? Where does the transformation, turn or “discovery” take place in this poem? What changes as a result? What does the poem cause me to notice or take new stock of? What questions does it raise?

I try to consider and feel all of the many things the poem has made me notice, and to let those things—the effects of the poem—mingle a while. I look at the title again to see how my experience of the poem affirms or changes my initial understanding of the title. Then I read the whole poem again, a little less like a strange guest this time.

Whether a strange guest or someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars, poetry undoubtedly invites us into the power of mystery, beauty and human creativity.

Mrs Clare Murphy

English Coordinator & Literacy Instructional coach