How to Dwell With a Poem
Five suggestions for engaging with poetry, and a call to poets for making these offerings more complete.
Hello, R&W community… Happy National Poetry Month!
Hopefully, you read Saturday’s post and know that here on R&W, we’re celebrating National Poetry Month by reading together, An Axe for the Frozen Sea, by Ben Palpant, coupled with poetry offerings by the featured poets.
(By the way, if you want to hear a great interview with the author on his making of the book, listen to his conversation with Jonathan Rogers on The Habit podcast.)
But, I’m greedy. I want more for you—and me—as we move through this month and beyond. I want us to dwell with the poetry I offer at the end of each post. I want us to dwell with poetry, period.
I also know that this “dwelling with” doesn’t come naturally to 99% of us when it comes to poetry. Yes, there are those reading this who know how to enter into a poetic work. You are able to read it with anticipation and not anxiety. To sit with it, taking it in and relishing in its slow, unfolding beauty, the way one does a glass of fine wine.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are chugging that poem down like an anxious kid playing beer pong at a frat party. We’re just trying to hang with the cool kids; to stay alive in this literary world of strangly strung together words.
This month, and for the rest of our lives, I want the 99% of us take a deep breath. Stop trying so hard. Step away from the beer pong table. Instead, let us find our true place at poetry’s hospitable Supper Table, where the best wine and bread and fellowship abound.
To help us do this, I offer here some suggestions for engaging with poetry that will—I hope!—make reading poetry a more meaning-filled, rich experience. One that will help you “sneak past those watchful dragons”1 of reason without passion, intellect without imagination. One that will bring us closer to “dwelling with” and further away from “working at.”
A way of going “Further up and Further in.”2
But, I have another motive in my offering. I want these suggestions to be the beginning of a greater, more wonderful offering of suggestions by poets and teachers more versed than I, at reading and dwelling with poetry.
So…
This post is also a call to all those poets, teachers, and amateur3 poetry readers like me: Please share your own suggestions for how we can better engage with poetry. Add these in the “Comment” section at the end of this post.
At the end of April, I will gather all the suggestions and re-write the post to include a more nuanced, complex and full offering.
What I’m offering today is only an appetizer. What I hope to offer you at the end of April, with collaborative effort, is a feast.
Ways to Dwell with a Poem
The suggestions that follow are inspired by a story from Ben Palpant’s book. He is describing a dream in which poet, Li-Young Lee shows up at Ben’s apartment:
While I prepared his tea, I told him about the season in my life when I carried one of his books around with me. It was a hard time of life for me, but working through his poems, one line at a time, helped.
“I didn’t always know what you were saying, but somehow I understood,” I told him. “I didn’t comprehend in my mind, but I got it in my heart. Does that make sense?” (p. 99-110)
This is my desire for us: to sit with a poem long enough without having to know but somehow still understand what it is saying to us. To not comprehend with our minds, but still grasp it in our hearts.
Before I go any further, if you think I’m suggesting you “dwell” with every poem you ever read, you would be mistaken. My guess is, more often than not, you won’t do this when you read poetry. I certainly do not.
But, for those poems that haunt you after you read them, puzzle you, disturb you, make you chest tighten and your eyes water without reason, I offer these five suggestions for dwelling:
Read the same poem five days in a row.
When I homeschooled my children I used this literature-based curriculum called Five in a Row. The foundational idea of FIAR is to read the same story to your children five days in a row, each day you pull new meaning and learning from it, by considering it from a different angle. The story is used as a spring-board into interdisciplinary studies: pulling from the text ideas for studying concepts in science, math, history, geography, art, etc.
I think what I’m suggesting here is similar: As you read the same poem each day, focus on a different way of “seeing” the poem. Consider the rest of my suggestions as ways into that seeing.
Begin with words, phrases, lines that capture your attention.
Think of this as “snagging” at your eyes—or maybe the eyes of your heart. What word(s), or phrase(s), or line(s) caught you off guard? Confused you? Repelled you? Drew you in? Mark them. Write these down. Interrogate your reaction. Don’t try and come up with an answer for why… just be willing to ask yourself the question. Maybe, spend 5-10 minutes in freewriting4 your reaction. Here is a prompt to get you going: [Write the word, phrase, line] makes me [write your emotional reaction] because…. (Note: you may not know why. That is the point of the freewrite, to write all around it until you write into it. Remember: further up, further in is anything but direct.)
Read the poem out loud.
The vast majority of poetry is meant to be read out loud. At least, it used to be. I know it feels funny to read out loud to yourself. But do it! At least a couple times throughout your week of reading. After you read out loud, ask yourself: How does this poem sound? Is it fast or slow, or somewhere in-between? Does it gallop forward? Or beg my contemplation? Is it hard? Sharp? Soothing? Soft? Rolling? What sounds do I hear? Are there repeating sounds? Where does there seem to be emphasis in the lines? Were there places I struggled with the language, or pacing? If so, where? Did I begin to gloss over the words or lines? If so, where?
These questions dovetail into the next suggetion…
Notice the poem’s form and its grammar.
This is hard for those of us who do not have any formal education in poetry. But, I think there are a few things even we “neanderthal” poetry readers can notice. For instance… Are the lines long or short? When you read the poem out loud does it have a rhythm to it? What does that rhythm sound like? (da-Dum, da-Dum; or La-la-la, La-la-la… those are just examples) Does the poem have rhyming words? Does it follow a rhyme scheme (for example: a,b,b,a, or a,b,a,b)? Does it have stanzas (groups of lines that form a unit)? How many lines per stanza? Does this follow a pattern throughout the poem? Do the stanzas make a shape? What is it? What other patterns do you notice?
What about the grammar of the poem? What words are capitalized? What punctuation is used? Where? How do these things affect your reading of the poem? Your understanding of each line—what it is saying?
Engage with the poem’s imagery. Respond to it. Let it take you “further up and further in”.
This moves us back toward my second suggestion, engaging with the poem’s language and attending to the ways in which its images move us: as Palpant suggests, to not knowing but understanding; not comprehending it in our heads, but “getting it” in our hearts.
How do we do this?? I’m not 100% sure. But I will share my process:
Write the vivid image down.
Freewrite about the image (see footnote 4 below).
Write down everything that image makes me think of—other connecting points and images it conjures in me.
Pray. Ask God to reveal His deeper beauty, goodness, and truth about the image, and ultimately, the poem. This is, in essence, my “How then should I live?” question, taken to the Lord in prayer.
As I said at the beginning, I offer these suggestions: a) as a complete amateur poetry reader; and b) as the appetizer to what I hope becomes a full course offering of beautiful poetry dwelling ideas from the community of poets I know exists here on Substack (and beyond!). I’m excited to see how these suggestions are made more rich and full by others’ voices.
So, if you’re reading this and you’re a poet or a teacher, or simply have an idea to add, please share it in the comments below! If you know a poet, teacher, or avid reader of poetry who you think would have something to contribute, please pass this post along to them. Thank you.
Until Saturday: Read wide, read well. Live always in witness to the Great Story.
C. S. Lewis famously said this in writing about the way fairy tales can reveal the heart and truth of the Christian story in ways the “ought to” teachings about Christ freeze one’s heart. “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Cone one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” From: “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”, collected in Of Other Worlds, Essays and Stories, C. S. Lewis.
Another often quoted of C. S. Lewis, stated often throughout the Narnia books in allusion to living a full life “at home” with Christ—a life fully dwelling with, in, and through, Christ. It is the declaraion of the Unicorn at the end of The Last Battle, upon finding his true home in the New Narnia: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we love the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up and further in!” From: The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis.
amateur comes from the French “amateur” meaning, one who loves. This is how I mean the word above… and also, as it is more popularly used today: as one who engages in activity for pleasure, without professional background or expertise.
Freewriting is writing non-stop about something. Non-stop means exactly that. You write without stopping, even if you don’t have a thought or are drawing a blank, you write it down (“I don’t know what to write, still don’t know what to say, ugh, when will I have a thought…”). Set a timer. Keep your pen moving on the paper until the timer goes off.
Your gifted teaching is showing!
This is what I’m currently looking for in a group - I’ve proposed it to a poetry group and am not seeing much understanding of what I’m talking about so far. Some fairly established poets, too, so I don’t know if it’s just anxiety? Anyways, thanks for speaking my language!