A note on reading contemporary poetry:
The vast majority of the reading we do on a day to day basis is really skimming – we peruse headlines, glance at text messages and emails, scan the internet for one-and-two-sentence information bytes targeted at our increasingly short attention spans. Reading poetry – particularly of the experimental variety – requires a much slower pace. It can be difficult, and often this difficulty is intentional. Many of the poets we’ll read this semester write in ways that force you to stop, reread, think about the words, and think about language and meaning-making in general. To succeed in this class you will have to embrace this kind of reading. The fact that you struggle with a particular poet’s work does not mean that you are stupid. Nor does it mean that the poet is worthless. It means that the poet is asking you to think about how he or she is using words, rather than rushing headlong to the question of what the poem is “about.” Think of learning to read contemporary poetry as learning a new language. At first, much of it might seem like gibberish, but the more you read, the more the poems will teach you how to read, and the more meaning you’ll find. It can be a frustrating process, but I hope it will be a rewarding one, too. Another useful way to think about reading contemporary poetry is to consider it as a form of meditation: a way of slowing down our sometimes frantic and increasingly programmed-for-speed brains.
A useful tip: when you encounter something and think “I don’t get it,” don’t stop there. Ask yourself why. Is it the words themselves? The order of the words? Their placement on the page? Try to be specific in thinking about where the difficulty is, and you’ll be on your way to transforming your frustration into an interesting observation about the text. Remember, I don’t expect you to understand what’s going on in every poem – I certainly don’t. But I do expect you to be interested in finding out.
