Reading poems is a matter of applied bias. Always, I look for something that says "poem" to me, when I sit down with a verse, that depends on an assumption, an expectation, a predetermination, a bias. How would I recognize "poem-ness" otherwise?
Now, these statements are problematic, of course. For bias acts most often as blinders, forbidding us to "see" in a poem all of what's there. Or, conversely, to see only what we are "trained" to see. We have names for bias that functions this way: gender bias, race bias, class bias, cultural bias and so on.
There are other kinds of bias, less dangerous, but just as limiting. There is the kind of bias that a fellow writer, a non-native speaker of English, once shared with me in a workshop. A poem must follow the rules of grammar (i.e., of Standard English); otherwise, it is "less than" a poem, or certainly not a "good" poem. She objected to poems that use sentence fragments because she learned her English in a classroom and from a textbook only, that is, by sight more than by sound. She also objected to using conjunctions and articles as line endings (she understood the poetic line as a complete unit).
How often have you heard a dabbler poet or occasional reader of poetry insist that poems must rhyme? Or that iambic pentameter is the only poetic beat? Or that a "poem" must record a complete thought? Or that it conclude something? Or "be about" something (besides itself)?
So to the kinds of bias listed above, we should add literary bias, or what might be called "English Lit Survey Bias (ELSB)": the insistence that poems fit the models collected in your Norton Anthology (Vol. 1). ELSB . . . otherwise known as The Canon.
Still, everybody writes and reads poetry with bias of some kind or another, and in fact with a complex of biases: cultural, gender, race, class, literary. That's what makes unfamiliar poems unfamiliar--that they come from some other understanding--and such a rewarding experience. They call our biases to the surface, in the form of value judgments, misreadings, forced readings; they puzzle us; sometimes, they escape us altogether. We can't avoid bias when we write or read a poem; we can only try to be aware of the bias that we bring to a poem.
One way to make ourselves more aware of our biases is to read outside our normal range. To read poems that confuse or perplex us, that might even anger or annoy us. And of course it does no good just to become aware of ourselves in this way, unless we also interrogate our responses, as opposed to passing judgment on what we're reading. Why is this poem so difficult (for me) to understand? What's the point the poet is trying to make? How does this image make me feel and why? What does this word or expression mean (to me & why do I take that meaning on board)? What's the effect of the line endings, line length (on me, as I read)? And then to ask ourselves, is this poem really poorly conceived or written, or am I just not "there" yet in terms of understanding and accepting it as a work of art? If I am finding fault, where does the fault lie, in the poem or in me?
And THEN, maybe you'll start to see or hear the biases in your own writing, how you "lean" toward certain themes, expressions, images, tones, rhetorical devices, cultural tropes, meanings. Which is all part of growing as an artist, expanding and deepening your understanding of your art, how it works and how you make it, what you make with it.
This is not a prescription for ridding yourself of bias as a reader or a writer. Not only would that be impossible, it probably would be undesirable, for writing/reading without bias means to experience art without belief and personality. No, what I am suggesting is that you work to expose your biases to yourself as a means of deepening not just your literary experience, but your life. Including your life as an artist. If you harbor a bias that really should be got rid of, like a race bias, then shouldn't you want to expose it? How else to rid yourself of it, or at least to defend yourself against it, than to bring it to your attention, to call it out?
Now, go, friends, and find some poems that heretofore have left you "cold" or annoyed or confused or feeling attacked or whatever . . . poems that are outside your normal reading comfort zone. Read them. Read them twice. Re-read them. Internalize the images, the tones and voices, the turns of phrase, the very words of them. Ask yourself why you respond to them the way you do (even if, and maybe especially if, you respond positively).
Then try to write differently the next time you sit down at your keyboard or journal. Try to write with those biases exposed.
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