The habits of poetry - lazy reading (8.21.21)

For reference to this post, see the following . . .

• Discipline and indiscipline in poetry writing (8.26.20)
• The habits of poetry - daily reading (2.13.20)
• The habits of poetry - regular practice (10.1.19)
• The habits of poetry - honesty (7.23.19)
• The habits of poetry - revising (3.28.19)
• The habits of poetry - practical observation (1.23.19)

For the most part, these posts address good habits, habits every writer should want to cultivate.  But now I want to talk about bad habits to avoid . . . if you want to improve your writing and develop greater confidence when you sit down to your work.

Let's concentrate on lazy reading.

Each week during our Wednesdays@One salon, someone will say of a poem, "I like it!  It flows."  And this suffices for analysis of the poem and of the reader's response to the poem.  To which I sometimes probe, "Tell me more about why you like this poem.  What do you mean by 'It flows,' and why is flow so important?"  Which generally results in a "I dunno.  It just does."

This "I dunno-ness" is a bad habit not just for reading a poem, but for writing one, too.  Often enough, I sense my W@1 colleagues' boredom (or even contempt) for over-analyzing a poem.  And I agree with them: over-analysis leads to creative paralysis.  Or is borne of it.  And none of us wants to think we've lost our creativity in experiencing a poem either as writer or reader.

But if our goal is to write better poems today than we did yesterday, better tomorrow than today, then we should be open to ourselves as consumers of an art.  We should try harder to understand why we like or dislike a poem.  We may murder to dissect, but for a practicing poet, ignorance of how poems get written and understood can be very limiting.  A little dissection is a necessary thing.  More than necessary, it's vital.

If we want to become better writers, we must become better readers as well.  And we must work hard to understand and articulate our responses to what we read.

Now, there are tools for this sort of analysis, beginning with the critical terms that are available to us.  We've talked about them often at W@1, and you can find posts related to them in this blog:

• Syntax, lineation, enjambment, meter, rhythm and cadence, onomatopoeia, rhyme and its various guises, alliteration, juxtaposition, caesura and ellipsis
• Figure, image, metaphor, analogy, comparison and contrast, allusion, symbol
• Style (that is, personal, the writer's "signature"), voice, breath, tone, point of view, persona
• Formal verse, free verse, accentual-syllabic verse
• Consider style above, but in a more topical sense: lyric, narrative, dramatic, episodic, epic
• Structure, repetition, how poems and their parts begin and how they end
• Movement, in the sense of the progression or development of a thought or a feeling
• Wholeness, unity, coherence

You get the idea: the tools for reading (and writing) a poem are many and have been handed down to us through the millennia.  

Lazy reading neglects these tools.  It skims and moves on.  I do this sort of thing myself, often, and it can be pleasurable.  I don't quite know why this poem moves me or leaves me cold, but it does and that's enough.  Let's move on.  That's okay.  Not all reading must be analytical or "academic," if you have to use that shopworn epithet.  Sometimes, like when I'm reading in bed, it's enough just to be entertained or to dwell in the rhythm of a "good" poem.

But if I want to understand why I feel what I feel, how the poem I'm reading elicits an emotion or complex of feeling and thought and wonder, then I have the tools for doing so.  And if I participate in a forum like Wednesdays@One, my interest lies there, in greater understanding.  For I know from experience that the more deeply I understand my response to a poem, the better I am as a writer of poems in turn.

And this takes work.  It takes, patience, curiosity, practice, consciousness (self- and otherwise), openness, and a framework of reference to other poems, traditions, cultures.  

Not explaining to yourself how and why a poem works for you easily becomes a bad habit.  It's lazy.  So, develop the better habit whenever you encounter a poem--one of yours included--of investigating the art of it.