If we mean to talk about a poem, we have to come to it as art, not as statement. And if we mean to come to a poem as art, we have lots of tools and frameworks at our disposal for talking about it. Part 2 covered one of those tools, the most foundational of them: language as both the medium and the material of the art. Others, which I'll develop in following blog posts, include figures of speech, syntax, rhyme and meter, repetition; voice and persona and their close cousin, tone; style, both personal and historical; intention; appreciation and its close relative, reception.
One way to talk about the art of a poem we're reading is to ask ourselves not What is it saying? but What is it saying to me? Which can also be put this way: What is this poem's effect on me? Which, when we come down to it, we're asking . . .
How am I responding to this poem?
For when we talk about art, we don't talk just about the art object, which is a merely technical discussion or description, but about our experience with the art object. We always include ourselves when we talk about a work of art.
Now this doesn't mean that we can get away with statements like "I liked it very much!" upon reading a poem. Or "It moves me." Or "Oft thought but ne'er so well expressed!" These are impressions, but hardly discussions of a work of art. Nor can we "read" ourselves, our opinions, our prejudices "into" a poem, if we mean to talk about it as a work of art: "This passage reminds me of the time when I . . ." You know what I mean.
When I ask myself how I am responding to a poem (as a work of art), I am interested in how my mind and my emotions engage with it, are focused, aroused, suspended, engaged, confounded, titillated, confirmed, denied as I read phrase by phrase, line by line, stanza by stanza down the page of text (or, even more interestingly, as it's uttered into my hearing). Has the poem led me to expect the next image or line or figure of speech or rhymed ending? Has it teased with an expectation only to deliver something else? Has the poem violated everything I've learned to expect about a poem and how it works? If I am surprised by a poem - its language, images, structure, cadences, beginning or ending - why am I surprised. What was I expecting that didn't happen?
You see where I'm headed with this. One way to talk about a poem as a work of art is to examine my own assumptions about what a poem is and to measure the success of the poem against those expectations, on the one hand, and the appropriateness or adequacy of those expectations against the poem, on the other.
When I come to a poem as art, I come to myself as a Reader of Poetry and not of an opinion piece, a letter to the editor, an expository essay, a story (merely), a piece of reportage, a speech (especially!), an instruction, a proposal.
Art engages and moves us in deep ways. To the extent that it is presented to us in the form of words, our interest remains: What is our engagement, precisely, and toward what are we moved? How does that engagement or movement begin, develop, and fulfill itself in the poem as we read, image by image, line by line, stanza by stanza, beginning, middle and end?
The less we talk about what we think a poem "means" or "what it's about," or at least the longer we hold that interest at bay, and the more we try to talk about our own engagement with the poem, the better we talk about a poem.
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Here's an interesting reading exercise. Choose a poem you've never encountered before, so you don't know what to expect as you read from line to line. Have a notebook and a pen handy as you read.
Jot down in the notebook your impressions as you go through the text phrase by phrase if you like, or image by image, line by line and so on. Try to note where you are surprised by the text, where your expectations for what comes next are fulfilled, how you react emotionally, even physically, and intellectually. How much head-scratching are you doing in one portion of the text compared to another? What parts of the poem do you tend to skim, and what parts force you to reread the text?
Then reread it. Does the text of the poem remind you of any other poems you've read in the past? Is the poem completely new to you? How does the poem begin and end? Does the poem "speak" with a voice? Whose voice is it? Whose voice could it be? Does the look of the text on the page (assuming you're reading and not listening) seem to have anything to do with how the poem affects you as you read?
In doing the above, you are approaching the poem as art. Why? Because you are interested not (yet) in what the poem "says" but in your own engagement with it, how you absorb new information, how the text encourages you to absorb new information, when and how you get bogged down, read more slowly or rapidly, and so on.
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