happy to meet you

There may be others who have loved poetry more deeply and read it more broadly than you, but they are few.

same same

One felt the poet could go on endlessly in the same register and tone of voice.

mood matters

Remember that your mood will determine how you read or hear a poem.

too beautiful to understand

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

—Carl Sandburg, from the poem "Manitoba Childe Roland"

chaotic reader

This means that I am more of a chaotic reader who often avoids the responsibilities of ownership in favor of library books, as if reading books that do not belong to me grants me some additional measure of freedom (libraries—the only arena where the socialist project has succeeded).
[...]
There's nothing terribly wrong with reading "only" poetry—but there's still a shadow of premature professionalization hanging over this practice. A shadow of shallowness.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything,” A Defense of Ardor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

slack line

Each week Muriel gave us writing as well as reading assignments, and we would go over class poems as well as poems by Whitman, Keats, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams. Once when someone read a poem that had a very weak line, a line without much in it, Muriel called the line "slack," and we could see the line sagging there in the poem, without tension, nothing that an acrobat would trust her life to.

Then she said, “No one wants to read poetry. No one wants to!” (With her good-humored energetic pessimism that felt like optimism). “You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down, impossible for them to stop reading it—word after word you have to keep them from closing the book. They want to close the book. And if it’s slack they’ll be able to—nothing says they have to read to the end. No one’s making them. And they don’t want to! They could be doing something else, like making a cheese sandwich! You have to make them want to go on reading with every word and every line.”

And Muriel said this cheerfully, the truth of it giving her voice energy. There was no whining in her about the place of poetry in America. It was just a reality, what was there for us to work with.

—Sharon Olds, “A Student’s Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2020)

adjectives arise

Start a review of a book of poems by listing all the adjectives that come to mind while reading the book.

speed bumps ahead

Not speed reading, reading poetry should impede the reader.

one and done

The saddest thing I could say about the poet was that no poem of his/hers I’d read impelled me to read it again.

go slow

Reading poetry is slow reading.

loose thread

Like a loose thread in a beautiful garment, an odd unwound line can alter and awaken one’s reading of the poem.

stages of experience

First the poetry startled you, then it enthralled you, then by study you became aware of its faults and limitations—but still you admired this poetry.

where social doesn't mean self

I dream of a social media site where the poets talk about what they’re reading and say very little about their own publications or events.

attention and ardor

To read poetry requires attention and ardor.

reading is the event

Young poet, reading poetry is more important than poetry readings.

not that close

His close reading of poems was ‘close’, in that it was inexact.

cannot wear out

No matter how many times you read or hear it, you can’t wear out a good poem.

empty chair

Sitting there in workshop she was like an empty chair—it was clear the moment she spoke how little poetry and criticism she’d read.

sentence v. line

This is why the sentences rather than the lines of poems are the primary focus of our attention: the function of language is the transmission of meaning, and we’ve attended to sentences as the life-giving instrument of meaning since infancy, long before we ever started reading poems. But language is also a system in which everything is connected to everything else—tout se tient, in de Saussure’s words—which is why the orchestration of sentences through the agency of lines may produce a unique kind of musical meaning that expands the meaning of sentences as they unfold.

—Michael Ryan, ‘Winter 2004’, from Table Talk: from The Threepenny Review (Counterpoint Press, 2015), edited by Wendy Lesser, Jennifer Zahrt, and Mimi Chubb.

good company

He scanned the litmag’s contents page to make certain he was in good company, and then closed the litmag and filed it away for his archives.