Happy April! Besides being the best month because school is almost ending, spring is really starting, and it’s my birthday month. April is also National Poetry Month! And as a creative writing student, I love that! The hills are alive and singing, filling my notebook with prose and verse. But not everyone feels the same… Oftentimes, when I tell people that I love poetry, I’m met with at least one of these three responses:
- Ew, poetry is really pretentious
- Whatever, poetry is meaningless
- Poetry is fine, but I usually don’t get it…
If you are one (or more!) of these people, never fear! Today, we are going to talk about some of my favorite poems, how to read them, and why the way that we are taught about poetry in school is a disservice to the art.
Wild Geese
Our first poem is “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. You can read it here, and there are several videos online of her giving a reading of this and her other work. I believe that Oliver is a great starter poet because her work is fairly concise and easily digestible. She often relies on imagery grounded in the real world—most of her poems are about enjoying nature and how that connects to her spirituality. Very stereotypically common themes in poetry overall, but Oliver tackles them with a simplicity that makes her stand out in the field.
Wild Geese is my favorite of Oliver’s poems because the message is all about self-compassion and peace. Something that I think a lot of us often need. You can read this poem and enjoy it at face value because you love language and you love kindness. But as a writer, I love diving deeper, and that’s often what we are encouraged to do in school, so let’s do it!
Find common recurrences in the poem; for example, in this work, Oliver speaks a lot about cyclical, seasonal things such as rain, migration, and the rotation of the Earth. What could that mean? To me, it emphasizes her focus on continuation, a reminder that nothing is so earth-shattering that the world will physically stop. She quite literally repeats “Meanwhile” several times. Also, look for shifts; many poems have them. Does the tone of the poem change? Does the setting? Here, Oliver changes our perspective: An incredibly zoomed-in view of our personal suffering, to the Big Picture. We literally get a birds-eye view of the situation at the end because we are with the wild geese.
If you didn’t pick up on that, no worries! It takes practice! There is no wrong way to read or interpret the poem, no matter what your English teacher told you. Besides, the most important part to focus on when reading a poem is how it makes you feel. I love Oliver because she loves. Her poems make me feel at peace with myself, and they let me slow down to look at the world around me. She is a very real poet, and very corporeal. I like to say that while her feet are firmly planted on the ground, her head is up in the clouds.
Morning Song
If you’re looking for more of a classic and more of a challenge, welcome to “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath. It can be read here.
Plath is a much more subdued and subtle poet than Plath, she likes to play with metaphors, and often her poetry lends itself to much more nuanced interpretations. Here, we have to look at the imagery being described. There are several familiar images of birth and infancy here: the midwife, the cry at night that a mother rushes to soothe. Even the title works itself in here, “Morning Song,” referring to the cry of the baby that wake the speaker up. There are also ideas of sterileness and wealth throughout the poem: a gold watch, a museum, a new statue. Are these ideas of separation to be paired with the line “I’m no more your mother,” or to make commentary on socioeconomic status? That’s up to you to decide.
Much of Plath’s poetry can be understood better with knowledge of her life handy. If you’re confused about a poem, you can google it (especially for a poet as well known as Plath), and there will probably be something online that analyzes it for you (though I think you should always stick to your own interpretation first), and gives you some background knowledge about her as a writer and person. When I really like a poet or find their work interesting, I like to do some surface research as it helps me understand and interpret things more! However, with these tools (tools: to help you, not do the job for you) in your back pocket, we also need to be aware of a concept that can ruin the whole experience again, something your english teachers probably relied on.
Authorial intent: The risk of only interpreting a work through a single lens, usually the one that you assume an author wishes you to take. For example, only reading Plath’s work through the analytical lens of depression takes away from other ideas you could bring into it. Once poetry is published, it is out there for you to use. Don’t be afraid to bring yourself into it, it will enrich your experience.
I like Plath because I am someone who has dealt with depression in my life, and can see how that fog of illness is present in her work. She feels… suspended, or subdued. Much of her work is quiet, like it was written in a dissociative state. What does she make you feel?
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Our final poem: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” by Ocean Vuong. If you’ve read my other articles, you’re probably not surprised that Vuong is in here. You may be surprised of the poem’s title though. Didn’t I mention that this was his book he wrote? Am I going to make you read a whole book? Never fear! This is a single poem, with the same title. This poem explores themes present in his novel as well, and inspired the title, but the are not the same. You can read it here.
This is a long poem, and a complicated one. Vuong deals with a lot of concrete themes in abstract ways, usually through beautiful, seemingly tangential imagery that weaves a narrative throughout the piece. I also love this poem because Vuong plays with the enjambment of the poem (how the lines are indented on the page). If you like this poem, check out more of his work; or another one of my favorite poets who does this often as well– Richard Siken. This abnormal enjambment enhances the abstraction of the page. Even if you don’t consciously realize, where the lines are broken changes how you read them in your head. The halting stop and start feels like a dream, or a memory, which are topics Vuong likes to tackle often.
I’m not going to give you an easy answer on Vuong’s poem, because I think that it illustrates what is in my personal beliefs, one of the best things about poetry: a poem can be so many things at once. Vuong illustrates this through repetition: “Say surrender. Say alabaster.” Two commands can be true at once. He holds the complicated truth in his hands and rotates it, allowing the light to reflect and illuminate different corners. War, memory, violence, love. Everything exists and more. Vuong, in a lecture he gave at the Toledo Museum of Art (being in attendance was the best day of my life!!!!!!), said that he would never tell anyone they interpreted his work wrong, he wants the readers to take away what is important to them.
Most of the times, I don’t think you should leave poems with an easy answer the way that high school asks of you. Rather, you should leave with questions and contemplate what they mean for you. A good poem should make you pause and think, the way Oliver makes me reconsider walking past a rosebush without admiring the curve of each petal, the way Plath discusses the difficult parts of motherhood– something that was difficult to do at the time, the way that Vuong tries to reconcile two opposing desires.
There is no wrong answer, but there may not be a right one either. It’s why I love poetry.
I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope it was helpful. It’s half a “how-to” and half a love letter to the art form, as I tend to do when I get carried away. If you want to learn how to enjoy poetry, read it! There is so much diversity in the genre, and don’t let anyone tell you “no” about how to read it. Until next time, remember: you do not have to be good.