Intimidated by verse? 鈥楧on鈥檛 Read Poetry鈥� explores how to enjoy poems.
Stephanie Burt entices readers into an appreciation of poetry by demystifying the act of poetry reading.
Stephanie Burt entices readers into an appreciation of poetry by demystifying the act of poetry reading.
Saying that you like or dislike poetry is akin to saying the same thing about weather or music or people. That鈥檚 because, as Stephanie Burt says, there鈥檚 no such single thing as poetry, only poems. And no two poets are doing the same thing. What you notice first about her charming book Don鈥檛 Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems is its range. Shakespeare and Dickinson and Yeats are here, but so are Li Bai and Lorine Niedecker and Juan Felipe Herrera.
Fittingly, Burt begins with how lyric poems express feelings and thus dramatize 鈥渁 soul or a self or a voice that reaches beyond one body, one story, one time, one life.鈥� From there, she looks at character in poems; if a lyric poem is a song, a poem that depicts a character is a portrait. The third chapter of 鈥淒on鈥檛 Read Poetry鈥� is devoted to forms, and it鈥檚 here that one realizes what Burt is up to: Having hooked the reader with feelings and character, she now gets into the carpentry of poetry and the way the pattern of a poem can reflect the grandeur of the universe the way a constellation of stars or 鈥渢he architecture of ancient temples鈥� can.
She also demolishes the silly distinction between formal poems and free verse by pointing out how contemporary poets have renovated such age-old forms as the sonnet and how they work with new ones, such as the lipogram, a type of poem in which the poet avoids one or more letters. (The example she gives is a prose poem that uses no vowels except 鈥渆.鈥�) Burt is a delightful companion who reminds us that poems go down a lot better if we read them out loud and slowly. She's also comprehensive, though she clearly has her favorite poets, such as the endlessly inventive Terrance Hayes.
The whole idea of 鈥淒on鈥檛 Read Poetry鈥� is not only to celebrate the freedom and inventiveness in poems and how that sense of shared play can build community but also to connect poems to a larger world of beauty. Not every poem is a walk in the park, of course; in a chapter entitled 鈥淒ifficulty,鈥� Burt writes about deliberately baffling eat-your-spinach poems and confesses, 鈥渁 bit goes a long way, and then I just want to read Keats.鈥� But easy or not, poems are essential. They鈥檙e our culture鈥檚 life blood.
David Kirby鈥檚 latest poetry collection is 鈥淕et Up, Please.鈥�