7 Secrets to Unlock the Beauty of Reading Poetry Books
In American educational spaces, many of us were never taught or given time to read full collections of poetry at once. And by modern and living poets? Hell no. Many poetry lessons instead focused on single poems from a handful of authors who were well-established figures in the Western canon. If we read any full-length collections it was likely an epic by Virgil or Homer. Through Shakespeare’s plays we learned the sonnet. “But wherefore art” our modern poets? speaking to today’s landscape? To crave poetry outside of the canon was a dirty little secret. You like to do what!? With who?! How scandalous!
It’s true: poetry is salacious, poetry is dangerous, poetry loves to gossip, loves to spill the tea, loves to tell it how your mama couldn’t. That’s why, as poets, being in conversation about the books we’re reading is so important. Word of mouth is how I often hear about the next mind-blowing poet I’ll encounter. This is how The Poetry Lab’s BookBash came into the picture: so we have a time to talk about books and make space for the genuine exploration of word-bending magic.
BookBash is The Poetry Lab’s sort of mimosa-infused Sunday afternoon book club, where we read a book that’s been turning up in our community. This monthly gathering has been the cornerstone of my reading practice this year. The collective BookBash reading experience has taught me so much about my own writing practice, and about the world.
If you’re also trying to make space for the revolutionary act of reading poetry books, here are seven secrets I’ve learned by reading in community this year. Let’s go! Together we got this.
1) Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith
Look at the ‘Cheat Sheet”
Ever start reading an author new to you, and wish there were answers in the back of the book like in math class? Maybe you wish you had a little more context, a hint of what an author is getting up to so you can get it too?
Well, there actually is often a ‘cheat sheet’ at the end of a poetry collection! The Author’s Notes section is where a poet will tell you background details about how a poem was written. In Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water, we could hear the whispers from the author’s inner mind. There she lists the documents and texts she uses to create her erasure, cento, and ekphrastic poems in this collection. Connecting her poetry to outside sources helped our reading of this work immensely. If you encounter a form that is new to you just flip to the back of that book, more than likely there will be information waiting there for you to help guide your reading. As you write your own poems this will teach you how to give credit where credit is due, as crediting a whole collection is different than when submitting single poems or series of poems. Noting the differences and possibilities will help strengthen your practice as a poet.
2) Owed by Joshua Benett
Push Past the Wall
Sometimes, it takes more than one poem to enter into a poet’s world. This was the case for many of us who read and discussed Joshua Benett’s Owed, a collection with both lines and words that dazzled us. The style of the third poem felt like a barrier to entry for this book. Like until we read this poem, Joshua wasn’t willing to share his other more outwardly joyous poems. As readers we felt we ‘owed’ it to the poet to really wrestle with these poems; we had to share in Joshua’s the grief and loss before we were invited to ride along in friendship on “The Cheese Bus.”
This brought up the reasoning that goes into ordering a full-length collection of poetry, and the dimensions that are added by participating in Ivy League scholastics. We discussed the different choices an author can make in the first collection as a mostly unknown poet versus a second or third collection from a more established writer. This led us towards self-examination. What do we expect from our own readers? What are our barriers to entry in these books that are comprised mostly of heart and soul, if not blood and bone? What are your chilling truths, and how will you trust your reader with them?
3) Fat Girl Forms by Stephanie Rogers
Nerd Out
In the project book Fat Girl Forms Stephanie Rogers takes traditional and nontraditional forms to create a collection. This is the book’s title and its project. In these poems Stephanie interjects fatness into the expected structures of a given form to explore ideas of femininity, shape, body weight, and beauty. The idea of ‘fatness’ appears consistently throughout this work in the use of white space to change the shape of a poem, to add roundness, to fill up the page in new and interesting ways. To really appreciate what she was doing we as a group had to go looking for definitions for all of these forms. And when I say we nerded out I mean Anne Marie Wells wrote an entire companion guide for this book explaining each of the forms found in the collection. Except for the one she couldn’t find which means of course she reached out to Stephanie herself! to find out more. Bonus tip: this is a great way to connect with the authors you admire. Reach out because you just want to know more about their poem or creative process or tell them how much their work meant to you. Though not every poet may be receptive, you’ll find those that are. This is a way to build your tribe of nerds: those that you can geek out with, vibe on, and keep each other motivated to write new sh!t.
4) A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
Get Grounded
Just as Fat Girl Forms inspired the need to nerd out, craft books like Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook help keep poets grounded in our traditions, speaking a common language, and playing by the same set of rules. Now of course the best part of learning the rules is figuring out ways to bend these rules in order to push language forward, finding new and better ways of expressing ourselves and the stories we carry. We all agreed that A Poetry Handbook was a great basic guide for poets, but that it was only a start to what we wanted to know. Our Director Danielle Mitchell has written up two listicles of BIPOC authors who have written some craft books that are total fire. I myself looked to these articles to select Dear Memory by Victoria Chang to read this year as well. I reread every page in Dear Memory four times, mesmerized and gazing into the collages trying to garner all the wisdom I could. In craft books authors speak directly to us as authors. If you really want to get into the mind of poets you admire, this is the way to do it. Honestly, I dare you to add craft books to your reading practice; for self-guided learners, there’s no better brain candy.
5) Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen
Build Your Own Glossary
You will discover so much by reading poetry. Namely cool freakin words you never new existed. In reading Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, this was assuredly the case. In the poem “Winter,” Chen writes, “This is a list of five things I love in no particular order: Oak trees. Men’s calves. Honey Oolong milk tea with boba. The interrobang. A video in which a young Björk says, You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.” Along with wanting to try Honey Oolong milk tea with boba, sitting under an oak tree while admiring men’s calves, I had to look up interrobang—and no, it is not a sex position!? But the combination of a question mark and an exclamation point,which is kinda sexy. So, I got to add this gem to an ongoing list of favorite words. There are several reliable free online dictionaries to aid in word searches, though none are perfect as we continue to decolonize language. I suggest finding the one that works best for you. I totally believe a writer’s search history should be a wild and wilder thing. In addition to keeping a basic word log, I also collect songs from books and make reading playlists. From this collection I added Bjork’s Sun in My Mouth and a renewed love of divas.
6) Homie by Danez Smith
Yes, I Mean Cover-to-Cover.
The book itself is an object: something which contains the body of poems, a copy of the text that you hold, carry around, fold, and bend. Learning the anatomy of a book will help you understand your choices as a writer when creating this object, the possibilities and limitations of working with any particular publisher. When reading Homie, by Danez Smith I was grateful for my bookbinding experience as Danez plays around with the idea of a title and how it shows up on the cover versus how it shows up in the colophon. Other book anatomy terms may inspire your writing as well. For Danez, book anatomy allows for him to express both spoken and unspoken language. The need to code-switch as a Black person with white readers, and as a gay person with straight readers; to both allow strangers into his world, while also maintaining his boundaries. Danez leaves it to the careful reader to suss out his landscape, he gives nothing away, yet knows that once the book is out in the world it isn’t just his anymore, now the words inhabit us, now Homie takes up space on our shelves. In this way the book finds its purpose as a living memorial, as a reminder of who can be lost.
7) Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Your Heart Will Break
Ultimately, the gift of reading poetry is that it will break your heart. At the same time it heals your heart, mind, and soul. Poetry reveals the everyday wounds we carry with us across time and space. Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky explores the collective consciousness born in wartime. How this trauma can be felt throughout a diaspora, and the way this trauma continues on through generations. Ilya does this with easy and delicate language giving the reader enough space for their own feelings. There is no resolution in this text but rather Ilya invites us into the poet’s conundrum, of both finding beauty everywhere we go while having to face the real horrors of humanity on a planet we all share. When we ask, can this really be happening all at once? Poets are there to both comfort and acknowledge these complicated truths. Poets hold us with the words on the page to say yes, it is beautiful and yes, it is horrific and yes, we must keep on and keep speaking and writing. When you get ready to delve into the pages, pack a handkerchief, and keep reading, keep feeling, keep dreaming up new poems.
You Get It, Now Tell A Friend!
As creative spirits, reading connects us to the voices of our time, challenging us to expand how we think and feel and exist. And that thing that happens when you read one killer poem? It only deepens and widens when you take the plunge into reading whole collections.
The possibilities as a writer expand as you see what other authors are pulling off in their works. You start to think, hey, maybe I could do that too. I feel less alone in the world when I can see that poetry—despite polite society turning up their noses—is thriving, is still wickedly good, is a mind-altering substance, is daring and revolutionary. Poetry is not lost in halls of academia but screaming in the streets, frolicking in wonderland, the hot-mess you want to make out with. If nobody ever gave you permission to read books of poetry, consider this your permission slip.
Maybe this part is now obvious, but do it—tell a friend! Find places where you can talk about books, exchange recommendations of must-reads (and toxic books to stay away from). Start dishing your dirt, you dirty rotten poet you. If you’re already deep into the rabbithole, I hope this helps recharge your batteries or gives you some tools to aid on your quest. Right now, I myself am lost in the world of Nin Andrews, where I am learning Why God is a Woman—and there is nowhere else I’d rather be. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you there.
This article was published on October 2, 2023. Written by:
