If you’re reading this on email, you can click on the header and go to the website and listen to an audio version of the essay (read by me, not some creepy AI). Also, at the very bottom I’ve got two announcements that might be of interest to some of you. How to read a poem: feel Here’s the lesson: emotion first, interpretation (maybe) second. Let’s start with a poem by Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them” It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy. Let’s pretend that you don’t know anything about Frank O’Hara. You come across this poem in a weird little newsletter, and dutifully you read the poem and think to yourself: “and…?” Yes, at first blush it’s a poem where a guy goes on a walk, probably sometime in the middle of the 20th century based on some of his word choices and his mention of Jackson Pollock and a lady wearing fox fur. He goes on a walk at lunchtime, sees some stuff, and goes back to work. Why, you might think to yourself, would anyone read this? What’s the point? Slow down and visualize Last week I encouraged you to read a poem slowly, and to read it twice after a little gap in the middle. So go ahead and read it again right now. And… you’re still in the same place, aren’t you? Even though all the words are pretty easy, most people would scratch their heads and say, “see? This is what I hate about poetry. It isn’t about anything. It’s just, like, a list or something.” You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking this, but you would be still making some wrong assumptions. Let’s put aside any question of what the poem is “about.” You don’t need to know what it is about. Sometimes you can just take a poem on how it feels. So we need to figure out what this poem feels like. This O’Hara poem has a lot of good concrete images and references. Can you picture going on a walk on a hot day in New York City, where laborers with dirty torsos are eating sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola on their lunch break. They’re wearing yellow hard hats. Women calf-length skirts are walking, and the skirts are swishing as they walk. A man in a doorway silently watches a pretty girl walk past, he doesn’t say anything but he smiles and rubs his chin. On your walk, stop and get a cheeseburger and a shake. Keep walking. See the posters on the buildings that they’re about to tear down. Stop and get a glass of juice to drink. Head back to work. Try to really picture this. Picture yourself walking, or imagine a movie where they’re filming this happening. What music would you use for the soundtrack? What music feels right? My O’Hara afternoon Last summer I took a trip to NYC and did a lot of walking around. New York is a great city for walking. I saw posters on buildings that were under construction, and I ate a hamburger at a burger joint just a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park. I visited the Strand bookstore (of course), and a used bookstore that also sells pickles, and waited in a very long line to get a sandwich at Katz’s deli. (And, yes, I did have a book of poetry in my pocket. Of course I had a book of poetry in my pocket.) No one would ask me what my walk was “about.” It was about walking around NYC and seeing stuff. It was about feeling the city. O’Hara published the poem above in 1964 in his collection called Lunch Poems. This poem exudes the energy of a walk through New York on a warm summer noontime. And of course there’s a lot more going on that just a walk. Like, for instance, what’s going on with this line: “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” I wonder who Bunny is. I wonder who John Latouche is. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t know who they are, because I feel this jazzy energy when I read the poem. I feel transported to a different time and a different place than I’ve ever visited. Because the New York I visited is similar to O’Hara’s but it is clearly also very different. I can only get there through the poem. All poetry plays with emotion The rule for poetry for today is to put aside meaning and just feel. Let the music of the poem move you. Let it push you forward. Think of poetry like music rather than meaning. This is not to say that poetry is always just music. Clearly, many poems have something they want to say, but at some level a good poem is also about making you feel something. This is not a foreign concept: you listen to music and it moves you. When you listen to instrumental music, you don’t think “but what does this song mean?” The song doesn’t need to mean anything. Listen to this selection of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor: is it saying anything? No: it’s not necessarily telling a story and preaching with a moral. Sometimes a piece of music might be sad or exciting, it might calm you down or hype you up. The music is doing something emotional in your brain, to your brain. And a poem, a good poem at least, should do the same thing. So, in practical steps, try this. Read a poem (slowly, twice) and then try to name what it is the poem is trying to make you feel. Note that I say to name what the poem is trying to make you feel. Some poems will fall flat. You won’t feel anything. That’s on the poem. A good poem will reward an attentive reader, but many poems are failed attempts. That’s just how it works. No one likes every piece of music, and no one likes every poem. Don’t get too worried if you don’t feel anything. Move on the to the next one, and see if that one clicks for you. An example of a very different poem I recorded a video the other day doing a reading and some analysis of a pretty well-known poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.” The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Watch my video and see the beautiful scenery (because hot dang the mountains around my house are looking spectacular right now), but also look at how I point out some of the deliberate musicality Hopkins puts in here. All the alliteration (“grandeur of God,” “shining from shook foil,” “gathers to greatness” “ooze of oil,” “reck his rod,” “nature is never spent,” “world broods with warm breast”), or the rhymes “seared... smeared... bleared,” “foil, oil, soil, toil”), or the rhythm of “have trod, have trod, have trod.” All of this feels very poetic. And still many people read Hopkins and say, “dang, I can’t figure out what that guy is talking about.” If you do the process of reading slowly and reading twice you might start to unpack it, but really, why not just enjoy the way it feels? Practical Application Once you have tentatively named the emotion that the poem is trying to get you to feel, now look back at the poem and see if you can identify what tricks the poet is using to get you to feel that way. Maybe it’s the words he chooses. Maybe it’s like O’Hara and his use of so many concrete images that feel specific to a time and place. Maybe it’s the rhymes and rhythm of Hopkins. You don’t need to know the names of these tricks: you’ll know them when you see them. Make up your own names for things (“words that all start with the same sound” or “lots of words with ooh in them” or “a whole bunch of long words all at once”). If this feels too much like reading poetry in school, know that there’s no grades here and you don’t need to be comprehensive. You don’t even, really, have to be correct. You’re looking for what is making the poem tick for you, because the poem is interesting to you. Sometimes it’ll be language things, like Hopkins, and sometimes it’ll be the subject or ideas, like
