Making sense of poetry

Readers who avoid poetry may also be inclined to avoid Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse. That could be a mistake, at least if these readers are a bit like me, someone who wishes poetry was easier to read and understand. Why do poets have to make their work so difficult?

If anyone can make poetry make sense it is Thomas C. Foster, whose earlier books about reading novels and watching films were so much fun and so educational in the bargain. He may tell most readers more than we want to know, but what we do want to know he explains in clear, witty prose, using a wide variety of examples from Chaucer to several contemporary poets.

Foster attempts several times to define poetry. One definition is: "It's really just a lovely form of play. That sometimes rhymes." I like that. Poetry is play with words, images, ideas and sounds. Like most any kind of game, it can be fun even if it doesn't make sense.

His book might be summarized in the seven rules he gives in his first chapter:

1. Read the words.

2.Read ALL the words.

3. Read sentences.

4. Ignore lines on first reading.

5. Obey all punctuation, including its absence.

6. Read the poem aloud.

7. Read it again.

Yet perhaps the most important lesson I got from Foster's book could be an eighth rule: Read it slowly. That has always been my biggest problem with poetry. I want to get through it quickly, at at least the same pace I read fiction. Good poetry, however, takes time. Time to enjoy the sound of it. Time to understand something of what the poet is saying. Time to probe the deeper meaning that is often there just below the surface.

Foster assures us that he doesn't understand some of his favorite poems, yet they give him pleasure anyway. That is another valuable lesson on reading poetry.