A quite wide-ranging question, really – and I don’t necessarily mean the fact that the poetry is hard to understand (although some is!). I like poetry very much, and in the past I’ve read a lot of it. But nowadays I find it hard to settle to it, and I’ve been wondering why…
I think there might be a number of reasons why I’m struggling, and one of the main ones is probably something that’s my fault. I’m a fast reader – too fast, I sometimes think, as I always seem to be wanting to finish a book, no matter how much I’m enjoying it, so I can get on to the next one. Poetry can’t be rushed like prose sometimes can; it needs to be read carefully and slowly to get the full meaning of the words and what’s behind them.
The offending doorsteps!
The other main issue is size – I’m thinking in particular of two poetry books which are lurking: The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton and a huge volume of the complete works of Georg Trakl which I bought on a whim after reading an intriguing article about him. Both are authors I really want to read – Anne Sexton particularly, as she’s a poet that’s been on the periphery of my literary vision for decades and a visit to her work is long overdue. But both books are huge, and look as if they’d take days and days of reading carefully to get through. (Come to think of it, my Rimbaud and Baudelaire volumes are huge too, which is probably why they’re still mainly unread).
However, casting my mind back to when I was reading lots of poetry in my twenties, I was reading slim Faber volumes of Plath and Hughes and the like. A small book of poems is not so intimidating – you can linger over each one and still feel like you’re making progress through the book. Conversely, these huge collected tomes, though a good way to acquire the works, are off-putting; you can’t read through the whole thing without committing to weeks of poetry and that’s *certainly* not a good way to experience it.
So I think the answer is that I need to take the pressure off myself; read a poem or two when the mood takes me, and not worry about reading everything in one go or finishing the book to do a big review. And the Sexton is divided up into its originally published volumes, so marking each one off may be a way to handle it.
New year’s resolution – allow a little time each week for a few poems! 🙂
Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings 
Dec 05, 2014 @ 09:45:24
I think I have the same problem- I read so fast that I find it hard to slow down. Also, studying poetry at school and university has made me a bit intimidated by it. I feel like I have to understand all the symbolism or I’m doing it wrong. I think I’ll also try to read more poetry next year- at least I know a few poets I like to start with!
Dec 05, 2014 @ 10:37:20
Exactly – if you don’t examine and savour every word, you feel as if you’re not doing it justice. Maybe I should try reading out loud to get the rhythms right!
Dec 05, 2014 @ 10:37:28
I think you may well have the answer in your penultimate paragraph. Otherwise, I found that reading a novel in verse (Lettice Delmer – a Persephone in a library sale!!) that held me in a different reading rhythm for a while was interesting.
Dec 05, 2014 @ 10:42:16
A Persephone in a library sale!! Wonderful luck! And yes – I’ve tried to start the regime of a poem a day (or when the mood grips me) and I think that may work!
Dec 05, 2014 @ 17:26:57
I find myself in the same boat, and you touched on the reason in your final paragraph [and I covered it myself in my Chekhov review], which is that a big career-spanning volume is hugely dissatisfying.; they are unwieldy, arbitrary. In the main, readers, and human beings in general, like logically progression – they like to think that there is a recognisable beginning, middle and end to their endeavors, and these collections don’t give you that; they are more like being thrown into the sea. I am sure you have read them before, but, in case you haven’t, I would recommend Byron’s Don Juan or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin [as novel length poetry] or Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Wallace Steven’s Harmonium, or Rimbaud’s Illuminations as short, standalone volumes.
Dec 05, 2014 @ 19:01:51
Yes, a good analogy that – it’s just too overwhelming being faced with a huge book like that, and I know if I want to read e.g. Plath I’m going to go to an individual volume, not the doorstop collected works! Thanks for the recommendations too! 🙂
Dec 05, 2014 @ 18:26:46
I have the same problem with poetry. I love my collected editions, but seldom start at the beginning, am not quite sure how to proceed, and often read only the poems from one of the famous books. I have the Anne Sexton, too. We need browsers’ guides!
Dec 05, 2014 @ 19:02:24
Yes – it’s tempting to just dip in almost randomly but then there’s the fear you’ve missed something! Very difficult!
Dec 05, 2014 @ 19:38:11
I read very little poetry. Maybe I should try to read more. I remember really engaging with it when I was much younger.
Dec 06, 2014 @ 08:57:26
I used to read a lot more too – maybe it’s because reading time is a little more limited nowadays than when I was younger! 🙂
Dec 06, 2014 @ 11:58:10
When we were little, we always read it out loud – and I think that really helps. I read very little poetry, despite having a decent stack of it from Shakey’s sonnets to John Hegley – it always surprises me when I look at it.
Dec 06, 2014 @ 16:34:17
Reading out loud would help, definitely (though OH might think I’d finally gone mad if I went round the house reciting Shakespeare….) I have *lots* of it and I need to read more of it.
Dec 07, 2014 @ 18:58:21
Read the Transformations poems of Anne Sexton – one at a time, one a day is more than sufficient because there is so much happening in a poem and so much to take in and digest. (A poem is the equivalent of a short story, I think!) But those poems are particularly fun, being rewritings of fairy tales. They are funny and accessible, something not a lot of poetry appears, at least at first. A poem is always pushing the moment of ultimate meaning creation ahead of itself, like a snowplough pushes snow, and then often when you reach the end of the poem, you feel you have to return back into it to understand what ‘it was about’. This is all hard work for the brain, holding the line of thought, waiting for the meaning to become apparent. You can only do so much of it (or at least I can). I also find a lot of poems don’t speak to me, and so I’m less willing to do that work at all. But I’m pretty ruthless with poems now, happy to skim a whole load before finding one that I’m drawn into, and that helps me. I do recommend Anne Sexton, though.
Dec 07, 2014 @ 19:27:06
That’s good advice – thank you! And I must keep telling myself I don’t have to read them if they don’t trigger a response. I am starting to make my way through Sexton (definitely no more than a poem a day!) and she’s a striking writer.
Dec 08, 2014 @ 08:07:01
When I saw the title of this post in my blog reader, I immediately thought, “It’s because I read too quickly, so I don’t take them in properly”. This is a bit odd, though, because I’m perfectly happy reading beautiful, limpid prose or quite complicated things in novels and non-fiction. I do say “I don’t like poetry” but I do like John Donne, Wendy Cope, John Hegley, Simon Armitage … I couldn’t read a massive volume, though – I like those slim Fabers, too. Oh dear, now I can see a lovely row of them developing in the small Poetry section of my bookshelf … gulp … resist!
Dec 08, 2014 @ 09:00:49
I’m the same – I love poetic prose! And I *do* like poetry too (love Simon Armitage!) but I just need to slow down the reading rate!