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The letter "O" When I first fell in love with the word "joy" because it had a circle inside it, I did not know I was entering a whole way of life. I noticed that while nothing prevented o from appearing at beginnings and endings of words, it was a bigger, rounder O if it lay in the middle, as it does in "love" or "world." Inevitably, as joy led to love, world led me to the word. A circle, the O of a mouth, holding hands, a hula hoop, a halo, and later in life, the aureole of a breast, an orgasm.... That O was a connector of all things, and it linked me to a habit of thinking and sanctioned a way of feeling -- my way through life among others who have also felt intensely and thought deeply. These are the readers of poetry. And poetry's readership is expanding; You online readers know just how much poetry has reentered our lives. Poetry is the perfect screensize art. It offers depth in an instant -- but not instant depth. We still find reading it mysterious -- and sometimes daunting. Now that National Poetry Month is here, it's time to peer behind the veils of verse. How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle In my book HOW TO READ A POEM...AND START A POETRY CIRCLE, I use 12 poems that have become special talismans for me to show readers how to read poetry. The book is for anyone who finds poetry alluring but sometimes too mysterious to understand. The book also holds the key to more than solitary understanding: the shared reading of poetry in groups. Here follows a collage of passages from HOW TO READ A POEM as well as 12 books of poetry you might choose to read either on your own or in a poetry circle. Poetry Circles Poetry circles are a guilty pleasure because they exist for the pure love of language and emotion. The whole and only point of them is to read and talk about poetry. Conquering book lists, jostling for attention because you better look smart, slumping your shoulders because you feel so stupid, cooking for a crowd, and cramming a schedule are all out. All those things are inimical to poetry circles, which are divinely slow in a hurtling world, heavenly in their absence of social, philosophical, and psychological pressure, and -- best of all -- thrilling in their presence of revelation. Poetry circles make you know you have a soul, and that other people do, too. There are only three rules for organizing any poetry circle:
The Slip-in Circle If you are already in a book club that meets on a regular schedule, you know the horrible homework feeling of having to slog through 600 pages of a dreaded tome. A perfect solution is to slip in a book of poetry. Since your book club is probably already connected to a bookseller, your regular ordering procedure should make the slip-in a breeze. The Three Systems of a Poem Poetry is really the fusion of three arts: music, storytelling, and painting. A simple way of talking about a poem is through the three systems that represent each of these arts: the line, the sentence, and the image. The line displays the poem's music, the sentence displays its thoughts, and the image displays the vision of the poet. We can also talk about the body of a poem as anatomy. The line is like a skeletal system, the sentence is like a circulatory system, and the image is like a central nervous system. Lines make the music of the poem. They function as the bones in a skeleton, holding the poem up. Lines contain every aspect of sound, from how words sound alike and different to how they reflect emotion -- how such sounds, in fact, are emotions themselves. The line always means rhythm and sometimes means rhyme. Even free-verse poems that don't seem to have a regular rhythm or an obvious rhyme scheme still have the baseline bones of music. The line's music gives us our instinctive understanding of a poem, even when we can't articulate it. Sentences open up the thoughts of the poem. The mainstay of prose, the storyteller's tool, sentences circulate through the lines of poems, often flowing past the lines themselves, pumping their meaning down through the poem, even when the poem is in fragments or has no punctuation to let us know where sentences begin and end. The sentence appeals to our intellectual pleasure, and following a sentence through a poem often enables us to articulate what we've understood. The image is the visual art of the poem. Functioning as a central nervous system, imagery sends the poet's vision, fired into word-pictures, throughout its length, the way the nerves inside a spinal cord send electrical charges to muscles. The body of each poem is wired a bit differently. (These verbal images are separate from how the poem looks on the page or screen.) Following the three systems through any poem, even the most abstract one, lets a kind of simplicity enter understanding. You may discover that you understood what was going on without consciously knowing it, that you apprehended the poem viscerally, if not intellectually. Even though a poem is made with words, it is only one-third verbal art. It is equally an auditory and visual art that we take into our bodies as well as our minds. How the Three Systems Work Together If the line is a way a child apprehends intuitively and the sentence is the way an adult apprehends intellectually, then the image functions as a two-way mirror between these states of understanding. It is both instinctive and constructed. When you are at a loss to understand a poem, following the images (which means tracking the nouns) will often bring you to a clarity you can use to make sense of the rest of the poem. Two arts, the art of storytelling and the art of music, work on your ear as the sentence wraps around the line. Meanwhile, the third art, imagery, flares across the sky of the poem as the music plays. Picking the Books for Poetry Circles The trick of selecting the books for your poetry circle is to pick books that are accessible but not one-dimensional. To help you find appealing, readable poetry books that also speak to your soul, I've assembled a collection of titles that includes several of the poets introduced in HOW TO READ A POEM.... Click here to see the collection Once You've Made Your Pick, Now What? But once you've made a selection, what do you actually talk about in a poetry circle? The whole book? In two measly hours? I find that it's best to pick two poems to start with. One poem might spark a discussion that lasts the whole meeting, or one poem might lead to the other. What often happens is that you discover how that poem relates to others in the book, and so many correspondences bloom that you do end up with a sense of the book as a whole. While it is an adventure in sequence to read a book of poems from first to last page, discovering the secret order the poet had in mind, frankly, most poetry readers are grazers. You needn't ever be comprehensive about a book of poetry. Sometimes a passionate reading of one poem will last you all month. There is a real difference between being guilty and indulging in a guilty pleasure. The fiction writer Elizabeth Bowen called guilt "the useless emotion," and as far as dictating the method of reading a poem, it certainly is. A Final Revolutionary Word I have this heretical news as well: You don't even have to read the poetry in advance of your poetry circle. What?! Of course, in an ideal world it is always better to glide elegantly into one's book club beautifully prepared, but the fact is that most of us are lucky if we zip in at the last minute wearing matching socks. To get together in a group for the express purpose of wrestling with language, caressing sounds, poking sentences, and petting the ears of images is a divinely unusual activity, and it can be done intensely with immediate concentration. Let the two hours lie open before you: You might as well luxuriate while you have the chance. -- Molly Peacock Molly Peacock is a past president of the Poetry Society of America. She is instrumental in selecting poems for Poetry in Motion across the country.
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