Reading poetry

BIBLIOTHERAPIST ELLA BERTHOUD SUGGESTS SOME GENTLE WAYS TO INTRODUCE THE JOYS OF POETRY INTO YOUR LIFE

Many of us groan when we are asked to read poetry – we’re transported back to school, when we slogged through sonnets and odes, impenetrable epics and that strange staple of teachers, the acrostic. For many, poetry conjures up baffled incomprehension. As a ‘bibliotherapist’, I am a reader of novels and short stories primarily – I look to fiction to cure all life’s ailments. But I love to read poetry too, even though it isn’t what I instinctively pick up. Like many people, I expect poetry to be opaque, and to take work to understand. But when I do read it, I’m struck by the deep effect it has on me, its power and magic, even when by its very form, it is defined by its brevity. In poems I find love, yearning, beauty, sorrow, delight, joy and revelation. For poetry can be a doorway into another world – a doorway into the past, the future, or into a place in a faraway

land, where mangoes ripen on trees above a peaceful lagoon. Or it can be a doorway into yourself – a part of you you’d forgotten to visit for a long time. It just takes a little bit more effort sometimes to find the door, and to turn the handle and step through.

FINDING YOUR WAY IN

I’m imagining that you may once have loved poetry, in earlier life. This may not be the case, but I would hope that as a child, you read – or had read to you – classic poems such as William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, (Tyger! Tyger burning bright / In the forests of the night) or the wonderful AA Milne poems in Winnie the Pooh.

Thinking back to those poems, you might notice the twitch of a smile start to cross your face, which is probably because whoever read you the poem would have made lots of funny faces and generally hammed up the performance for your benefit. There’s definitely something deliciously irresistible about those rhymes:

The rhythm is something that your mind loves to hook itself onto. In remembering the fun of poetry in childhood, you might just think that poetry may not be so alien; it can instead be illuminating, calming, surprising and full of insight and wisdom.

Find a poem you read or heard as a child. ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Daffodils’ – all of these will get you in the mood for poetry as a genre. Try reading the poem aloud, which will help you to enjoy the language. When you read a poem aloud, a moment of revelation often comes when you give words voice – the very act of saying them out loud makes you realise what they mean.

Attempt to learn the poem off by heart (the introduction to the book By Heart by Ted Hughes offers suggestions to help with this). This can become a nourishing kind of mantra – not just because of rhythm and rhyme, but new meanings, thoughts and ideas occur each time you say the poem.

You need different skills for reading a poem than you do for reading a novel or short story. With fiction, you sink into the story, especially if it’s an immersive, page-turning kind of novel. Of course, some novels are very much about the language too, but even with the more literary novels, you can sink below the surface of the prose and swim along with the current of the narrative thrust. With poems, you need to focus more on rolling the words around in your head or on your tongue – read through the whole poem once, then read it again line by line, trying to understand what it’s all about. Mull over each word and think about its meaning. Then read the poem again and ponder the sense of it as a whole. Juxtapositions of words can give them new interpretations, such as ‘soft fists insist’ in ‘Mushrooms’ by Sylvia Plath: soft and fists do not normally work together, but picture a mushroom as a fist coming up through the earth; it’s an irresistible image. A mushroom may not have seemed insistent to you before you

There are lions and roaring tigers – And enormous camels and things There are biffalo- buffalo- bisons And a great big bear with wings

saw these words together, but in the context of the whole poem, you begin to realise that the power of mushrooms is to be silently, discreetly ‘taking hold’ on the loam. The more you read this poem, the more you realise that mushrooms could be a metaphor for women and their quiet revolution (this poem was written in 1960).

Don’t be afraid of not understanding a poem – or of interpreting it in the ‘wrong’ way. Authors never expect everyone to find the same things in their poems; each person brings their own personality to a poem, and your interpretation is just as valid as anyone else’s. You don’t have to be an expert to appreciate poetry.

Try printing out a poem and sticking it on the wall of your loo. Then whenever you are in the bathroom, you can read it. You will find that each time you look at it, you will find new interpretations and thoughts occurring to you.

Why persevere with poetry? Reading poems can offer a way of exploring common emotions that you may find difficult to express. Love, loss, grief, yearning and regret are all feelings that we experience in our lives but don’t always know how to put into words. Poetry can be an unexpected vehicle of expression, where you suddenly understand a feeling you have had, and recognise an emotion for what it is. This is the alchemy of poetry: it turns the everyday – the inexpressible – into gold.