The Poetry Workout

Got your sweats on?
Done your stretches?
Great. Stop immediately if you fell any pain.

Ground Rules:
1. Below you will encounter a very friendly course of poems to read. Follow our Ten Commandments for Reading Aloud (pages 17 and 18). Disregard any rule that makes you crazy.
2. Read the poem aloud, taking your time, as if the words were yours and you meant every one of them.
3. Repeat step 2.
4. Enjoy the poem in any way you wish. You do not have to interpret the poem—just look for reasons to like it.

Day One: Breaking a Sweat.

Let’s begin with poems of one line. Because these tend to go by quickly, we must read slowly, with care. Here is a poem titled “Elegy” by the American poet W. S. Merwin. (An elegy, by the way, is a song or poem of lamentation or sorrow.)

Who would I show it to

Poor person has a song or poem of sorrow and no one to show it to.
A true song of sorrow. Read it aloud again.

Now that we’ve worked up a sweat, I think we’re ready to move up to Two Lines. Read the following through to yourself, to get the words right. Then read the poem aloud. Consider what it’s saying. Let it Resonate. Rinse and Repeat.

I hate and yet I love. Perhaps you ask, “How?”
Don’t know—but I feel it happening and am tormented.

Tell me you need to be an English major, or any major, to appreciate that poem. Read it aloud again.
Perhaps you have been in this situation or know someone who has. Did you sympathize? Did you suffer? Are you suffering now? If so, take this poem as your own.

If you enjoy that poem even a little, then you like poetry—and Latin poetry at that, for this was written by Gaius Valerius Catullus, a Roman poet of the first century B.C.E.

I think we’re ready to scale the Mountain of Three lines. These particular three lines are from “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer” by a wonderful poet, Wendell Berry.

Let me wake in the night
And hear it raining
And go back to sleep.

Me too.

Here. Have a song from the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians.

You did it
Therefore
you wept.

In the words of Jay Leno, “About says it all, don’t it?” Read once again aloud: “You did it [beat] therefore [beat] you wept.” See how important the pauses can be? You may even have a wry smile at the point. You did it, therefore, you smile.
You’re improving with every poem.
I think we’re about ready for metaphor—hey, wait a minute. Your running off the field and heading straight for the showers!

We make metaphors when we compare thing A to thing B without saying so. For example, this is a metaphor:

You are a snake in the grass.

Now compare that with this, which is an example of a simile:

You are like a snake in the grass.

The first one packs more of a punch. It’s a bigger insult.

Mysterious, but true. Remember what Dan Gottlieb says. Metaphor speaks—not always clearly, not always directly, but always powerfully.
Let’s try a poem of six lines, with a simile in it, by the Japanese poet Ono no Komachi.

Doesn’t he realize
that I am not
like the swaying kelp
in the surf,
 where the seaweed gatherer
can come as often as he wants.

Sounds as though that was written by a woman. She doesn’t like the way “he” has been treating her. He comes whenever he wants, like the seaweed gatherer.

Here is a poem by Imogene Bolls.

Coyote Wind
Scratching at the window
with claws of pine,
the wind wants in.

For days it has been
calling itself across
the white land, howling
on the hills, prowling
on the porch, crouching
hungry behind the barn.

When I turn on the light
it yelps, streaks off
across the yard, snow
covering its tracks,

It will be back.
It smells warm flesh
behind this frosted glass.

Just now it whimpers
in a corner of the porch
nursing a sore paw.

It knows all the tricks.

I won’t open the door.

When a poem starts talking funny—acting as though things happen that don’t—look for a metaphor.

Coyote wind is a poem exploring fear. Read the poem over from that viewpoint.

By the way, it’s a poem with wonderful, gentle line breaks. Read the following aloud, pausing gently with a little expectant rise in your voice.

For days it has been
calling itself across
the white land, howling
on the hills, prowling
on the porch, crouching
hungry behind the barn.

Now here it is in prose:
For days it has been calling itself across the white land, howling on the hills, prowling on the porch, crouching hungry behind the barn.
Something is different with the prose version. It’s pretty, all right, but you lose something. If you don’t pause after “across”—the land doesn’t seem as huge somehow. We’re waiting to hear across what? “The white land” is the payoff after the break.

And what is the difference between this segment as prose
howling on the hills, prowling on the porch
and as poetry
                        Howling
on the hils, prowling
on the porch?

The prose makes one think of location—the hills and the porch—but the line breaks in the poetry rearrange the rhythm and redirect one’s attention. The coyote (or the wind) howls and prowls. The rhyme helps focus on the action too. The line breaks and the rhyme work together and with the howling, prowling, and crouching really build up tension. First it makes noise, the it starts to move, then it prepares to pounce.

You can’t rest, not until the last line. “Hungry behind the barn” lets us finally relax after that long buildup.

We get more out of poems when we pay attention to the pauses and line breaks, and poetry gets its effects both from words and from a whole host of elements beyond the words. The more attention you pay, the better your experience will be.

Two more poems, and our workout will be over for today.

I like to read Theordore Roethke aloud for his music. His poem “Root Cellar” describes a basement in which someone has left boxes full of bulbs and roots. The whole place is overgrown. When you read aloud, let your mouth get into the oral acrobatics. It’s fun, and it take you there.

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!—
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

This poem is a symphony of vowels. Emphasize them as you read. For the line “Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,” get your nose and tongue into those o s, I s, and a s. Work your jaw John Wayne-style while drawling “Roots ripe as old bait.” There’s humor in the “congress of stinks,” which you might in Washington as well as in a cellar, and the last two lines are startling. Pleasure above all, but pleasure leads us to truth.

If you’re worn out, save this one for another day. But if you’re ambitious, try a sonnet by Robert Frost. The same rules of reading apply. “The Silken Tent” compares a woman to a tent of silk on a summer day.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

It’s all one sentence, so those pauses are important. The whole thing is one long, detailed comparison—the pleasure lies in working that comparison out.

Speculate how a woman might resemble a tent like this. How might she be “loosely bound/By countless silken ties of love and thought”? Do you know any women like this? Are you one? Would you like to be?

Back to: It Could Be Verse, by John Timpane