Since retiring from his professorship at the University of Michigan-Flint, where he taught literature and writing for nearly 30 years, Thomas Foster has made a fruitful career writing instructive books about how we ought to read. With How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which he revised in 2014, Foster scored his first New York Times bestseller. It was followed by How to Read Novels Like a Professor, Twenty-five Books that Shaped America, and Reading the Silver Screen.
Now Foster, who studied English at Dartmouth College, turns his eye toward poetry, a form he says he “didn’t know how to handle” in grade school. His new book, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, provides something of a blueprint for tackling verse while also disproving the notion that poetry is intimidating, esoteric, or, as Foster told the Guardian, “obscure on purpose”. In an interview with the professor, whose early teenage encounter with the works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti left a lasting impression, he shares his tips for understanding and enjoying poetry:
Read the words
Ezra Pound says the poem ought to work on the level of a person for whom a hawk is simply a hawk. That is excellent advice. Read that way, too, on a literal level first. Read what’s actually in front of you. And the next tip, which seems a little redundant but I don’t think it is, is read all the words. Not only do you need to read them, but you need to read them in the way that they are assembled. I don’t encounter this with beginning readers as much as I do readers with a little bit of experience, but there’s suddenly an urge to jump forward from the language on the page to hidden meanings or symbols that might be present. In doing so, I’ve had any number of students actually skip a key word. It really makes a difference if you skip over that word “not”. I don’t want anyone worrying about secondary meanings or symbolic suggestions until they’ve actually got a handle on what it is that it is saying on a literal level.
Read the sentences
There’s a great tendency in an art form that is written in lines to want to read lines. But lines, in a great many instances, don’t make sense and don’t contain complete meanings. If we stop at the end of every line as if we just read a full statement, and we all do at a certain early stage of reading, we’ll never get anything out of the poem because we will not have understood what it is that’s being said. Poems have this in conjunction with everything else that is written in English: their basic unit of meaning is the sentence, and we shouldn’t ignore that fact.
Obey all punctuation, including its absence
If there is no punctuation at the end of the line, we want to keep that pause as the eyes travel back, and we don’t want to drop our voice as if the sentence is over. Keep it going and flowing as much as possible. Now, if there’s a comma, we want to pause as if there’s a comma, but not as if there’s a period. And if there’s a period or a semicolon or a question mark, something that approximates a full stop, we want to do a full stop there and understand that we came to the end of some kind of unit of meaning. That’s how the poet understood it when she wrote it and we should do that as well.
Read the poem aloud
If you’re in a house with another person, this is problematic. Maybe you can go to your room, maybe you can go out and sit in the car where nobody will hear you. But I think you’ll do best with your poem, especially until you get pretty good at that internal voice taking over, to read it aloud, hear it aloud. There are echoes within the poem that you won’t hear reading silently. There are places where suddenly you’ll wonder about the emphasis – is it here or is it here? – and you may be able to sort that out for yourself by reading it aloud. Generally, poems were written for the page. But they still have that oral quality, and we’d do well to honor that.
Read the poem again
My friends in the community have this mantra, they say it to themselves eight times a day: that all writing is rewriting. Every draft needs to get better. I heard rumors about the critic Harold Bloom, and maybe one or two other people in the history of the world, who write first drafts and they’re done. The rest of us don’t operate that way. In our situation, I say reading is rereading, and that’s especially true with poems. It’s really hard to go back and reread War and Peace right after you finish it, or Moby Dick, any of those chest-breaking tomes. But we can do it with a sonnet or any kind of shorter poem. For a lot of people, if you read it aloud the first time, you can do it silently the second time, because now you’ve got a handle on it.
Poetry doesn’t have to be obscure
One of the [hangups with poetry] is that it’s not only obscure, but it’s obscure on purpose. But when it is obscure to us, it’s often because we don’t get the cultural references. Traditional English poetry would’ve been written for a fairly small segment of the population who all kind of knew the same thing, so it’s not only in a semi-foreign language but it’s also a foreign set of references. I don’t recommend that people go out and start their poetic experience with John Milton or Andrew Marvell.
The most important thing to understand in verse is that it is, first and foremost, a sort of experiment in and with language. How can I talk about this thing, how can I say this in a way that is interesting and unique, that will convey my meaning but do more than just convey my meaning? I think of poetry as a laboratory. What great poets largely have in mind, the thing that makes them hang around, is that they speak to our imagination in some way. They don’t speak to everybody’s. This isn’t selling car wax or something. But they will find an audience and there will be people who go, “Oh, yeah, I get that. That rings a bell with me.” It will be one imagination speaking to another. So it’s not just about words: it’s about the way that imagination expresses itself, and the way another imagination receives that message.
