I’ve never quite known how to read poetry. I’ve read some books cover to cover. In some cases, moving through the poems in a particular sequence either suggests a story between and beyond each or enhances individuals by juxtaposing them with the one(s) around them. In most cases, however, poems don’t really change by being read in a given order, probably because most anthologies are written as separate poems, not a series.
When one of my friends and I go to the bookstore, our routine is to take books and magazines off the shelves and haul them over to the in-store café. We buy decafs and biscotti or gooey cheesecake. Then she reads aloud, articles, stories, poems. It’s a wonderful experience. While I love it all, I feel especially inspired by hearing one or two poems read out loud.
I’m not sure that I understood the value of that until just this week. I’ve been receiving the Knopf Poem of the Day, a regular April feature, and I’ve noticed that reading that single poem first thing in the morning has really helped me read and revise my own work. Even when I haven’t liked the Poem of the Day or when I’ve thought it to be fairly mediocre, the reading of that piece makes me think about how poems are put together, how they get their point across, how this change or that change can affect the poem over all. I think that, once the month is over, I’ll continue to read a poem a day, choosing books at random from my chaotic library and satisfying myself with a single piece, two at absolute max.
As far as the current state of my manuscript …. I finished the two poems that needed to be finished. Hurrah! I divided the list of poems into four sections and organized three of those sections into a table of contents. I won’t make up the fourth until I reread a few (no more than five) of the poems in that section to revise or discard them.
The end really is close now. I hope my next writing session is as productive as the previous one. If it is, I should be able to fine-tune the two newest poems and tweak or discard the other five. I really am almost afraid to take a break from it now, but I need the objectivity, and that comes of thinking about other things for a while. If I don’t take it, I’ll think I’m brilliant and change nothing, especially the really crappy stuff.
Puntitas reads _Friend of the Devil_ by P. Robinson.
