Reading poems I think should always be first an emotional and sensual experience. The desire to pick apart with questions as assign meanings should come only after one has experienced the poem with the heart. Naturally, there is no one way to do anything, particularly something so personal. Poems are of course deeply personal, which is to say that even when they are the product of a stranger half a world or centuries away they speak to profoundly human realities. So while a part of me resists writing as if there is one truly effective way to read a poem I think it is important to encourage certain approaches to experiencing poetry. For one, people tend to want writing that puts its meaning up front. We are a culture that relishes "just getting to the point already." But poetry delights in its sounds, colors, and emotions. These are the source of its life force, the very things that give the words heat and the meanings power. I encourage readers to resist the impulse to know immediately the message of a poem. Instead, consider that perhaps the greatest wisdom of poetry can impart comes through simply feeling its impression on your senses, and on your heart if you let it. I believe that we can begin to demystify the process of reading poetry only when we understand that the effect of poetry on the reader's emotions is integral to arriving at the "meaning" or mission of a piece. Because it is a process like a journey from impression and feeling to understanding.


The journey begins...
With a gaze. The first read should be like looking at a painting in a museum or a photograph of a place you've never been. See the colors, feel the shapes the words make. Take it in without intending to interpret or judge or even speak an impression. Just flow through the lines without asking questions. Close the intellectual mind. Be simply human first.

Try it out:
Gaze at Gustav Klimt's mermaids for practice. Open up and feel the image.



Now read a few lines of Rilke with the same openness.

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

In both the painting and the poem there is so much emotion, so much to taste and smell and touch. The moody colors of the mermaids' waters, her light skin and the eyes. Just like Rilke's rich, thick fluids rising and flowing and the billion stars blazing. The first experience of both poem and painting is thick with impressions of darkness, peace and I think (for me) of something both painful and beautiful. Reading or seeing them first is sensory, and the impressions either evokes begin to signal something about the creator's meaning.

From here....
If the experience is not enough (which I believe sometimes it alone can be) then read again, look again. This time linger on the elements that make you feel or question. Read these words again. Read in you mind. Then aloud. Where do these places figure in the piece as a whole? How to do they appear to operate? For example, Rilke's billion spinning stars "blazing" set up a powerful (yes emotional) contrast to the image of them dead in the final words of the poem. The contrast reinforces something, but what? When an image like this captures your attention, consider what the poet wants you associate with the image. Is it, as in Rilke's last stanza the passage of time? Often, there is a strong relationship between images and repetitive sounds or words and a larger idea the poet is attempting to put across. Remember, of course, sometimes the idea behind the words is not a simple message- sometime the purpose is (returning to where we began) to simply make you feel something. Unsettled. Romantic. Yes, even confused. In such cases the purpose of the poem may rest in you, your time, or times before yours. I can only say that in these case it is useful to consider the poem's relationship to you, or (thanking the library gods for research) go explore what the poem's relationship is to its political, social, or historical context. When all else fails, research and or at least taking the time to read any footnotes can go along way toward interpreting those impressions and sensations that a poem conjures.