Poems

The three poems I asked you to read this week are pretty different from each other. So there are several ways you might approach responding to them on the blog.

• You might do a close reading of one of the poems (like we did w/ David Mason's poem last week)
• You might compare the poems. What similarities do they have? What differences do you notice?
• You might write about difficulties you have with a poem. Feel free to use the blog to ask questions. I value good open questions. (Open questions are subjective, they lead to exploration. Closed questions are purely factual ("What color is the sky?") or yes/no.) And yes, you get credit for asking good questions.
• Try to answer one of my open questions.
• Try to answer one of you peers' very good open questions. And yes, again, you get credit for responding to classmates' comments and questions. 
• Make connections between a poem and other texts you've read (or seen or heard).
• Make connections between a poem and your life experience. 

It helps to quote from the text if you're making a specific comment or claim about a poem.

Poet John Ciardi had these three rules for reading poetry:

1)  The poem is not to be confused w/ a paraphrase.

2)  Avoid speed-reading. Discover the natural rhythm of the work.

3)  Read it aloud.

Or we might consider what poet Richard Wilbur wrote about poetry (quoted in BAP 2018, p. xix): "A poem should not be like a Double-Crostic; it should not be the sort of puzzle in which you get nothing until you get it all." In other words, although a poem may puzzle you, it's not for you to solve. A truly rich poem should offer you something different every time you return to it. Shakespeare wrote his plays over four hundred years ago and people are still publishing books and articles about them. That shows you how rich some texts can be.