“.A poem the audience can get lost in is a poem that exercises poetic freedom” -dimitrireyespoet.com
With anything that you can call your passion you need to study it in order to hone your craft. If you have a knack for writing and feel like calling yourself a writer while also enjoying a good book or movie then you’re in luck because that IS how you study. But this doesn’t necessarily mean you can read a poem, say, “I like how this makes me feel” and tell yourself you did “the work” of the poet. The real work starts once you start asking questions like …
Why is this poem making me feel this way?
or better yet…
What is working in this poem?
Once you study the work you love, you are able to produce material that has a similar effect on an audience. In addition, what you’ll find is that analyzing poetry is a lot like analyzing your own work.
1) Know Your Author
There is a general rule that one must separate the speaker from the writer because after all, poetry is a work of fiction. For many poets who pick up a pencil, poetry leans towards the act of sorting out experiences. Despite this fact, a poem the audience can get lost in is a poem that exercises poetic freedom. This means being able to recreate the truth.
When you are analyzing another poet’s poetry, it’s still a good idea to get into the headspace of the writer even if a truth is being recreated. This is very helpful because although there is a separation between the speaker and the writer, we understand that the creation of the speaker still comes from the mind of the writer. Therefore, we can assume that the experiences of that writer in some shape or form influences the material being written.
If you go to Poets.org or the Poetry Foundation to look up the bio of a poet you are reading, there will be information that includes a bit about their life (like hometown and schooling), their publications, and maybe even how they discuss their own work.
2) Relevancy of Title
How does the title help the understanding of the poem? I say this very often: the title is very important to the poem.
The title and the body of the poem should work hand in hand to tell the story or add depth to it. In a complex poem the title can help you understand the poem, giving you a guide, or some context on how you should understand it.
3) Look for Themes
Tropes– a word, phrase, or image used so often in the context of certain literary pieces, that the word, phrase, or image used represents something way larger than what is expressed.
Example: Below there will be a mentioning of a character walking on water in a poem giving the tonal qualities of baptism, holiness/ cleanliness, and other worldliness because of Catholicism and magic.
This was my poem as seen in the December 2017 issue of Arcturus
Metaphor– talking about one thing but alluding to another. Example: comparing the loss of a loved one to the weight of carrying a box.
Repetition– word choice using the repetition of certain words or phrases calls particular attention to the repeated words or lines.
When put together, these literary devices help give the poem its overall tone, or feeling, to the poem.
4) Where are the Changes?
Make sure you are looking out for the poetic turn. Every poem has a moment where the speaker realizes or reveals something that changes the perspective of the poem. Think of the turn as a change in perspective, whether it’s revealed or realized. Think of the lines, “already men/ have tried to steal me” and “& no one blinks/ no one/ stops wanting” from Safia Elhillo’s poem, “1000.”
5) How Does the Poem End?
This is when you analyze how the poem closes. A good idea is to begin thinking how the title, tropes, metaphors, turns, and all of the other poetic devices leads up to the conclusion of the poem.
The allure to poems are that they aren’t novel-length journeys so we must come to the end of each poem questioning our experiences. Did the poem have a closed ending, ie was there some sort of resolution?
Or were there more questions left at the end of the piece which would cause more pondering?
Remember that the writer and poet are different, still it won’t hurt to know a bit about the individual who wrote the piece. Also, don’t forget that the title of the poem as well as its metaphors, repeated words, phrases, and tropes affect the way we interpret the work from the first word to the very last line.
With these 5 simple tips on how to analyze poetry you will be able to engage in productive poetry discussions within a group or on your own.
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