How do you read a book of poems?

Hello all, I've just discovered this group and I'm looking forward to exploring the threads.

It's recently dawned on me that most - if not all - of my books of poetry have poems that I've never read. Some have quite a lot. I might even say that quite a lot have quite a lot. Thinking about it, I realised that I'd never actually taken a poetry book and methodically read it right through from start to finish. I just dip into them and read one or two when I'm in the mood.

My reaction to that has been to copy the contents pages to use as bookmarks, so that I can pencil through each poem read (um - is that a bit obsessive?).

So I'm curious as to how others read them. Have you all read every page of your books of poems? Are you 'dippers-in'? Do you methodically work your ways through them from start to finish? Do you keep records of which you have or haven't read?

Or are you all as disorganised as I am?

Some poetry books I've read cover to cover, some -anthologies for example- I've read by section, some I've dipped into randomly. With poetry books and with collections of essays I don't feel that I need to read the whole thing. That's why I end up buying so many.

I generally read cover to cover skipping any poem that is too long (I'm generally not fond of poems longer than a page or two) or that I'm not enjoying. I check off the ones I really liked in the TOC so I can go back to them.

What a good question! I looking at The Poetry of Birds last night and was wondering whether it was correct to simply dip of whether I should read in a more regular and organised fashion - I too am new to the world of poetry.

I have just dipped again into this book while writing and was delighted to find a selection from Gilbert White's journals, which I always thought were extremely poetic prose, like Haiku.

I tend to cruise through the first time around, looking for the poems that have a special resonance for me before putting the book back on the shelf and having sudden random urges to read the rest. With a very short book I will read it right the way through and with big fat collections I leave the book beside my place on the sofa and try to remember to read one poem every day until I get through the lot. Frequently I forget though and end up just dipping in and out. I do something very similar with short stories unless they completely grip me (as The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales is currently doing).

At the moment I'm studying some very long poems (Paradise Lost, Milton, Don Juan) and so having to stick with things I'm not really enjoying (except for the Byron one, which I love, but then I love everything George did, with the possible exception of shagging his sister).

#4 - Oh, I'm not new to poetry - some of my books I've had for decades and I know lots of the poems very well indeed - which is why the number of poems I hadn't read came as a bit of a shock.

Until a month or two ago I don't think the subject ever crossed my mind and if someone had asked me I'd probably have said, yes, of course I'd read them all.

Then, in another group, I was introduced to Byron's 'Darkness', a poem I know I'd never previously read - I'd have remembered. I checked my old paperback Byron - not there - then found it in a nice little leather-bound selection I found in a junk shop some time ago. In the process, I realised that, not only had I probably never read a poem from the leather-bound, but there were quite a few in the paperback - battered though it is - that were unfamiliar.

So that got me thinking and I started to look through my others. It was the same in almost every case - lots of quite unfamiliar poems.

Having recently acquired hardback 'completes' of three or four of my favourites, how I was going to read them started to obsess me a bit - hence this thread and the bits of paper mentioned in the OP.

The trouble is that I really don't care to read a string of unfamiliar poems in one go. I prefer to read them one at a time - two at most - and give them plenty of time, reading and re-reading and pondering, working out a read-aloud for myself, and so on. So reading my new collections (and the old unread stuff) is going to take years - I just hope the bits of paper hold up (I'm sure everyone on LT is familiar with the supernatural way bookmarks have of disappearing into thin air).

#5 - On my 'cruise through' I usually find a particular poem or two will 'grab' me before I get very far and hold my attention until, before I know it, it's time to put the book down and do something else.

#6 - Incidentally, the leather-bound Byron I mentioned was given as a prize to a schoolgirl in 1912 - for history. I'd have been delighted if I'd been given a collected Byron when I was at school, but I can't help wondering why they didn't give her a history book.

I definitely like the idea of reading one/two poems a day. I shall endeavour to be more disciplined but still in my usual laid back manner.

When I was new to poetry reading I preferred dipping into anthologies, which I still enjoy. But quite often when reading single books you find that there is a cumulative effect from reading in order, and feel that the poet has positioned the poems carefully to work together, so they are best read in order.

The internet has changed the way I read poetry. I used to buy anthologies, or track them down in the university library, and dip into them randomly, reading whatever caught my eye.
Since I've had internet access I've discovered poetry journals with online content - journals like Poetry, Pedestal, Ploughshares, Flashquake, and Barnwood Magazine. This helps me to keep up with the latest, and arguably, the best new poetry. Even on the net, I tend to dip, I guess.
Besides this, I'm still methodically working my way through A Fierce Brightness, which is a wonderful anthology of poetry by women. But I discovered the anthology on the Calyx website. I think the internet has been absolutely fantastic for poetry publishing. What do you think?

#10 - I have to say that the few forays I've made into online poetry rather defeated me. There's a lot of stuff - um - I'm trying not to sound nasty - I'll just say there are a lot of enthusiastic amateurs online.

So thanks for listing those online journals - I look forward to exploring them. Thanks for doing the hard work for me!

To be honest I haven't really kept up with modern poetry. If I remember correctly, I have a book by Wendy Cope and before her there's nobody later than Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith. And - and this goes back to my OP - I have a distinct memory of feeling guilty as I was buying the paperback Wendy Cope that I'd hardly scratched the surface of some hardback earlier poets I own. There are probably a lot of good poets out there turning out stuff faster than I can read it while I still haven't caught of up with the seventeenth century, let alone the twenty-first! The story of my reading life, of course.

Dear Rankamateur
I hope you will take a look at some of the better online poetry sites. I agree with you that there's a lot of not-very-good poetry on the net and a reader should be selective. Poets I can recommend are Bob Hicok, Kim Addonizio, Robin Ekiss, Kazim Ali, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Ange Mlinko, and Arlene Ang. There are so many others. If you only look at one site please look at Poetry Magazine - very user friendly and totally intriguing. Here's the link:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/
Please read contemporary poetry everyone. There's some amazing work out there.

I usually dip into and out of poetry books, often - as an earlier commenter said - skipping the longer poems, at least till I have finished all the shorter ones. I am trying, though, to read more collections from cover to cover.

It's very rare for me to read a poetry collection in one sitting - one that I did read right through, because I was enjoying it too much to want to stop, was My Iron Spine by Helen Rickerby.

I'm ashamed to say that I don't feel I have enough time left to experiment too much with new poets - though I buy up old poetry magazines from the charity and secondhand shops as it's interesting to read articles original reviews of stuff I like from some years back. I find I can't read too much poetry at a time, it takes too long for me to appreciate them properly, I have to read, think, leave it, come back and so on. I find it much more demanding than reading fiction.

#12 - Thanks for the link, Linda.

When I was in high school, I was reading The Ticket that Exploded by William S. Burrough and was admittedly having difficulty with it.

I spoke to an adult friend about it and he said: You want to read Burroughs? Let me tell you how to read Burroughs. Open the book to a random page and start reading. Read for as long as you wish then put it down. Next time open to another random page and do the same and repeat. The reason you read Burroughs this way, is that is the way he he wrote it. Then my friend explained to me about Burroughs' "cut up" method.

I frankly had no idea about any of that but that was even more fascinating to me than the book itself. However liberating it might be to write a book in that fashion , it seemed even more liberating to read it that way.

I do do not know if he was right in suggesting reading it that way, but decades later I think about that advice and understand that I much prefer non-linear writing to linear books. And I rarely can be bothered to read anything that requires me to read a book cover to cover.

Poetry and especially collections of poetry, it strikes me are near the apex of books put together and read non-linearly. So what applies to Burroughs is probably even more true when reading a book of poems. Unless it's a long narrative poem, I cannot I cannot even imagine ploughing through a book of poems the same way you would a novel. It just seems like a forced exercise.

Since most poetry books are non-linear, there is no need to read from front to back, but there is no reason not to either.

As a poet, I like to arrange my collections into related themes, so you can chose the subject you are in the mood for. For example, my first book had: As I See It, People and Places, Ponderance and Muse, The Human Condition, The Environment, Odds and Ends, Table Scraps.

As you can see, the last two were used for poems that didn't fit anywhere else or were short, leftover bits.

I know this is rather a long time after my OP, but ... well ... don't know where I'm going, there. Anyway:

I have read one book of poetry from start to finish since the OP: one of my favourite poets, reading just one poem at a time—two at most, reading and rereading, reading aloud, meditating over them. It had a wholly unexpected result.

The poet was Thomas Hardy, who had been a favourite of mine since schooldays, pushing on sixty years, perhaps. He is no longer a favourite.

The trouble is that as I was travelling through the book I very gradually built up the conviction that Thomas Hardy the poet was an artificial construct. I mean by that something like the artificial stage persona a comedian (or even, sometimes, an actor) will create for themselves. In other words, I believe the poet of these poems is a fictional character.

Except that with Hardy there was dishonesty—the reader is not meant to be aware there is a construct at all. I and plenty of other people have always thought of the elegies for his dead, first wife as his greatest poetry and these are the very poems I just can't believe in any more. Hardy was notoriously controlling of his personal history—very concerned with his image, in modern parlance. On the one hand, I now think of these poems as an exercise in putting himself right with the world, very carefully calculated to show himself in the best possible light without provoking accusations of being unfair to Emma. On the other hand, he wanted to be remembered as a great poet and I think he saw the problem of his estrangement from Emma as a heaven-sent opportunity. Once she was safely out of the way, of course—I'd give worlds to have had her reaction to the poems.

But I now find myself unable to read some of my favourite poems with straightforward enjoyment, 'The Voice' for example. Always one of my all-time favourites (and I've known it by heart most of my life), for the last couple of years I cannot but experience the words with cynicism and disapproval.

So, do I now recommend reading collections through, start to finish, methodically? Don't know. I suppose it depends whether you welcome every change and movement in your intellectual life or prefer some certainties. It has risks.

Hah! I've been wanting to write this stuff down somewhere or other for a couple of years. Load of my chest and all that ...

>19 alaudacorax:

I still value Hardy for his novels and—and this is something I don't see much mention of—his short stories.

>19 alaudacorax: Interesting experience. And an opinion you could form because you've not only read Hardy, but read about him as well.

I rarely read a book of poetry all the way through. The ones I've read this way are, like you, by poets I've enjoyed and want to read more of. When I read this way, I usually read one or two a day.

I read anthologies periodically, and I'll read 2-3 poems at a sitting. I usually flip through and try things.

>21 markon: - ... but read about him as well.

I should have mentioned that. I've read at least one biography, possibly two, and that certainly had a bearing. It was, though, when reading the poems that the disillusionment came on me.

I like to read a couple every morning with coffee, plus a longer spell some evenings in place of literature - in each case working through the entire book. There are some I could happily start over as soon as they are finished. I find it the only way to uncover gems, though a good 'selected poems' is a better option than a 'complete works of' if going this approach. For complete works I usually start by search for a list of a writers best and reading those, then let how much I enjoyed them determine how much more to take on.

I've read several poetry books cover-to-cover, usually a poet's collected works. Often this is in preparation for reading a book of literary criticism or biography of that poet. This includes: Edmund Spenser, John Milton, William Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats. Also Shakespeare's Sonnets. I find it helpful to understand the development of a poet's work and recurring themes. Often the poet places their poems in a particular order intentionally. (I admit that I also read poetry randomly, just flipping through pages for what appeals to me. This is especially common with anthologies.)

I read poetry in all sort of ways, from randomly chosen to cover to cover, the only constant being I never read any criticism, annotations etc. before experiencing the poem itself, often repeatedly. Only when its words have thoroughly washed over you is it time to delve into any secondary reading.