In his collection of 35 short essays titled How a Poem Moves (ECW Press), Adam Sol speaks to reluctant poetry readers, the ones who are afraid they don’t “get” poetry to help guide them through poetry’s range and pleasures, going beyond the question of what a poem means. Below Adam explains how poetry might be more like ice cream than we think and leaves us with a question to ask ourselves when reading our next poem.
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Let’s start with this: nobody is going to force you to read poetry. It’s not a requirement, once you’ve graduated high school. Really, it’s not. If you want to live the rest of your life without it, go right ahead. You won’t hurt my feelings. Poetry will be fine, absolutely fine. Poetry is totally ok without you. Don’t feel in the least bit responsible for “the death of poetry.” The death of poetry is a myth. Never happened, never will happen. So, from the get-go, no pressure.By the way, no one demands that you eat ice cream either. You can live your whole live without any form of ice cream, or whatever lactose-free chilled dessert equivalents are out there. Ice cream will continue to get made and consumed without you, maybe less in certain seasons, maybe more in certain regions.In both cases, though, why deny yourself the pleasure?I know dozens of smart, informed, enthusiastic readers of all kinds of books who are “afraid of poetry,” who fear they “don’t get it.” Perhaps you are one of them. If you are on this website, chances are pretty good that you are a reader, probably an avid one. And if you are a reader, you already have the tools and talents to read and enjoy poetry. Full stop. But it’s true you may need to re-jig how you read when you read a poem, as opposed to how you read when you read a story, an article, or a whatever. It’s the question of how that I’m trying to answer with How a Poem Moves. What I’ve tried to do in the thirty-five short essays in the book is walk readers through the processes I generally go through when I encounter a poem. The kinds of questions I ask, the techniques I’m keeping an eye out for, the things that catch my attention and give me pleasure. Think of me as an enthusiastic park ranger: I may have a bit more practice seeing that flash of yellow in the distance and recognizing it as a goldfinch. But my job is to point it out so that you can see the goldfinch yourself, and feel the same thrill.One first step that I tell my students: don’t worry at first about what a poem means. Meaning is only one of the things that a poem does while it’s moving down the page. Instead try asking, what does the poem do? This allows us to start off with some simple answers like, “It uses regular stanzas,” or “It describes a scene at a baseball game.” That focuses us right away on the pleasures a poem provides, and tends to point us to other ways of seeing it. We don’t watch an accomplished dancer and ask ourselves, “What does that dance mean?” We don’t look at a painting and worry at first, “What is the meaning of that colour choice?” We might do some of that later, but our first response tends to be, wow. The teaching and writing I do is mostly to try to get people to wow. * * *Adam Sol is a poet, writer, and teacher originally from Connecticut. Educated at Tufts University, Indiana University, and the University of Cincinnati, he has lived in Toronto for 20 years. He currently teaches at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, with his wife, Rabbi Yael Splansky, and their three sons.Photo credit Mark Raynes Roberts
