Glyn Maxwell, in a recent review of the book Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, argues that reading the sonnets altogether in a collection is a little strange, since many of them are worth more attention than they’ll get if you read through them all quickly. Grant explains a similar problem he’s had with poetry, but in going back to Langston Hughes’ poems, he finds that trying not to focus on the rhyme or rhythm allows him to more fully understand the meaning of the words. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Reading Poems in Succession”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. It’s not often that I read a review of a book that’s so beautifully written that I have to put it down and share the book review itself with somebody.
Oh, really?
Yeah, but I did that recently when I was reading a review about a book by Neil Rudenstein about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it’s called Ideas of Order. And this review was written by a poet named Glenn Maxwell. And he’s talking in the review about how odd it is really to read a lot of sonnets all together in a collection. He suggests that the sonnets were just sort of written individually and not meant to be grouped together. And here’s how he puts it.
What howls around our hearing of a great sonnet is not silence, but a voice dying into silence, its last utterance clinging to memory. There are reasons for its length, its shape, its balance. In a Shakespearean sonnet taken on its own, that final couplet functions like two hands touching, a prayer breathed into oblivion on a trembling ledge of thought, a hope, a resolution of the contradictions that have thronged the three quatrains. These couplets always rhyme, but they frequently invert, repeat, recast, recur, knit words together like a spell or the weaving of chain mail. And then later he says, the Shakespearean sonnet doesn’t lend itself to a sequential narrative because the rhymed couplet without its paired feet trembling at that abysm of time has to settle instead for the sound of sighing resolution at regular intervals over and over before taking a deep breath and returning, usually for better or worse, to the same subject.
And Grant, that had me thinking about how I read books of poetry. I used to try to read them all the way through and thinking that that was some kind of accomplishment. But more and more, when I read a book of poetry, I sort of let my eyes go out of focus when I look at the page to see how long the poem is. And then more and more, I read just one and put it down. I mean, Rilke’s poem about the panther, that’s all you need for a week.
It’s like a meal, right?
It’s like a whole meal and there’s no need to gorge.
The python that ate the pig, you don’t need to feed for a while.
Do you have that same experience? Do you?
I have a strange relationship with poetry. We’ve talked about this before, but maybe it bears repeating. The older I get, the more I understand poetry because I feel like my understanding of the world is clearer and I have a distance to go, but I’m seeing that I’m not the 20-year-old kid trying to read Langston Hughes again. But if I turn back to the Langston Hughes book, and since I’ve bought Langston Hughes, I’ve always had a copy of his collected poems. I find new things there. And I’m particularly astonished when I read a poem, maybe not Hughes, but somebody else that’s supposed to rhyme, that if I don’t follow what I call the tyranny of the meter, if I choose not to read it in that rhythm that the author intended, I will frequently get more out of it than if I obey what they are trying to make me do by where the stress falls, where the line ends, where the words rhyme.
Oh, that’s interesting. You’re a poetry rebel. Do you get a different meaning?
I do. I feel like I’m picking up more. And maybe that’s a weakness on my part as the reader. Because I require that sometimes that it be more like prose and less like poetry for me to understand what is intended or to feel like I’m getting what was intended.
Yeah. Yeah. And so you read them like several in a sitting?
Well, when I read poetry, I do it like the I Ching. I just flip through and let the pages fall where they may and wait for my eyes to light on a word or a shape of lines or just something that leaps out at me. And I read it.
And amazingly often, something in that poem speaks to me and has a synchronicity that matches what’s going on in my head or in my life.
I love that.
The I Ching method of poetry reading.
I like that.
We’d love to hear your experiences about reading poetry. We know it’s so personal. And sometimes it’s even hard to relate. You can hear Martha and I trying to struggle our way through to put into words these feelings that we have about the poetry that we love. But give it a try.
Or email us words@waywordradio.org.
