top of page
Search

Quick guide: how to interact with and read poetry

Writer's picture: Caroline A. Pinheiro da CostaCaroline A. Pinheiro da Costa

There is this feeling that good poetry takes makes the top of your head seems to come out. I can add that also there's been a light breeze blowing in my crown too since September 2021.


The comprehension from 'what is the meaning of this poem?' to 'how does this poem generate its power?' gets correlated with feeling the effect that each poetry hits in your soul. This touch mostly happens with some tools being used propositionally. It opens up space to transcend and feel alive again.


Reading a poem out loud and interacting with it will make you able to see that a poem is made of images, sound, meter, form and diction. Beyond the form, you will be moved by some particularities from poetry such as defamiliarization; that's when you notice that the words used in writing give a different meaning than you are used to. This makes you slow down and open space in yourself to the word presents itself in another way for you.


Inside poetry you can also be introduced to uses of language that refer to innocence or childishness. In those cases you are also being invited to think about reality in another perspective, such as being familiarized with the word from a new point of view.


The use of metaphor is largely common in poetry and a potent tool to generate the poem's power. In metaphor, you are comparing two things that are not similar, but when they are together they vibrate and resonate, creating potency. It helps to create a visualization or increase the comprehension of the sensations inside the poem. If the metaphor is powerful you will see that object as strange again, and this is again the sensation of defamiliarization presenting itself.


Bad kid jokes and the game of mixing and matching letters and words to create new meanings are also authorized in the creation and appreciation of poetry. Language is elastic and infinite and poetry goes beyond language. Poetry is constructed in the tense of the "what if" beyond your current perspective. The result of getting in touch with this art is that it will inevitably creates the divine possibility to new ways for us to see and feel life.


Ps: Sharing with you my favorite poem written by Adrienne Rich written in 1974.


Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old

cure for fever or melancholy a tonic

for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds came from the same source as her power.



1 view0 comments

Comments


bottom of page