Reading Poetry When You Don’t Read Poetry

In my email this morning, there was a frantic query from a good friend, asking “Poetry! Help!!! Any recommendations on what to look for when critiquing someone’s poetry? Rhyme scheme? Imagery?”

I love being the go-to poet among a handful of my friends, based largely on the fact that I’m the only poet (published in a small handful of little literary journals) most of them know. It makes me feel like poetry is an esoteric discipline that will solve real-world problems with specialized tools wielded by trained expert poets. Not as flashy as forensic science, say– but in the same vein of essential, but mysterious to outsiders.

Now that I’ve just compared poetry to CSI, amusing and horrifying myself a little, down to business.

Off the top of my head, and from the poetry classes I’ve taken, I was able to come up with: poetry is writing where the language rhythms and the emotions matter more. It should stand up to being read aloud, or do something on the page that makes the layout or structure tell more of the story than just the words. It should be distilled, condensed- give a snapshot of a scene and its emotions in a very spare, uncluttered way. And poetry should be seductive. Not necessarily “get naked” seductive, but should draw you in, to read more, to feel something.

I’m not sure if I got that entirely right. People who’ve studied poetry more than I have would probably say something different, or say that I’ve oversimplified. Did I get it right?

A lot of what is written or taught about poetry acknowledges the fact that people think it’s specialized and alien and inaccessible to all but a select few. And then takes great pains to say that poetry is immediate, for everyone, and not scary at all, we promise. Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Traveled is a particularly nice intro guide.

And for others finding themselves in writing groups with poems to critique- a quick fix: ask the submitting poet what his/her favorite poem or poet is, go read some of that, and see if you can pinpoint things that are similar between the famous poet and the submitted piece.

What does everyone think? How do you explain poetry? How do you make it make sense or understand it?