Tone deaf to poetry - help!

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Tone deaf to poetry - help!

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1Cecrow
Ene 2, 2019, 8:45 am

I love prose, can't comprehend poetry. I can appreciate some of the technique - rhyme, meter, etc. - but it's a terrible way for me to follow a narrative. Mood pieces I generally do okay with, but I can't get anywhere with, say, The Odyssey and only conquered it when I resorted to a prose version.

Take me back to school (since mine did little/nothing on this front, at least that stuck): what are the fundamentals here for obtaining an appreciation?

2bluepiano
Ene 2, 2019, 9:58 am

This isn't a discriminating approach but it's what I'd do: 1) Forget about the techniques & elements of poets & poetry; 2) Find an anthology with a wide range of poems. Take note of ones you especially like. Look further into the writers of them. Look further into the poems/poets this leads you to. Look into the mileus from which they came. And so on. (Most of my anthologies are confined to works from a certain period, nation, etc. or are used in classrooms and you'd probably want something more general; I've just finished Poems on the Underground and it might suit you well: very short poems which although mostly all Anglo are from wide range of times & styles, none of them taxing but none of them dumbed-down.)

If it's only poems that tell a story you want, someone else could better advise you--what first occurs to me are epics & medieval tales and neither tend to be easy going. And as well, translations/modernising of the original language can be variable & are sometimes at their worst when modern writer tries to force new version into poetic form.--I adore the Child Ballads but their significance and their appeal doesn't really lie in their poetry.

Sorry if this all sounds too fuzzy to be useful.

3bluepiano
Ene 2, 2019, 10:03 am

Whoops, my post was about finding enjoyment in rather than appreciation of poetry, wasn't it? Never mind, broad appreciation will come along in time, and hexameters & enjambment you can worry about later; I promise you that no one is going to catch you out with a snap quiz on them in the meantime.

4haydninvienna
Ene 2, 2019, 11:38 am

As to following a narrative: I recently finished reading The Faerie Queene, which is about 1200 pages long in the Penguin edition, and I can tell you what worked for me. One of the problems with verse narrative (metrical verse narrative anyway), of course, is that the syntax gets scrambled for the sake of the meter. My solution of this problem was to take it slowly, imagine it being read aloud (a good idea for any sort of poetry actually) and just let it flow like that. If you can get an audiobook read by someone who knows how, that might be even better (although The Faerie Queene in audiobook form would be a massively long audiobook). C S Lewis suggested somewhere that in reading Milton you should imagine a voice chanting the lines.

And on reading poetry aloud: do so whenever possible. I have T S Eliot's Four Quartets read by Robert Speaight. Speaight had superbly clear diction and as an actor he knew how to phrase the reading. I used to find Four Quartets difficult on the page. With Speaight reading, they are almost as easy to understand as good prose.

5bluepiano
Ene 3, 2019, 3:13 am

Remembered a good book that might help in understanding elements of poetry, How to Read a Poem, if read selectively--the first portion deals with literary criticism. Even so I wouldn't set myself the task of getting it under my belt before diving into reading poems themselves.

6thorold
Ene 5, 2019, 2:10 am

>3 bluepiano: >4 haydninvienna:

Yes! I’m pretty sure “appreciation” is meaningless unless it’s preceded by enjoyment. And reading aloud is probably the best way in, especially for narrative poetry. Dig out some recordings made by really good actors or by the poets themselves, and you’ll find you’re listening to the story and not fussing about decoding the syntax.

After all, oral performance is the way most of us come to poetry as children - if I think back to my first memories of enjoying poetry then it’s having (different) elderly relatives reading Hiawatha and Max und Moritz to me before I learnt to read. Although ... I don’t think the story of Hiawatha meant all that much to me at the time, but the rhythm and richness of the language were just so magnificent.

And do look for poems that grab your interest because of the subject-matter. Maybe the Odyssey simply didn’t grab you because island-hopping isn’t your thing? How about Milton, if you want more of a brain workout, or Browning for narrative complexity? Or Scott or Tennyson for clarity? Or Wordsworth for introspection?

The other supremely impractical bit of advice is to find a good teacher. There’s nothing like the experience of sitting round a table with a group of keen students guided by someone who really knows what they are talking about when you’re trying to make sense of how a poem works. I had the good luck to have a couple of teachers at school and one undergraduate tutor who were brilliant at getting the class to do the thinking.

7bluepiano
Ene 5, 2019, 4:22 am

>6 thorold: Milton? Browning? You're being a bit naughty. ('A bit naughty' is one of those coded phrases--like convivial, confirmed bachelor--& means 'a thoroughgoing sadist'.)

Cecrow, if you're intent upon reading a classic narrative poem, maybe The Inferno; I read it in Ciardi's translation & it went down well. And yes, HIawatha IS a good one IF you want a SENSE of metre. If you're happy enough reading poems that simply express moods, impressions, observations there's a world of them to explore.

My elderly relatives were all killed by a falling dirigible so I had to make do with reading Gilgamesh in cuneiform after Mummy tucked me in at night.

8thorold
Ene 5, 2019, 8:16 am

>7 bluepiano: reading Gilgamesh in cuneiform after Mummy tucked me in at night.

Keep on taking the (clay) tablets!

I wasn’t being excessively malicious - I think Milton and Browning could be just the thing for some kinds of people who have trouble with narrative verse, because of how concentrated they are. You never get the chance to drift off and lose track of what’s going on as you might with more normal poets. And if it doesn’t work for you, you’ll know that very quickly.