Critiquing Poetry

Posted on May 6, 2003 in Writing Groups

Many people don’t understand that poetry is to be read aloud. I was at the writer’s critique group last night. Nannette sat at the head of the table, brooding over a mentionless unfinished task waiting for her in the backroom. The rest of us circled the yellow pine surface in our cushioned folding chairs and arm chairs. I sat at the far end, along one of the sides because I didn’t want to be staring at the group leader the entire time. Phoenix of the long dark hair and, these days, of the plastic surgery-bruised face and blinded left eye, sat next to me. She was on the spot for two poems that she’d written.

I’m not reprinting it because it’s not mine. It was good stuff, true, and concentrated, to the point of the emotions. A few people didn’t get it. They analyzed every word, tried to figure out the story that she was trying to tell. I listened to the criticism, reviewed the poems, and made a list of “ordinary things” that one saw in a bookstore.

I praised the poem in my turn, which was one of the first. When the round of the group had been made, I asked to be recognized again. I asked those who had evinced the most confusion about her choice of words if they’d read the poem aloud. They hadn’t. I read the passage which befuddled them, simply stating the words as she’d pressed them to paper. Then I looked around in the silence and said “Poems don’t need to tell a story. They need to move you to feel emotion. I think Phoenix succeeded here. And you need to realize that the subject of a poem isn’t a line, but an instant. Take Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. Many people have run afoul of that poem. They get to the line that says “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and they cry ‘Aha! This is the meaning of the poem!’ But that phrase’s bullshit. It’s the wink of the poet’s eye, it’s the smile in the verse. It’s telling you “Don’t try to find a message or a story in me. Just look at me. I’m beautiful.

“The poem’s not just in the words, it’s in the sounds and the echoes they create in our minds.”

Phoenix thanked me afterwards for setting them straight. And the ones I “corrected”, I think, are going home to look at the dusty old poetry anthologies from college and recite a few choice bits of verse aloud, listening for that which they missed in the silence of studied reading.