LESSON 2: TECHNIQUES FOR READING POETRY AND SHORT STORY

TECHNIQUES FOR READING POETRY

Reading poetry well is part attitude and part technique. Curiosity is a useful attitude,
especially when it’s free of preconceived ideas about what poetry is or should be.
Effective technique directs your curiosity into asking questions, drawing you into a
conversation with the poem.

The goal of careful reading is often to take up a question of meaning, an interpretive

question that has more than one answer. Since the form of a poem is part of its
meaning (for example, features such as repetition and rhyme may amplify or extend
the meaning of a word or idea, adding emphasis, texture, or dimension), questions
about form and technique, about the observable features of a poem, provide an
effective point of entry for interpretation. To ask some of these questions, you’ll need
to develop a good ear for the musical qualities of language, particularly how sound
and rhythm relate to meaning. This approach is one of many ways into a poem.

Getting Started: Prior Assumptions

Most readers make three false assumptions when addressing an unfamiliar poem.
The first is assuming that they should understand what they encounter on the first
reading, and if they don’t, that something is wrong with them or with the poem. The
second is assuming that the poem is a kind of code, that each detail corresponds to
one, and only one, thing, and unless they can crack this code, they’ve missed the
point. The third is assuming that the poem can mean anything readers want it to
mean.

William Carlos Williams wrote a verse addressed to his wife in the poem "January
Morning,":

All this—
was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it?
but you got to try hard—

Williams admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. He also suggests that a
poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must "complete" what
the poet has begun.
This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem,
bringing to it your experience and point of view. If a poem is "play" in the sense of a
game or a sport, then you enjoy that it makes you work a little, that it makes you
sweat a bit. Reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many other things, it takes
practice, and your skills and insight improve as you progress.

Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human
understanding about living, loving, and dying. Successful poems welcome you in,
revealing ideas that may not have been foremost in the writer’s mind in the moment
of composition. The best poetry has a magical quality—a sense of being more than
the sum of its parts—and even when it’s impossible to articulate this sense, this
something more, the power of the poem is left undiminished.

Poems speak to us in many ways. Though their forms may not always be direct or
narrative, keep in mind that a real person formed the moment of the poem, and it’s
wise to seek an understanding of that moment. Sometimes the job of the poem is to
come closer to saying what cannot be said in other forms of writing, to suggest an
experience, idea, or feeling that you can know but not entirely express in any direct
or literal way. The techniques of word and line arrangement, sound and rhythm, add
to—and in some cases, multiply—the meaning of words to go beyond the literal,
giving you an impression of an idea or feeling, an experience that you can’t quite put
into words but that you know is real.

Reading a Poem Aloud

Before you get very far with a poem, you have to read it. In fact, you can learn quite a
few things just by looking at it. The title may give you some image or association to
start with. Looking at the poem’s shape, you can see whether the lines are
continuous or broken into groups (called stanzas), or how long the lines are, and so
how dense, on a physical level, the poem is. You can also see whether it looks like the
last poem you read by the same poet or even a poem by another poet. All of these
are good qualities to notice, and they may lead you to a better understanding of the
poem in the end.

But sooner or later, you’re going to have to read the poem, word by word. To begin,
read the poem aloud. Read it more than once. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the
words make. Do you notice any special effects? Do any of the words rhyme? Is there
a cluster of sounds that seem the same or similar? Is there a section of the poem that
seems to have a rhythm that’s distinct from the rest of the poem? Don’t worry about
why the poem might use these effects. The first step is to hear what’s going on. If
you find your own voice distracting, have a friend read the poem to you.
That said, it can still be uncomfortable to read aloud or to make more than one pass
through a poem. Some of this attitude comes from the misconception that we
should understand a poem after we first read it, while some stems from sheer
embarrassment. Where could I possibly go to read aloud? What if my friends hear
me?

The Line

What determines where a line stops in poetry? There is, of course, more than one
answer to this question. Lines are often determined by meaning, sound and rhythm,
breath, or typography. Poets may use several of these elements at the same time.
Some poems are metrical in a strict sense. But what if the lines aren’t metrical? What
if the lines are irregular?

The relationship between meaning, sound, and movement intended by the poet is
sometimes hard to recognize, but there is an interplay between the grammar of a
line, the breath of a line, and the way lines are broken out in the poem—this is
called lineation. For example, lines that end with punctuation, called end-stopped
lines, are fairly simple. In that case, the punctuation and the lineation, and perhaps
even breathing, coincide to make the reading familiar and even predictable. But lines
that are not end-stopped present different challenges for readers because they
either end with an incomplete phrase or sentence or they break before the first
punctuation mark is reached. The most natural approach is to pay strict attention to
the grammar and punctuation. Reading to the end of a phrase or sentence, even if it
carries over one or several lines, is the best way to retain the grammatical sense of a
poem.

But lineation introduces another variable that some poets use to their
advantage. Robert Creeley is perhaps best known for breaking lines across expected
grammatical pauses. This technique often introduces secondary meaning, sometimes
in ironic contrast with the actual meaning of the complete grammatical phrase.
Consider these lines from Creeley’s poem "The Language":

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

Reading the lines as written, as opposed to their grammatical relationship, yields

some strange meanings. "Locate I" seems to indicate a search for identity, and
indeed it may, but the next line, which continues with "love you some-," seems to
make a diminishing statement about a relationship. On its own, "eyes bite" is very
disturbing.

Hearing Creeley read his poems can often be disquieting, because he pauses at the
end of each line, and these pauses create a kind of tension or counterpoint in
relation to the poem’s sentence structure. His halting, hesitant, breathless style is
immediately recognizable, and it presents writers with new ideas about meaning,
purely through lineation. But many poets who break lines disregarding grammatical
units do so only for visual irony, something that may be lost in performance. Among
metrical, free verse, and even experimental poets of today, there are those who do
not interrupt grammatical sense when reading a poem aloud as much as they
interrupt it in the poem’s typography. What to do as a reader? Try a variety of
methods. It’s fun to "Creeleyize" any poem, just to hear what the lineation is doing.
But if the results seem to detract from the poem’s impact, in terms of its imagery or
concept, drop the literal treatment of line breaks and read for grammar or visual
image. Reading a poem several ways allows you to see further into the poem simply
through repetition.

With poets who use techniques drawn from music—particularly jazz, such as Michael
S. Harper or Yusef Komunyakaa—or poets like Walt Whitman who employ unusually
long lines, there may be another guiding principle: breath. Some poets think of their
words as music flowing from a horn; they think of phrases the way a saxophonist
might. Poems composed in this way have varied line lengths but they have a
musicality in their lineation and a naturalness to their performance. They may have a
recognizable sense of measure, an equivalent duration between lines, or, for the sake
of contrast, one rhythmic pattern or duration that gives way to successive variations.

For some poems, visual impact may also be important. In "shaped poetry," as well as
many other types of writing that are meant to be seen as a painting might be seen,
the line is determined by its placement in space. Some visually oriented poets
present real challenges in that the course of the poem may not be entirely clear.
Visual choices presented by the poet may be confusing. Sometimes the
arrangements of words on a page are intended to represent different voices in a
dialogue, or even a more complex discourse on a subject. Overlapping and layering
might be the poet’s intent, which no single voice can achieve. It’s best to be aware
that poems with multiple voices, or focuses exist and, again, looking for the inherent
rules that determine the shape of the poem is the best approach.

Remember that the use of these techniques, in any combination, pushes the words of
the poem beyond their literal meanings. If you find more in a poem than the words
alone convey, then something larger is at work, making the poem more than the sum
of its parts.

Starting the Conversation

We mentioned earlier that encountering a difficult poem is like a game or sport, say
rock climbing, that makes you work a bit. The idea of finding handholds and
footholds and ascending one bit at a time is apt. But some climbs are easier than
others; some are very easy. You may enjoy an easy climb for a while, but you may
also find that you want a bigger challenge. Reading poetry works the same way, and,
fortunately, poets leave trails to help you look for the way "up" a poem. You’ll have
to do some work, hard work in some cases, but most of the time, the trails are there
for you to discover.

The best way to discover and learn about a poem is through shared inquiry
discussion. Although your first experience of the poem may be private and personal,
talking about the poem is a natural and important next step. Beginning with a focus
question about the poem, the discussion addresses various possible answers to the
question, reshaping and clarifying it along the way. The discussion should remain
grounded in the text as much as possible. Responses that move away from what is
written into personal anecdotes or tangential leaps should be gently urged back into
analyzing the text. The basis for shared inquiry is close reading. Good readers "dirty
the text" with notes in the margins. They make the inquiry their own.

Talking Back to a Poem

It would be convenient if there were a short list of universal questions, ones that
could be used anytime with any poem. In the absence of such a list, here are a few
general questions that you might ask when approaching a poem for the first time:

 Who is the speaker?

 What circumstances gave rise to the poem?
 What situation is presented?
 Who or what is the audience?
 What is the tone?
 What form, if any, does the poem take?
 How is form related to content?
 Is sound an important, active element of the poem?
 Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment?
 Does the poem speak from a specific culture?
 Does the poem have its own vernacular?
 Does the poem use imagery to achieve a particular effect?
 What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use?
 If the poem is a question, what is the answer?
 If the poem is an answer, what is the question?
 What does the title suggest?
 Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way?
You can fall back on these questions as needed, but experience suggests that since
each poem is unique, such questions will not go the necessary distance. In many
instances, knowing who the speaker is may not yield any useful information. There
may be no identifiable occasion that inspired the poem. But poems do offer clues
about where to start. Asking questions about the observable features of a poem will
help you find a way in.

We’ll now bring inquiry to bear on two very different poems, each of which presents
its own challenges:

 "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams

 "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

Text and Context

Some people say that a poem is always an independent work of art and that readers
can make full sense of it without having to use any source outside the poem itself.
Others say that no text exists in a vacuum. However, the truth lies somewhere in
between. Most poems are open to interpretation without the aid of historical context
or knowledge about the author’s life. In fact, it’s often best to approach a poem
without the kind of preconceived ideas that can accompany this kind of information.
Other poems, however, overtly political poems in particular, will benefit from some
knowledge of the poet’s life and times. The amount of information needed to clearly
understand depends on you and your encounter with the poem. It’s possible, of
course, even for someone with a deep background in poetry to be unaware of
certain associations or implications in a poem. This is because poems are made of
words that accumulate new meanings over time.

Consider this situation, a true story, of a poet who found a "text" at the San Mateo
coast in northern California. As she scrambled over rocks behind the beach, near the
artichoke fields that separate the shore from the coast highway, she found a large
smear of graffiti painted on the rocks, proclaiming "La Raza," a Chicano political
slogan meaning "the struggle." She sat down and wrote a poem. Why? her poem
asked. I understand, she wrote, why someone would write La Raza on the side of a
building, or on public transport. There it would be seen and would shout its protest
from the very foundations of the oppressive system. But why here, in nature, in
beauty, so far from that political arena. Couldn’t you leave the coast unspoiled? Then,
one evening while reading the poem in Berkeley she got her answer. A man came up
to her and asked her, "Do you want to know?" "I beg your pardon," she said. "Those
fields," the man went on, "were where Chicanos had been virtually enslaved, beaten,
and forced to live in squalor for decades." The landscape was not innocent of
political struggle. The text was not out of place.

Embrace Ambiguity
Here’s a tricky issue: the task is to grasp, to connect, to understand. But such a task is
to some degree impossible, and most people want clarity. At the end of class, at the
end of the day, we want revelation, a glimpse of the skyline through the lifting fog.
Aesthetically, this is understandable. Some magic, some satisfaction, some "Ahhh!" is
one of the rewards of any reading, and particularly the reading of poetry. But a poem
that reveals itself completely in one or two readings will, over time, seem less of a
poem than one that constantly reveals subtle recesses and previously unrecognized
meanings.

Here’s a useful analogy. A life partner, a husband, a wife—these are people with
whom we hope to constantly renew our love. Despite the routine, the drone of
familiarity, the daily preparation of meals and doing of dishes, the conversations
we’ve had before, we hope to find a sense of discovery, of surprise. The same is true
of poems. The most magical and wonderful poems are ever renewing themselves,
which is to say they remain ever mysterious.

Too often we resist ambiguity. Perhaps our lives are changing so fast that we long for
stability somewhere, and because most of the reading we do is for instruction or
information, we prefer it without shades of gray. We want it to be predictable and
easy to digest. And so difficult poetry is the ultimate torment.

Some literary critics would link this as well to the power of seeing, to the relationship
between subject and object. We wish the poem to be object so we can possess it
through our "seeing" its internal workings. When it won’t allow us to "objectify" it, we
feel powerless.

Torment, powerlessness—these are the desired ends? Well, no. The issue is our
reaction, how we shape our thoughts through words. We have to give up our
material attitude, which makes us want to possess the poem. Maybe we’ve bought
the book but we don’t own the poem. We have to cultivate a new mindset, a new
practice of enjoying the inconclusive.

Embracing ambiguity is a much harder task for some than for others. Nothing scares
some people like the idea (even the idea) of improvisation as a writing or analytical
tool. Some actors hate being without a script; the same is true of some musicians.
Ask even some excellent players to improvise and they start to sweat. Of course,
actors and musicians will say that there is mystery in what they do with a script or a
score, and it would be pointless to disagree. The point, after all, is that text is
mysterious. Playing the same character night after night, an actor discovers
something in the lines, some empathy for the character, that he or she had never felt
before. Playing or listening to a song for the hundredth time—if it is a great song—
will yield new interpretation and discovery. So it is with great poetry.
General Strategies for Reading Comprehension
The process of comprehending text begins before children can read, when someone reads a
picture book to them. They listen to the words, see the pictures in the book, and may start to
associate the words on the page with the words they are hearing and the ideas they represent.

In order to learn comprehension strategies, students need modeling, practice, and feedback. The
key comprehension strategies are described below.

Using Prior Knowledge/Previewing

When students preview text, they tap into what they already know that will help them to
understand the text they are about to read. This provides a framework for any new information
they read.

Predicting
When students make predictions about the text they are about to read, it sets up expectations
based on their prior knowledge about similar topics. As they read, they may mentally revise their
prediction as they gain more information.

Identifying the Main Idea and Summarization

Identifying the main idea and summarizing requires that students determine what is important
and then put it in their own words. Implicit in this process is trying to understand the author’s
purpose in writing the text.

Questioning
Asking and answering questions about text is another strategy that helps students focus on the
meaning of text. Teachers can help by modeling both the process of asking good questions and
strategies for finding the answers in the text.

Making Inferences
In order to make inferences about something that is not explicitly stated in the text, students must
learn to draw on prior knowledge and recognize clues in the text itself.

Visualizing
Studies have shown that students who visualize while reading have better recall than those who
do not (Pressley, 1977). Readers can take advantage of illustrations that are embedded in the
text or create their own mental images or drawings when reading text without illustrations.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Narrative

Text
Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. There are a number of strategies
that will help students understand narrative text.
Story Maps
Teachers can have students diagram the story grammar of the text to raise their awareness of
the elements the author uses to construct the story. Story grammar includes:

 Setting: When and where the story takes place (which can change over the course of the
story).
 Characters: The people or animals in the story, including the protagonist (main character),
whose motivations and actions drive the story.
 Plot: The story line, which typically includes one or more problems or conflicts that the
protagonist must address and ultimately resolve.
 Theme: The overriding lesson or main idea that the author wants readers to glean from the
story. It could be explicitly stated as in Aesop’s Fables or inferred by the reader (more
common).

Printable story map (blank)

Retelling
Asking students to retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content to
determine what is important. Teachers can encourage students to go beyond literally recounting
the story to drawing their own conclusions about it.

Prediction
Teachers can ask readers to make a prediction about a story based on the title and any other
clues that are available, such as illustrations. Teachers can later ask students to find text that
supports or contradicts their predictions.

Answering Comprehension Questions

Asking students different types of questions requires that they find the answers in different ways,
for example, by finding literal answers in the text itself or by drawing on prior knowledge and then
inferring answers based on clues in the text.

Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Expository

Text
Expository text explains facts and concepts in order to inform, persuade, or explain.

The Structure of Expository Text

Expository text is typically structured with visual cues such as headings and subheadings that
provide clear cues as to the structure of the information. The first sentence in a paragraph is also
typically a topic sentence that clearly states what the paragraph is about.

Expository text also often uses one of five common text structures as an organizing principle:

 Cause and effect

 Problem and solution
 Compare and contrast
 Description
 Time order (sequence of events, actions, or steps)

Teaching these structures can help students recognize relationships between ideas and the
overall intent of the text.

Main Idea/Summarization
A summary briefly captures the main idea of the text and the key details that support the main
idea. Students must understand the text in order to write a good summary that is more than a
repetition of the text itself.
K-W-L
There are three steps in the K-W-L process (Ogle, 1986):

1. What I Know: Before students read the text, ask them as a group to identify what they
already know about the topic. Students write this list in the “K” column of their K-W-L forms.
2. What I Want to Know: Ask students to write questions about what they want to learn from
reading the text in the “W” column of their K-W-L forms. For example, students may wonder if
some of the “facts” offered in the “K” column are true.
3. What I Learned: As they read the text, students should look for answers to the questions
listed in the “W” column and write their answers in the “L” column along with anything else
they learn.

After all of the students have read the text, the teacher leads a discussion of the questions and
answers.

Printable K-W-L chart (blank)

Graphic Organizers
Graphic organizers provide visual representations of the concepts in expository text.
Representing ideas and relationships graphically can help students understand and remember
them. Examples of graphic organizers are:

Tree diagrams that represent categories and hierarchies

Tables that compare and contrast data

Time-driven diagrams that represent the order of events

Strategies for Reading Comprehension in Read

Naturally Programs
Several Read Naturally programs include strategies that support comprehension:

Strategies for Reading Comprehension

Read Naturally Intervention
Program Quiz /
Predictio Retelling Graphic
Comprehension
n Step Step Organizers
Questions

Read Naturally Live:

A mostly independent, cloud-based
✔ ✔  Main idea
program with built-in audio support.  Literal
Focuses on fluency and phonics with  Vocabulary
additional support for vocabulary.
 Inferential
 Short answer
 Learn more about Read Naturally
 Retell /
Live
 summary
 Comparison
 Video: Working through a story
questions
(levels 5.6–8.0)

 Main idea
Read Naturally Encore:
A mostly independent, print-based  Literal
program with audio support on CDs.  Vocabulary
Focuses on fluency and phonics with
 Inferential
additional support for vocabulary.
 Short answer
 Learn more about Read Naturally
✔ ✔  Retell /
Encore summary
 Read Naturally Encore sample  Comparison
stories questions
(levels 5.6–8.0)

Read Naturally GATE:

 Literal
Teacher-led instruction for small
groups of early readers. Focuses on (containing
phonics and fluency instruction with many words
additional support for phonemic
awareness and vocabulary. with the
✔ ✔ featured
 Learn more about Read Naturally phonics
GATE patterns)
 Read Naturally GATE samples  Short answer

One Minute Reader Live:

A component of web-based Read Live
for supplemental, independent reading  Main idea
that develops fluency with support
 Literal
for vocabulary and comprehension.
 Vocabulary
 Learn more about the One Minute  Inference
Reader Live

One Minute Reader Books/CDs:  Main idea

Printed books with audio support on
CDs that develop readers’ fluency with  Literal
support for vocabulary and  Vocabulary
comprehension.
 Inference
 Short answer
 Learn more about the One Minute
(oral response)
Reader Books/CDs
 One Minute Reader sample book

 Main idea
 Literal
Take Aim at Vocabulary: A print-  Vocabulary
based program with audio CDs that
 Inference
teaches carefully selected target words
and strategies for independently  Vocabulary:
learning unknown words. Students Clarify target
work mostly independently or in
teacher-led small groups of up to six words
students.  Vocabulary: Stu ✔
dy word parts
 Learn more about Take Aim at and review
Vocabulary target words
 Take Aim at Vocabulary samples  Vocabulary:
Apply the target
words

ACTIVITY 1: Read the poem and try to analyse the passage of it.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

The versification of the poem would be best classified as __________.

Possible Answers:

running rhythm

trochaic verse
blank verse

free verse

sprung rhythm

ACTIVITY 2: Write a short story and after use one of the strategies
above.

Activity 3: Poetry Quiz #1-Sylvia Plath

Pick the BEST answers based on Sylvia Plath's poem "Metaphors":

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils,
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

1.What does the title of the poem suggest?

a.that the poem will be vague and random
b.that the poem will involve implicit comparisons
c.that the poem should be taken literally
d.that the poem should be ignored entirely

2.The first line is an example of:

a.hyperbole
b.onomatopoeia
c.metaphor
d.metonymy
3. The first sentence compares the speaker to:
a.a riddle, an elephant, a house, and a melon
b.a riddle, nine syllables, an elephant, a house, a melon, and a fruit
c.a riddle, an elephant, a house, a melon, fruit, ivory, and timbers
d.a riddle, syllables, an elephant, a house, and a melon

4.If a person is compared to “an elephant” and “a ponderous

house,” the image is one of:
a.humour, since people are nothing like elephants and houses
b.large size, since only something large could be like elephants and houses
c.small size, since compared to elephants and houses, people are small
d.nothing, since people cannot be compared to those things

5.A “melon strolling on two tendrils” is an example of:

a.alliteration
b.allusion
c.irony
d.personification

6.A “melon strolling on … fine timbers,” in the context of the poem,

implies an image of:
a. a person whose legs seem particularly small in relation to his/her body
b. strolling and feeling just fine
c. the impossible literally happening in front of the reader’s eyes
d. fruit having feelings and being able to move

7. In the fourth sentence, the speaker compares herself to:

a. a means and a cow
b. a means, a stage, a cow, and a calf
c. a stage, a cow, and a calf
d. a means, a stage, and a cow

8.The final image: “boarded the train, there’s no getting off” implies
a sense of:
a. happiness
b. irreversibility
c. bliss
d. shock

9.When all of the comparisons are taken together the speaker is

expressing that she is:
a. crazy
b. excited
c. ugly
d. pregnant

10. Ultimately the poem:

a. cleverly uses metaphors to show that the speaker is literate
b. uses metaphors and hyperbole to present an image of pregnancy in its later
stages
c. uses metaphors to express a feeling of a crazy sort of excitement that the
speaker feels
d. metaphors to suggest that the speaker feels that she is terribly ugly and is
ashamed of her appearance