FYS 9 How to Read Poems
In this class, we will learn to read poems. We will practice the slow reading that poems require. Most specimens of writing we encounter in daily life admit of fast reading. This is because these specimens of writing are not meant to draw attention to their language but to the stuff in the world that their language is about. News stories, Tweets, texts, social media posts, advertisements, and so on are typically instances of language use that are meant to inform you of things out there in the world beyond the language itself. Poems, in contrast, amount to uses of language that draw our attention to themselves. Metaphor, simile, alliteration, rhyme, word patterns, rhythm, meter, and so on are the very stuff of poetry. This is not to say that poems cannot also be about stuff. They can. But what is typically most important in poems is the way—the linguistic, verbal, wordy way—that they are about the stuff that they are about, rather than the stuff itself. In this class we will attend not only to the stuff poems are about but also to how they use their language to be about that stuff. In other words, we will learn to read poems. Open only to first-year frosh.