{"id":188240,"date":"2025-12-16T21:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T21:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/188240\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T21:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T21:54:08","slug":"how-to-read-a-poem-harvard-gazette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/188240\/","title":{"rendered":"How to read a poem \u2014 Harvard Gazette"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Young<\/a> \u201992 is the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the former director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He was the 2024 recipient of the Harvard Arts Medal<\/a>. His most recent book is \u201cNight Watch.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Poetry is traditionally taught \u2014 at least it was taught to me \u2014 as a kind of thing you have to endure in English class; there\u2019s no sense of it applying to your life. But poetry, good poetry, is the stuff of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Poetry asks us to slow down and to think about what we\u2019re reading, but also to experience it. It\u2019s the kind of reading you do when you\u2019re a kid: You ingest it whole. It\u2019s not the bits and bites that I think we\u2019re used to sometimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry asks us to slow down and to think about what we\u2019re reading, but also to experience it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin Young<\/p>\n

Poetry also rewards rereading. There are poems I\u2019ve read a million times that one day mean something totally different. Having that sort of lifetime experience with a poem is really precious. Your tastes change some, but it\u2019s also that the poem never changes, but you do. Say, if you lose a loved one, poems that might talk about grief might not mean as much to you till after. Having edited a book of grief poems, people write to me almost weekly and tell me how much that book meant to them. It\u2019s been really powerful to see that testimony, and the companionship that poetry offers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no wrong way to read a poem. It\u2019s sort of similar to how there may be a right way to set the table \u2014 certainly my mom would say there is \u2014 but is there one way to enjoy your meal? I don\u2019t know. The best way is to taste it, experience it. I do think that reading aloud or hearing out loud makes a difference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Emily Dickinson says<\/a>, \u201cIf I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.\u201d It\u2019s as much a physical thing as it is an emotional thing. I like music in poems, so that quality of song in the broadest sense.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even at its best, even at its most clarion, it still has a mystery in it: The more I know about poetry, the more the mystery of it grows.<\/p>\n

So how do you approach poetry? I think it\u2019s through not seeing it as some foreign land, but as part of our everyday lives. If you\u2019re looking for entry points, there are many great places that offer public readings, both in person or online. That\u2019s where I first understood poetry: sitting in an audience with other people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But really, it\u2019s you and the poem. What\u2019s so incredible is the poem is waiting for you, and it transports you for the duration of the poem into another life. It brings you out of yourself and into this other self for the length of the poem, and hopefully for a few beats after. You carry a poem in your body. It lives with you. It can\u2019t be taken from you. There are not many things like that anymore.<\/p>\n

As told to Sy Boles\/Harvard Staff Writer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Young \u201992 is the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the former director of the Smithsonian\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[243,146,80317,85,46],"class_list":["post-188240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-education","tag-entertainment","tag-humanities","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}