#okay caveat the vendler and ricks books are definitely out of print but get them used—i promise they pay for themselves

[deadpanwalking]

hello!! do you have any recommendations for books or essays about becoming a better reader of poetry? I love the poems you post and esp love when your tags go into what you got out of it / understood from it, bc it’s always so much more than I was able to interpret on my own. and I want to become a better reader and learn how to really sit with a poem and get into all its layers but idk where to start.

I stand behind the recs in this post, but since you want to focus on poetry and poetics, in addition to William Empson's The Seven Types of Ambiguity and Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, and Poetry, I'd also recommend Christopher Ricks' The Force of Poetry, I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, and Jorge Luis Borges' The Craft of Verse. They are all beautifully written, by people whose love of the form transcends academia and becomes, at times, a kind of secular worship. I loved poetry before I fully understood language, back when it was just incomprehensible mouthwords my parents repeated to get me to sleep; I'd have loved poetry even if I never toiled a day in the hermeneutics mines, like my grandmother reciting Eugene Onegin after her dementia cleared everything else from the table—she wasn't sure what it meant, all she knew was that this was the nicest thing she had. Isn't that a kind of faith?

There are other good books about how to read poetry, but these were the ones that initiated me into a conspiracy of words, they taught me to be curious about why I liked a poem, how to take pleasure in its vivisection without worrying I'd kill that faith—like martyrs, good poems never fall apart when you open them up, they yield. If anything, the practice of explication has made me even more of a fanatic. I hope it does the same for you!

If there are poets you already like, I can get more specific about recs—I'm partial to modernist poetry, but that just means I like following breadcrumb trails of allusions to lots of different literary traditions and can tell you where the bodies, hatchets and/or treasures are buried.