Prologue for Week 6: Commas, Cancer, and Close Reading

This week, I'm going to challenge you, once again, to make brief, concrete, objective observations about the poetry you are reading. As much as your feelings about a poem matter, there's a real value in deferring the subjective impulse so that you can first see what the poem is on its own merits.

To be clear: my suggestion is that you delay the first-person response. Don't skip it entirely. Let it go at first so you can come back to it with more insight later. (Bonus parenthetical OED Online fact: "delay" and "dilate" share a root, so the Socratic idea of birthing ideas through careful consideration and conversation is very much a part of the delay I'm suggesting.)

Once you understand a poem, how it works with words, what it's trying to do, what it does, and so on, you can have a richer personal interaction with it. Isn't it like that with your best friends? When we react to new people, expecting them to fit a prefabricated ideal, they fail us. When we seek to understand others as others--as people whose ideas and expectations differ from ours--we often find unlooked for truth and beauty.