How the fuck do you read poetry

I've taken a number of poetry classes from hs through college and I'd advise the following:
1. Learn what all the metrical feet and metres are (iambs trochees, anapests, dactyls etc.) (Iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, etc.)
2. Pay attention to rhyme schemes
3. Learn other poetical techniques like metrical substitution, caesura, etc.
4. Find some list of world's greatest poems or just start with some random poets like keats, yeats, milton, Browning, and scan the poems with all the above in mind.
5. The above are formal elements. There are also structural elements: e.g. around line 9 of a sonnet the author's tone toward the subject is supposed to shift. Pay attention to formal elements: forshadowing, the author's tone toward his subject at each line/stanza, setting up expectation then breaking it, etc.
6. Enjoy!

any good books mate?

There's a book called de/compositions that takes 100 or so 'good' poems and rewrites them as bad so that you can see the difference.

For one thing I end up picking up "The complete poems of ***" volumes at used bookstores all the time. Good way to read through a poet's progression.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature books have a pretty great selection of the most influentoal english poems.
For books about poetry I've found these two both good:
Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

I also juat got this and it's really comprehensive and honestly fun to leaf through:
The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms

kys

>e.g. around line 9 of a sonnet the author's tone toward the subject is supposed to shift.
In the Petrarcan sonnet, when the stanzas change from quatrains to tercets. The shift in the Shakespearean sonnet, however, happens only in the final couplet.
Just some pedantic faggotry, to avoid potential confusion.

>how exactly poetry works, how to read it, and how to appreciate it.
Nobody knows, really. Poetry has existed for millenia all over the world - it is impossible to catch and describe every way in which it might work. There are indeed many objective aspects of the art that suggested, but they, by themselves, are only a vocabulary that might assist you in understanding an individual work.
>Why do poets choose the structure of their stanzas (?) the way they do?
Stanzas are groups of lines/verses, usually separated from each other by blank space. A stanza is in some way a distinct whole. Often it is equal to one sentence, and has "its own" rhyme (stanzas of four verses - quatrains - will often have this sort of rhyme scheme - ABAB CDCD EFEF etc. - so each stanza will have its own "sound").
>By which I mean, why are some lines short? Why are some lines long?
"By which I mean", from what I understood, is here because of your misunderstanding - lines and stanzas are not the same thing. Lines being long or short is related to the rhythm and meaning. For the rhythm, it's obviously not the same to say a verse of eight and a verse of seventeen syllables (syllables are the measure of a verse's length throughout most of literary history). For the meaning, shorter lines imply more semantic weight given to the words in it, while longer lines will be more likely to be used in epic poetry that has to describe great amounts of scenes and "data". An extreme example of short verses is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_d'automne , and even if you don't know French you can feel their calmness and musicality (thanks to the close rhymes).
>Why do they sometimes leave a large gap between words?
Could be some free verse poem that, rather than through sound, works to a great degree through visuals.
>Is the way the poem is physically written (or printed) supposed to influence the speed, rhythm, and tone it is read in?
Lines usually correspond to rhythmic and semantic units, so it is natural to take a "rest" at the end. But exactly how long you'll rest, at which points, and the tone you'll assume in reading, is up to your own interpretation. Like in classical music, no two pianists will perform a piece in the same way, so will no two readers of literature read a text in the same way. I like reading poems aloud and experimenting with the tone, how it might affect the meaning.

(cont)
>I always end up just reading poetry like a book
Like prose? Yeah, poetry, especially lyric, is not a typical communicative text. One of my professors has an interesting thesis - that lyric poetry is akin to painting. On the semantic level it is instantaneous (if a text describes a series of events it's technically not lyric but an epic/narrative work), and the reader shouldn't go through it like through prose or film or music, but be still, look at it, contemplate it, search for details, like you'd do with a painting.
book should explain what it means.
>You can see that words sometimes have longer spaces between them than just an ordinary space
That is most likely a visual representation of a caesura, a small pause within the verse. It is very common in Old English poetry, such as Beowulf, and the poem on the left seems to be written in that language too. Each of the two halves (hemistichs) has, if I'm not mistaken, two stresses. (Caesuras are sometimes signified by dashes, or, most usually, not at all, which is what the translation on the right does.) However, the poem's meaning is very obscure, and because of the illustrations I even though it was some contemporary experiment and exercise in writing in Old English. It seems to be a sort of a riddle, the introduction to the book or endnotes should explain it.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book/69
huh, it's about a hen and cock screwing and the poet being a smartass

Riddles, kennings, and alliteration were super common in Old English/Old Norse/Old Germanic poetry. Despite the common misconception of the Germanic tribes being barbaric brutes with no culture, they actually really valued wit when it came to writing.

Often an entire poem about, for example, the waves of the sea washing away a rock, might actually be used as a metaphor for marriage or some shit. Their kennings are obviously one of the most famous aspects of their poetry. Beowulf literally means "the bee-wolf," which means a bear, which itself is a metaphor for Beowulf being a great and powerful warrior. Germanic poets would refer to the sea as something like "the whale's road," or refer to warriors as "raven feeders."

That's why I love reading Old English poetry in the original text. I'm currently trying to learn Old Norse so I can read the sagas too. Every poem is like trying to solve a riddle and figure out what they're referring to, on top of whatever theme the author was already talking about.

I can vouch for this user. It is a great book to get you familiar with Poetry.

>I think the greatest failing I've ever personally experienced in my education growing up was that I was never taught
SROP. STOP. STOP right there and consider that thought over and over and over

What would you like me to consider? None of the English classes I ever took in elementary or high school ever actually taught us shit about poetry. We'd be assigned the Iliad or John Milton and Chaucer but the teachers never actually taught us how to interpret what we were reading, or even anything about the objective parts of poetry like meter and rhyme. Assignments based on poetry assignments were just skin deep "what do you think he meant" shit.

I'm not sure if you're an American or not, but my experience is pretty run-of-the-mill for most public American schools. American education is dogshit, pretty much everything I know today (including trades and skills) I had to learn on my own or outside of our education system. My family didn't have the money to send me to a halfway decent school growing up.

>but the teachers never actually taught us how to interpret what we were reading, or even anything about the objective parts of poetry like meter and rhyme.
Good. Yes. Deeper.
>American education is dogshit, pretty much everything I know today (including trades and skills) I had to learn on my own or outside of our education system.
DEEPER. I CANNOT GIVE YOU IT
>decent school
Misnomer for what failed you, a school doesn't tutor, or chastise, or moralise, or badger, or take in secrets and dole out advice. They do none of these things for you, maybe that they failed to provide the SPACE for them, maybe a little bit

based retard

You are a certifiable mongoloid if you actually believe that teachers are infallible saints who can do no wrong and can never fail a student in his education. Stop swallowing teacher union propaganda, teachers can (and often are) fucking idiots who have no business educating people and are completely unqualified to teach even the most basic subjects. Most of the people I went to school with who went on to become teachers were usually the stupid whores who all worked at Texas Roadhouse but "really loved working with kids" and shit. Not a single worthwhile thought in their head, hence why they went to community college for a stupid piece of paper that says they're somehow qualified to be a teacher.

>No one told me how to feel about what I'm reading, so I don't know how to feel about it.
What a fucking moron.

>muh unions
Teacher here, come at me. Explain how you would teach a room full of violent 17 year-olds with 8th grade reading comprehension and zero work ethic. In detail, please. I've been trying to figure it out for about 6 years now.

A salud

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>teachers can (and often are) fucking idiots who have no business educating people and are completely unqualified to teach even the most basic subjects.
NOOOO TEACHING AS A CONCEPT AND THE NECESSITT FOR A MORE EDUCATED MIND TO IMPART ANH SUGH FROM OF TECHUNG BTFO FOREVER you brainlet did you not grasp that I AFRIMMED WHAT HE WROTE YOU STUPID WHOTE HIS TEACHING AND CLEARL YOURS OO IS PURE SHIT

Take your meds.
I'm not assigning teachers all of the blame for how fucked up US schools are. Obviously there are good teachers out there stuck in a shitty spot, but the vast majority of teachers at public schools in the US are mediocre at best and know less than the kids they're supposed to be teaching at worst.

You pretty much have to read it out loud to get it, and yes the formatting is indicative of rhythms. If you want maximum authenticity, you should accompany yourself while reading.

>I pretend to have no genealogy but fall back on aborted, hazy, and muddled autodidacticisms rather than mediated didactic tutoring giving me the space for a truly free and personal autodidactic lifestyle after having broken free of an established and respectable genealogy.
You're worse than intestinal worms.

That's not what I said or even implied. I pointed out that at no point in my schooling was I ever taught anything about meter, rhyme, alliteration, or any of the technical aspects of writing poetry, or even prose for that matter, with the exception of basic English grammar and shit.

Even outside of English literature and poetry, the way schools teach grammar, vocabulary, and the linguistics of the English language is dogshit. Like I said earlier in the thread, I never finished my senior year of high school because I had to drop out and work, but I still experienced enough to know how little I learned. I wasn't even in the retard classes or anything, I was always in honors class shit, which was run only marginally better than normal classes.

Here's the most logical and rigorous analysis that that proposal deserves: You should not.

>the vast majority of teachers
Fuck off. Public schools are shit because of students and parents, not the poorly paid, overworked public servants blamed for your shit life choices.

>the way they teach grammar, vocabulary,and linguistics
Uh huh. What is the "way they teach grammar?"

But user, if I don't it's my fault for abandoning students. Those shitty teachers, amirite?

Don't fret too much, user, abortions fear reflection. You've been scorned an educated by society, now you know that you must take the monumental task of destroying all genealogies in the process of forming a new one (read: you must not, you don't have the superlative academic training, no one has for ,maybe, a century), or you must find sufficient peace in never being an intellectual, or at least an awake one.

Of course it's your fault. You fucking whelp, take some responsibility. You CHOSE to take their education into your hands, of course the megaborted institutions and the retarded don't let you really leave a mark on the students, every arm of society is, at once and always, indirectly distracting everyone from or directly rending useless via impediment any real attempt at master-pupil relating.
I don't blame you any more than the next guy, user. It's an anonymous burden, and every teacher (evert student every parent) is just as at fault for even mantling themselves for mass education, in a way. It's hypocritical, and I'm not in any place to make economic or political prescriptions, much less any real actionable statements. I'm just mad and critical

>it's your fault but society
Fuck off. I don't make society, I didn't break society. I'm asked to fix it and blamed by cunts like you when I fail.

Good thing you dropped out, it's clear the system wasn't the problem with your education.

>I'm just mad and critical
"useless" works too