Fucking hell, /lit/, how do i get poetry? I've been studying

read poetry out loud

>>9665766
fuck off le "just listen to the music of the words and feel the shiver in your spine, that's all u need :')" fag

Express yourself, not others. If you try to express others you will never learn to express yourself. Be critical of your work. Read everything more than once, make edits often. This is how I generally write mine.

For me learning to read poetry was a combination of three things:

- Deprogramming my YA fiction-reading retard expectations that every single sentence should have a single, easily accessed declarative meaning, and they should all be linearly related to telling me a single, easily accessed story.

- Learning to read meter properly, and expanding my ability to read different syntactical structures. I remember not being able to understand why the iambic pentameter blank verse of Milton, or Fitzgerald's translation of the Aeneid, was supposed to sound good. I just couldn't get my head into it, it seemed arbitrary, and the few times something would start to "sound good," it would collapse disappointingly a line later and leave me wondering whether it was just an accident. But after a while, the rhythm becomes second nature, and you really do feel the flowing beat and its implied anticipations.

- Knowing the historical, cultural, and spiritual context of poems. Try to read them as one of their contemporary audience might have read them. Think of things that annoy you and confuse you about the contemporary world, now, and imagine that the poem was addressing (or maybe pointedly not addressing?) its equivalents, in the era in which it was written.

Remember, people didn't have TV in 1805. They used to take a poetry book and go sit under a fucking tree on a nice day, and with their classical education behind them, read the latest poetry by some dude they had heard in the newspaper was writing a cutting-edge critique of the failing government or the recent botched revolution, or the feeling that industry was destroying London, or whatever. They were used to taking their time, feeling out their understanding of the poem and its contents.

One thing that really helped me was to listen to readings of poems on Youtube and hear what a more experienced ear makes of them. One of my favorite poems is "Snake," by D.H. Lawrence. Try reading it yourself here first:
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/dhl.snake.html

Actually give it a go, feeling out how it "should" be read. And then listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE0QvcFLEs8

You'll probably find that you're surprised at certain things. For me, I was consistently surprised at how experienced poetry readers gave themselves reflexive "permission" to pause, put weight on certain things, be emotional, etc. It was like my mind couldn't conceive of doing that.

Once I realised I had permission, too, I found it much easier to do the three things above, because I realised I could read poems in their own relaxed time and space, instead of trying to extract a single didactic meaning from them at the same pace that I'd read a news article.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/palinode

Palinode
—Monica Youn

1.

a bird / falls off / a balcony / panicked grasping / fistfuls of / air

2.

I was wrong
please I was
wrong please I
wanted nothing please
I don’t want

Tell us what you get out of it and what you think you're missing in this poem, and I'll try to direct you to some resources.

>>9665762
Read up on Giacomo Leopardi, he couldn't appreciate poetry either and you need to basically move from erudition to appreciation.

>>9665762
Check out Ezra Pound's Three kinds of poetry

It's not enough to read poetry out loud, you have to memorize. Once you've committed a poem to memory you can hear its subtleties in meter much more clearly

>>9665762
Faggot

>>9668376
shut up bitch
>>9666436
what stuff by leopardi?

>>9665772
How about you fuck off instead?
>hurr you have to study shit and read multiple books and jump through hoops to enjoy a love sonnet
Bull fucking shit. Yeah, the Truth and meaning of the universe are found in a regular stress pattern and words that end in the same way, sure.

>>9665762
OK, I didn't actually have your problem, we were taught all that theoretical garbage, prosody, anaphoras and polysyndetons in school and we would read lots of poems. But when I actually read Petrarca's sonnets in school I didn't analyze anything, I didn't notice the structure or which specific rhyme pattern was used. I fucking felt the thing and barely held myself back from crying because it was simply so beautiful. If you've read TWO books on theory and you still don't understand or enjoy it, you're doing something very wrong. I say drop the theory right now and go read poetry. I personally don't have to read the poems out loud, having a clear voice in your head is enough, and memorizing is absolutely not necessary. (Though I love both reading out loud and memorizing poems, if I've enjoyed the poem in the first place.) Art exists to be experienced, not analyzed autistically. You probably haven't fully realized the sensual and emotional aspect of poetry, probably you aren't accustomed to it. And the only solution to that problem is to actually confront yourself with more poetry.

And I'm not just making this shit up right now, that is how I've come to enjoy literally every art form. Visual arts, classical music, literature itself - it was all confusing, meaningless and boring at first, but when you actually dig into it, change your focus and perception a little bit (in a way that will in retrospect seem completely obvious and simple), everything falls into its place.