A Collection of Poems To be Read, Re-Read And Considered

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Examining the form of a text can help you develop a starting set of questions in your reading, which then may guide further questions stemming from even closer attention to the specific words the author chooses.

A little background research on form and what different forms can mean makes it easier to figure out why and how the author's choices are important. Most poems follow rules or principles of form; even free verse poems are marked by the author's choices in line breaks, rhythm, and rhyme—even if none of these exists, which is a notable choice in itself. Here's an example of thinking through these elements in "Design.

In "Design," Frost chooses an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet form: We will focus on rhyme scheme and stanza structure rather than meter for the purposes of this guide. A typical Italian sonnet has a specific rhyme scheme for the octave:. Conventionally, the octave introduces a problem or question which the sestet then resolves. Note that we are speaking only in generalities here; there is a great deal of variation. Italian sonnets have a long tradition; many careful readers recognize the form and know what to expect from his octave, volta , and sestet.

Frost seems to do something fairly standard in the octave in presenting a situation; however, the turn Frost makes is not to resolution, but to questions and uncertainty. A white spider sitting on a white flower has killed a white moth. We can guess right away that Frost's disruption of the usual purpose of the sestet has something to do with his disruption of its rhyme scheme.

Looking even more closely at the text will help us refine our observations and guesses. Looking at the word choice of a text helps us "dig in" ever more deeply. If you are reading something longer, are there certain words that come up again and again? Are there words that stand out? While you are going through this process, it is best for you to assume that every word is important—again, you can decide whether something is really important later.

Even when you read prose, our guide for reading poetry offers good advice: Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions you have in the margins or on a separate piece of paper.

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If you have ideas that may possibly answer your questions, write those down, too. The poem starts with something unpleasant: Then, as we look more closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may see connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural. When we imagine spiders, we do not generally picture them dimpled and white; it is an uncommon and decidedly creepy image. There is dissonance between the spider and its descriptors, i.

Already we have a question: We should look for additional clues further on in the text.

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The next two lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding spider:. On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—. Now we have a white flower a heal-all, which usually has a violet-blue flower and a white moth in addition to our white spider. Heal-alls have medicinal properties, as their name suggests, but this one seems to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider? Does the mutation that changes the heal-all's color also change its beneficial properties—could it be poisonous rather than curative?

A white moth doesn't seem remarkable, but it is "Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth," or like manmade fabric that is artificially "rigid" rather than smooth and flowing like we imagine satin to be. We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a coffin, but even that is awry, for neither should be stiff with death. The first three lines of the poem's octave introduce unpleasant natural images "of death and blight" as the speaker puts it in line four.

The flower and moth disrupt expectations: Well before the volta , Frost makes a "turn" away from nature as a retreat and haven; instead, he unearths its inherent dangers, making nature menacing. From three lines alone, we have a number of questions: Will whiteness play a role in the rest of the poem? How does "design"—an arrangement of these circumstances—fit with a scene of death? What other juxtapositions might we encounter? These disruptions and dissonances recollect Frost's alteration to the standard Italian sonnet form: Put simply, themes are major ideas in a text.

Many texts, especially longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes. That's good news when you are close reading because it means there are many different ways you can think through the questions you develop.

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Is his work autobiographical? The characteristic Kinnell poem has an identifiable first-person narrator and a recognizable setting or dramatic situation, often unfolding like a compressed story.

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He might refer directly to a personage called Galway Kinnell as in "This happened to your father and to you, Galway," from "Sheffield Ghazals" and incorporate the names of family members, lovers and friends. Yet poems are a mongrel species; they can be as documentary as nonfiction and as inventive as fiction.

The moment is hilarious and piercing, reminding us how writers utilize and transmute their own lives and those closest to them. Longtime readers of Kinnell are familiar with his almost continual tinkering with older poems. Many of us recall seeing him make changes with a pen in a printed book even while at a rostrum giving a reading.

There are at least three published versions of the poem "Feathering," for instance, and discerning readers might well disagree on their relative merits. In other cases, revision clearly paid off. Likewise, when Kinnell edited Whitman, he dismantled that ceaselessly revising ancestor's "final" Leaves of Grass and created a montage of what he believed to be the most intense and eloquent segments from earlier editions.

Some readers enjoy comparing variations, and Kinnell's older books are mostly in print or not hard to find used. Now, this new Collected Poems provides definitive renderings of Kinnell's poetry in a majestic hardcover volume. Gathering the poems in one place for those who've long loved his work, it's also a welcoming gateway for newcomers. Asked about the impact of Galway Kinnell's work on their own lives and practice, Vermont poets were specific. Baron Wormser, now living in Montpelier and former poet laureate of Maine, wrote in an email of Kinnell's rootedness in a particular earth, "the autochthonous that goes with us each day, a sort of inner shadow — rags and nightmares, bears and deer — that wants a poet to pull forth its raw glory.

Beneath the casual-seeming prosody, there is the taut romanticism of a clear-eyed lover who is, accordingly, ever-bewildered. Julia Shipley of Craftsbury a contributing writer to Seven Days observed that Kinnell "did gorgeous things with language: But he wasn't just playful; he made music from his melancholy, too. Shipley noted that Kinnell's New York Times obituary called him "plainspoken. Greg Delanty, now teaching at Saint Michael's College, remembers eagerly waiting as a young poet in Ireland for an imported copy of Kinnell's Selected Poems.

He called Kinnell "such a great poet and such a great reader of poems, both his own and others — I don't think there has ever been a better reader aloud of Whitman, for instance. Galway himself comes from the Whitman line and is very much a poet of the mouth — just read 'Blackberry Eating' aloud. Several of his poet comrades mentioned Kinnell's skill at unearthing old words, offering them not like antique curios but as just right for the task at hand. When Vermont poet laureate Chard deNiord was interviewing Kinnell for the book I Would Lie to You If I Could , he asked where he found "words like plouters, pronotum, noggles, sloom, drouking, moils, gowpen and dunch.

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They're actual words, except perhaps I made up 'dunch. Others, unfortunately, have passed out of usage. I hate losing them, so I use them. The original print version of this article was headlined "The Presence of Words". Seven Days moderates comments in order to ensure a civil environment.

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