How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

A key preoccupation of Foster’s work is that the writing of poetry is more abundant than the reading of it. He imagines that “the elapsed time between the development of language and the creation of the first poem was about five minutes,” thereby conjecturing that the impulse to express oneself is innate to humans (181). Lyric poetry, which reflects states of interiority, is a natural channel for self-expression. Thus, everyone who speaks has the potential to be a poet, although only a tiny fraction of those works will stand the test of time. Perhaps the imbalance in writing poetry as opposed to reading it reflects an individualistic culture’s propensity to speak over listening, as people assert themselves impulsively rather than reflect and appreciate.

Such an imbalance has characterized Foster’s experience as a teacher. At the outset of his manual, he writes that “I can’t tell you the number of students over the years who told me that they like to write poems, but they don’t read them” (3). Foster wryly comments that this “seems a little one-sided,” and the whole endeavor of his project is to show that those who do not read time-tested canonical poetry are missing out (3). His manual exemplifies his view of the best poetry in each genre, from the highly codified sonnet to free verse where the poet expresses their own ideas about form and is highly intentional about the positioning of every single word. While these poets are guided by a strong sense of play and aurality in the moment, their work is the result of toil, trial and error, and dialogue with a tradition that came before them. Foster implies that it is not enough to follow an impulse for writing poetry; if the work is to be any good, the poet must have an awareness of technique and the art of others. Moreover, in repeatedly asserting that most poetry is very bad, Foster also implies that most readers would do better to study the works of proven poets than attempting to write their own.

For Foster, the average reader’s creativity is better employed in the reading and interpretation of a poem rather than in the writing of it. He asserts that as a speaker of a language, a reader is already qualified to read its poetry and that their interpretation of a poem’s ambiguities is as valid as any other English speaker’s. Such flexibility of interpretation has occurred in the rapping of The Canterbury Tales. Here, the combination of reverence for tradition with irreverent modern treatment enables the old form to gain new life and significance. While Foster admires the slam poetry movement for bringing poetry to the masses in an accessible form, he also sees the “enthusiasm it engenders” as a vehicle for bringing “new readers for the more traditional mode” (151). There is thus a tension in Foster’s work between wanting to democratize poetry and make it less intimidating while at the same time revering a canon of proven excellence. There are political implications to this stance, as the canon of English poetry is predominantly male and white. One might reflect that those who are not represented by those identity markers may have complex feelings toward the English poetic tradition, so they seek other inspiration. The above Publisher’s Weekly review picked up on a deficiency of female and contemporary poets among Foster’s selection, indicating that his perspective may be overly retrospective and nonrepresentative for some readers. Moreover, although his idea that one should be a reader of poetry before deigning to write it is logical, it opposes contemporary youth culture’s preference for unabashed and irreverent self-expression.