How should I read a poem?

FIRST ENCOUNTER:  Poems don’t reveal themselves all at once.  In general, they yield their pleasures on repeated readings. ‘Live’ with a poem for some time; go back to it; let it settle in your mind.  You cannot rush poetry.Unless the poem is extremely lengthy, read it through aloud several times, allowing yourself to experience its effect on you and feeling the words in your mouth. On a first reading, it’s often helpful to ignore the line breaks and read through to the ends of sentences.  Let the punctuation guide you.If the poem were an essay, what would be the outline of its argument? Do the stanzas serve the function of paragraphs, for example?  Step away, as it were, and look at the poem’s architecture. The fundamental question that an explication, or close reading, of a poem might addresses is:  how does the poem do what it does? WORKING THROUGH THE POEM:1.  Words are the medium of poetry:  they have definitions, etymologies (histories), sounds, connotations, associations, ‘baggage’.  Be alert for puns, double meanings, and any sort of compression by which the poet contrives to have words or phrases do extra work.2. If the poem is heavily annotated, familiarize yourself with the content of the notes. 3.  Imagine the poem as a dramatic situation.  Who is speaking?  Who, if anyone, is listening? 4. Write down some words descriptive of the poem’s tone. (Examples:  bitter, desperate, joyful, joking, exhausted;don’t settle forsad orhappy). What sort of person talks in that manner? 5.  Imagery is the umbrella term for the language of the senses—all five of them. Western poetry employs a great deal of visual imagery, but don’t overlook sound, touch, smell, taste.Once you’ve explored the sensual language, consider whether there are patterns in it. Is there, for example, repeated imagery of water?  Of thirst? Of drowning? 6. Related to imagery is the poet’s use of figures of speech or tropes: similes, metaphors, hyperbole, symbols, chiasmus, synecdoche.  (Look at the glossary in Poetry). It is less important to memorize the names of these devices than to understand them as ways of poetic ‘thinking’.  7.  Sounds: the sound of a poem can be created by individual letters of a word, by rhyme, by rhythm, by metre (predictable rhythm, by a series of vowels or a preference for liquid consonants or hard consonants or by the number of syllables in the poet’s preferred vocabulary. 9.  Context:  A poet is a human being, too, one who lived or lives in a specific time and place. Don’t attempt to turn a poem into a political manifesto or a sermon or a confession. 9.  Most of the vocabulary used for the discussion and study of poetry is convenient in the same way that musical notation is convenient for musicians and names of tools are convenient for engineers.  A shared vocabulary allows readers to talk to one another about what they observe.