How to read a poem

Kevin Young ’92 is the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the former director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He was the 2024 recipient of the Harvard Arts Medal. His most recent book is “Night Watch.” 

Poetry is traditionally taught — at least it was taught to me — as a kind of thing you have to endure in English class; there’s no sense of it applying to your life. But poetry, good poetry, is the stuff of life. 

Poetry asks us to slow down and to think about what we’re reading, but also to experience it. It’s the kind of reading you do when you’re a kid: You ingest it whole. It’s not the bits and bites that I think we’re used to sometimes. 

Poetry also rewards rereading. There are poems I’ve read a million times that one day mean something totally different. Having that sort of lifetime experience with a poem is really precious. Your tastes change some, but it’s also that the poem never changes, but you do. Say, if you lose a loved one, poems that might talk about grief might not mean as much to you till after. Having edited a book of grief poems, people write to me almost weekly and tell me how much that book meant to them. It’s been really powerful to see that testimony, and the companionship that poetry offers. 

There’s no wrong way to read a poem. It’s sort of similar to how there may be a right way to set the table — certainly my mom would say there is — but is there one way to enjoy your meal? I don’t know. The best way is to taste it, experience it. I do think that reading aloud or hearing out loud makes a difference. 

Emily Dickinson says, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” It’s as much a physical thing as it is an emotional thing. I like music in poems, so that quality of song in the broadest sense. 

Even at its best, even at its most clarion, it still has a mystery in it: The more I know about poetry, the more the mystery of it grows.

So how do you approach poetry? I think it’s through not seeing it as some foreign land, but as part of our everyday lives. If you’re looking for entry points, there are many great places that offer public readings, both in person or online. That’s where I first understood poetry: sitting in an audience with other people. 

But really, it’s you and the poem. What’s so incredible is the poem is waiting for you, and it transports you for the duration of the poem into another life. It brings you out of yourself and into this other self for the length of the poem, and hopefully for a few beats after. You carry a poem in your body. It lives with you. It can’t be taken from you. There are not many things like that anymore.

As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer