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Lucky WordsA podcast about language, culture, philosophy, and poetry Author: Jeffrey Windsor
A weekly* email newsletter about literature, art, trail running or hiking or riding or camping or walking or just sitting in the Utah mountains or the desert of the Colorado Plateau, and a good deal of poetry. luckywords.substack.com Language: en Genres: Arts, Books, Education Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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How to read a poem, part 2: feel
Thursday, 15 October, 2026
If you’re reading this on email, you can click on the header and go to the website and listen to an audio version of the essay (read by me, not some creepy AI).Also, at the very bottom I’ve got two announcements that might be of interest to some of you.How to read a poem: feelHere’s the lesson: emotion first, interpretation (maybe) second.Let’s start with a poem by Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them”It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.Let’s pretend that you don’t know anything about Frank O’Hara. You come across this poem in a weird little newsletter, and dutifully you read the poem and think to yourself: “and…?” Yes, at first blush it’s a poem where a guy goes on a walk, probably sometime in the middle of the 20th century based on some of his word choices and his mention of Jackson Pollock and a lady wearing fox fur. He goes on a walk at lunchtime, sees some stuff, and goes back to work. Why, you might think to yourself, would anyone read this? What’s the point?Slow down and visualizeLast week I encouraged you to read a poem slowly, and to read it twice after a little gap in the middle. So go ahead and read it again right now.And… you’re still in the same place, aren’t you? Even though all the words are pretty easy, most people would scratch their heads and say, “see? This is what I hate about poetry. It isn’t about anything. It’s just, like, a list or something.” You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking this, but you would be still making some wrong assumptions.Let’s put aside any question of what the poem is “about.” You don’t need to know what it is about. Sometimes you can just take a poem on how it feels. So we need to figure out what this poem feels like.This O’Hara poem has a lot of good concrete images and references. Can you picture going on a walk on a hot day in New York City, where laborers with dirty torsos are eating sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola on their lunch break. They’re wearing yellow hard hats. Women calf-length skirts are walking, and the skirts are swishing as they walk. A man in a doorway silently watches a pretty girl walk past, he doesn’t say anything but he smiles and rubs his chin. On your walk, stop and get a cheeseburger and a shake. Keep walking. See the posters on the buildings that they’re about to tear down. Stop and get a glass of juice to drink. Head back to work. Try to really picture this. Picture yourself walking, or imagine a movie where they’re filming this happening. What music would you use for the soundtrack? What music feels right?My O’Hara afternoonLast summer I took a trip to NYC and did a lot of walking around. New York is a great city for walking. I saw posters on buildings that were under construction, and I ate a hamburger at a burger joint just a couple of blocks from Washington Square Park.I visited the Strand bookstore (of course), and a used bookstore that also sells pickles, and waited in a very long line to get a sandwich at Katz’s deli.(And, yes, I did have a book of poetry in my pocket. Of course I had a book of poetry in my pocket.) No one would ask me what my walk was “about.” It was about walking around NYC and seeing stuff. It was about feeling the city.O’Hara published the poem above in 1964 in his collection called Lunch Poems. This poem exudes the energy of a walk through New York on a warm summer noontime. And of course there’s a lot more going on that just a walk. Like, for instance, what’s going on with this line: “First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock. But is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?” I wonder who Bunny is. I wonder who John Latouche is. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t know who they are, because I feel this jazzy energy when I read the poem. I feel transported to a different time and a different place than I’ve ever visited.Because the New York I visited is similar to O’Hara’s but it is clearly also very different. I can only get there through the poem.All poetry plays with emotionThe rule for poetry for today is to put aside meaning and just feel. Let the music of the poem move you. Let it push you forward. Think of poetry like music rather than meaning. This is not to say that poetry is always just music. Clearly, many poems have something they want to say, but at some level a good poem is also about making you feel something.This is not a foreign concept: you listen to music and it moves you. When you listen to instrumental music, you don’t think “but what does this song mean?” The song doesn’t need to mean anything. Listen to this selection of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor: is it saying anything? No: it’s not necessarily telling a story and preaching with a moral. Sometimes a piece of music might be sad or exciting, it might calm you down or hype you up. The music is doing something emotional in your brain, to your brain.And a poem, a good poem at least, should do the same thing. So, in practical steps, try this. Read a poem (slowly, twice) and then try to name what it is the poem is trying to make you feel.Note that I say to name what the poem is trying to make you feel. Some poems will fall flat. You won’t feel anything. That’s on the poem. A good poem will reward an attentive reader, but many poems are failed attempts. That’s just how it works. No one likes every piece of music, and no one likes every poem. Don’t get too worried if you don’t feel anything. Move on the to the next one, and see if that one clicks for you.An example of a very different poemI recorded a video the other day doing a reading and some analysis of a pretty well-known poem, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.”The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.Watch my video and see the beautiful scenery (because hot dang the mountains around my house are looking spectacular right now), but also look at how I point out some of the deliberate musicality Hopkins puts in here. All the alliteration (“grandeur of God,” “shining from shook foil,” “gathers to greatness” “ooze of oil,” “reck his rod,” “nature is never spent,” “world broods with warm breast”), or the rhymes “seared... smeared... bleared,” “foil, oil, soil, toil”), or the rhythm of “have trod, have trod, have trod.” All of this feels very poetic. And still many people read Hopkins and say, “dang, I can’t figure out what that guy is talking about.”If you do the process of reading slowly and reading twice you might start to unpack it, but really, why not just enjoy the way it feels?Practical ApplicationOnce you have tentatively named the emotion that the poem is trying to get you to feel, now look back at the poem and see if you can identify what tricks the poet is using to get you to feel that way. Maybe it’s the words he chooses. Maybe it’s like O’Hara and his use of so many concrete images that feel specific to a time and place. Maybe it’s the rhymes and rhythm of Hopkins. You don’t need to know the names of these tricks: you’ll know them when you see them. Make up your own names for things (“words that all start with the same sound” or “lots of words with ooh in them” or “a whole bunch of long words all at once”).If this feels too much like reading poetry in school, know that there’s no grades here and you don’t need to be comprehensive. You don’t even, really, have to be correct. You’re looking for what is making the poem tick for you, because the poem is interesting to you.Sometimes it’ll be language things, like Hopkins, and sometimes it’ll be the subject or ideas, like O’Hara. Maybe there’s a personal reason why a poem works for you; that’s ok, too.A caveat: do you have to do this stuff to read poetry?If you’re thinking to yourself, “but can’t I just read the poem, and then read the next poem, and then read the next poem?” Sure, you can. You can choose to read poetry just like how you read non-fiction prose. That’s one way to do it. But poetry invites you to read differently, more thoughtfully. This is a style of reading that non-fiction prose (and most fiction prose, too) simply cannot sustain. Poetry can be read deeply, and the process of reading and feeling and disassembling and interrogating: this is part of the pleasure of poetry.But sometimes the pleasure of poetry is just in reading for the vibes, too.AnthologyLast week I shared a few poems and called it “homework” but I’ve decided that’s probably trauma-inducing for some of you. This is just an anthology of some interesting poems to practice on.You might go back and look at the poems from last week with today’s lesson in mind. Look at Auden’s “Twelve Songs: IX” (it begins “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”) and think about how that one makes you feel. Ooof. It’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it? Or Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” which makes me want to sit up a bit straighter, hold up my chin and be proud of my nationality.[^ Even despite, you know... everything.] What word would I use to describe the feeling that Mark Strand evokes in “Eating Poetry”? Maybe subversive, or mad, or manic?Here’s some poems that you might enjoy for this week. I’ve tried to stick with poems that you probably haven’t read before, and I’d be interested to hear if any of them resonate with you (or, on the other hand, any of them leave you cold).* “Snow Day” by Billy Collins* “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limón* “Vespers (Once I believed in you)” by Louise Glück* “Anticipated Stranger,” by John Ashbery* “Hysteria” by T.S. EliotLeast Bad Poem of the WeekStill thinking about a title for this one. “Tables” maybe (as in “tables of stone”), or “Etching”? I’ll probably wake up tomorrow with an idea that’s way better than these, but that’s what we get with the Least Bad Poem of the Week: still always a work in progress! And not all of them are winners!“Tables”God spoke to Moses— bare feet and burning bushes— works for the guy in the room, but it doesn’t scale. So later for the whole crowd God wrote it down, etched on stone. I told you this morning I love you, and I gave you a kiss. But now just so no one forgets or becomes distracted, I wrote this poem, too.Fiction!We return briefly to Ashley and Heather, as overheard first here and then here. There’s still more to come from these two (and Ashley’s cute-but-klepto boyfriend).“For how long?”“Two months. Off on a field assignment, and mostly out of cell range.”“I thought everywhere had cell coverage these days.”“Not in Alaska, apparently. I think it’s the Brooks Range. It’s supposed to be one of the most remote places in the US.”“What will you do?”“What can I do but wait? I’ll just, I don’t know, do my normal stuff, I guess. And two months isn’t that long, Heath.”“Oh, Ash, he hasn’t even left yet and you’re already pining.”“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”Wrapping UpAnd here’s the two announcements: books!* I’m putting the final formatting touches on a book of poetry that you can purchase! It’s called Ghosts and other poems and in includes my poem “Ghosts” as well as other poems. It’ll be available on Amazon as an ebook (if I can get the formatting kinks worked out!) and as a printed book (also from Amazon). I’m quite happy with the poems in the book, many of which I’ve featured here already. If you’re looking to start a poetry library, this might be a good place to start... For those who are paid subscribers: I’m going to send you a free copy of the ebook (Kindle and PDF formats) as a thank you for being so incredibly supportive.* I am working on another book as well! This is a collection of Christmas themed essays and poems, and will be out (fingers crossed) before the start of Advent on November 29. This is an explicitly Christian take on the holiday, and will be a great book to bring some good Christmas calmness into your life. This, too, will be sent for free to paid subscribers, and the rest of y’all should look for it on Amazon in about a month. (Full disclosure: there’s still a lot of work left to do here, and I’m not 100% sure I’ll make it in time. But I’ll try!) Working (and maybe final?) title: The Christmas Book. (Catchy, huh?)Here in Utah, we had a few days of rain and the weather has shifted from mid 80s to mid 60s. There’s a nice cap of snow on Timp and Cascade. The blood of my Nordic ancestors is feeling a sense of relief.All is well,Jeff Get full access to Lucky Words at luckywords.substack.com/subscribe
