Whenever You Read PoetryBy D.S. Martin
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Whenever you read poetry you must always
always always read it aloud so that each sound's sonorously sung letting your lilting tongue deliciously dance lightly brushing the back of your central incisors tasting the patterns as your lips pucker and pop as you subconsciously adjust the shape & size of your versatile mouth & you push & pull in & out the very air you live on in a game of beauty & complexity & as the poem plays on your lips you must slow the process pausing or half pausing so that its phrasing never trips so that its meaning settles into your being since it's simultaneously designed to propel you forward & to startle you to a complete halt making you want to start again from the beginning Whenever you read poetry you must always always always read it aloud except of course when you silently read it aloud that is when you read it aloud in your head so that your tongue pretends to be doing nothing but is subversively twitching all its movements imagined like the way you secretly run & jump across the racing rooftops while others only see you as a sophisticated adult book in hand silently staring out the window of your commuter train How She Reads a PoemBy D.S. Martin
Her approach is not unusual
like steeling herself two hands on the wheel accelerating down the onramp checking for blind spots even before she begins to read the poem She sees it as a forward linear trajectory the driving subject verb from point-of-departure to point-of-arrival with no thought for how lines break how gaps suddenly gape as though they were totally random When she drives she keeps space between her front bumper & the car ahead slips into the right lane well before it’s time to get off reading the intent of nearby drivers between the lines But once she's begun to read the poem her aim is simply to have read the poem By the second stanza or the third she won't check the rearview or circle back to refocus on that image of a driver about to merge with traffic will have not caught the poet's said more than she first thought For she reads as a means to an end skimming toward some destination But if she were more of a tourist she wouldn't simply scan four lanes to traverse the city she’d head downtown to take its pulse to pause where glass towers touch its red-brick past She'd head mapless into autumnal hills for the sake of the winding road & what fades along its fringe of open space & the tinge of red maples against the sky of what clings to a blade of grass & the tangible absence of those no longer on the land She'd catch the sunlight shimmering on a thread of water where the blacktop dips through a ravine & stop to stretch her legs because she'd know that this place where she's arrived is how to read a poem D.S. Martin is the author of four poetry collections, including Ampersand (2018), & Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (2013) — both from Cascade Books. He is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series, and has edited three anthologies — The Turning Aside (2016), Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse (2017), and In A Strange Land (2019). He and his wife live in Brampton, Ontario; they have two adult sons.
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