How to Understand Poetry

poem about poem

What
If 
the
Point of 
This poem
Teetered on the
Edge of a pin, just
On the verge of falling
To its death. What if it leaned? 
Could not for the life of it stand up straight?
    What if it swayed? What if the point 
Caught wind                       blew away. Would 
The point be that it left or that it was
Here in the first place? Or what if I lied
About the point? What’s the point of a
Point anyway? What if
There’s no pointʔ
There’s just a
What.

Then what?

art by Pragna Gaddamedi (@prgs.jpeg)¹

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Poetry Tip of the Day!

I wrote this poem as a catch-all response for, can you explain this poem to me? I could! But that would take away 50% of the fun from me, and 100% from you. I write the poem for one reason, but it has nothing to do with how it makes you feel or what it makes you think. Maybe the poem is about frogs to me, but it’s about elephants to you. Rather than nitpick about who picked the right animal, we can rejoice that we both picked animals at all. In fact, the author wrote that poem about an aunt who never let him eat her cherry pie because she would wait for her husband to leave home and share the pie with the mailman. What does it say about us that we read her as an animal? What else can we learn from the words if she actually was supposed to be an animal? Sometimes there’s nothing to get at all. We just read. We think one thought or many thoughts or read again or don’t. If you’re lucky though, something sticks.

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1. goat