Getting Started

Poetry gives the reader and writer an approach to language in a way they hadn't been able to before. They're asked to question convention and understand words in both shape and sound, in ways unfamiliar to how they're taught in expository writing courses. Despite this, there exist ways of navigating a poem and breaking it down. Just like jazz or impressionism, poetry is grounded in fundamental concepts; these fundamentals are bent, broken and beaten, and still persist to give meaning and structure to every poem.

To both read and write poetry is simultaneously visual and aural. If there were three rules about experiencing poetry, it would be:

  1. Read aloud.
  2. Read slow.
  3. Have fun.

The next step to experiencing English poetry is to understand two concepts: Meter and Rhyme. The concepts and their topics are displayed below.