Poetry is indeed a little mysterious; just look at this handful of quotations that try to describe what it is, what it does: “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” (Rita Dove) “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” (T.S. Eliot) “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” (Robert Frost) “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” (Carl Sandburg) “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” (Wallace Stevens) “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” (Emily Dickinson) This introductory-level class will take on the mystery of poetry in such a way that will strive to make it more accessible by developing clear strategies for reading poems—with a special focus on the role that sound plays in how poems do what they do to us. (Consider rhyme and meter most obviously—but also other, less defined ways that the sounds of language help to shape meaning.) The reading strategies we practice will help you engage with poetry’s strangeness which, for many people, is easy to dismiss as illegible or unimportant. But poetry’s strangeness, of course, reflects important strangenesses in the world around us, strangenesses we can choose to explore or ignore. We’ll start our work with a pair of crucial assumptions about reading poems: 1. Poetry is not a code to crack, and 2. Poems can’t be made out to mean whatever you want them to mean. Our mode will be primarily interpretive, and indeed just what it means to interpret and just how to know when you’re doing it well and when you’re being sloppy about it will constantly be on our radar as we do this work. Simply put, our class will be devoted to the act of reading poems together, during every class meeting, in order to practice and explore as a group the endeavor of deep, careful reading.