Introduction: on not introducing poetry

Here, or nearby, is a poem.

Read it.

Does any more need to be said?

The heartfelt response of many readers, and of many writers, would be No! Anything you add by way of a gloss, says that response, diminishes the poem; it undermines its autonomy, denying its power to speak for itself. The most common criticism of a poet’s introductions in performance is that they repeat-in-advance, less concisely, what the poem already says and does. Equally, the reader’s freedom is reduced…and in practice it makes no sense to distinguish between the ‘autonomy’ of the poem (which may be a metaphor) and that of the reader (which may be less real than it seems), because reception is what happens where the text and reader meet. It is a relationship.

Of course, poems are regularly glossed by critics and reviewers, professional readers to whom others turn for insights and for context-knowledge deeper than their own. Lazy or hard-pressed students turn to secondary sources first, to tell them what experience to have. Few of us would encourage that as teachers, just as few writers welcome the plea of a deeply unconfident poetry reader to tell them what it really means.

The critic’s reading also has its context, which determines what kind of reading it gives. In literary studies, the agenda might be to develop insights into language, ideology or cultures, rather than responding to the poem in the way a reader-for-pleasure might. In a community of poetry readers (or one of the several communities that co-exist, sometimes overlapping), a reader’s introduction to a poet’s work may come from a published review. Reviewers are frequently poets; the roles of reader, critic and fellow-writer exist in a subtle ecology, even within a single person’s mind. Though most readers of poetry journals would resist a gloss to the poem on the page, still the choice of the poem by that journal, with its particular aesthetics and position in the world of poetry, and the choice of the journal by the reader, constitute a kind of introduction in itself.