In what follows, I’ll focus on how reading for specific parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs, can alert students to the preoccupations of the poet. Of course, one could begin class by asking students what each sentence of the poem “means,” and that could yield a great discussion. But if you focus first on parts of speech—especially nouns and verbs, which are the most powerful parts of any phrase or sentence—you’ll find that your most reticent students are able to form opinions on the poem even before they’ve fully analyzed it.

For my example, I’ve chosen Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait”—certainly his most recognizable and frequently anthologized poem. Here’s the poem in its entirety, with an audio file of Kunitz reading the work. If you play the audio so that students can hear Kunitz’s brilliant, deeply moving delivery, they’ll understand the poem’s narrative right away: the speaker’s father has killed himself; the speaker’s mother cannot forgive him for doing this; and instead of telling her son what happened, she hits him when he tries to learn about who his father was. The poem is an incredible testament to the toll that such a trauma can take on a family.

First, ask your students to circle or highlight Kunitz’s nouns. The result should look like this:

Even before we’ve read the poem for its narrative, we can see that the poem’s first line features the mother and father; we know that the house plays a large role in the poem, with a focus on the attic (which is in fact the literal attic of the speaker’s childhood) and a reference to a cabinet (which is a metaphor for the mother’s heart); we see that Kunitz is attending to the time of year (spring) and time as a concept; and we can also see that Kunitz is concerned with the body—hand, moustache, eyes, cheek. From this reading of just the nouns, one can already sense that the story of the father’s suicide has deep, lasting effects that are attached to the memories of the house. We can also see that the child who wants to know something about his father learns that knowledge through the body—through the recognition of his father’s face and the slap on his own face that lingers in his mind for decades.

Next, ask your students to isolate the poem’s verbs:

By isolating the verbs, we can see the gothic terror at the heart of Kunitz’s poem. In this reading, Kunitz’s concern with forgiveness—his mother’s refusal to forgive the father—becomes the poem’s first action and tension. One sees, too, that the verbs are incredibly violent: killing, thumping, ripped, slapped, burning. Of course, there are three agents of action in the poem—mother, father, and son—and each of them performs one or more of these actions. In this reading, the poem is reduced to the physicality of its actions, and is already quite exciting. Kunitz wants this to be a hot poem, one that leaves us feeling singed by that “burning” in the final line. Memory, then, is not a cerebral or abstract entity, but one that is visceral, a mark that stays with us forever.

Not every poet will use such verbs of violence and assault; not every poet will use nouns that allude to the time of year or body parts. But that’s precisely the point of the exercise. By charting a poet’s obsessions with language, and with parts of speech specifically, students will be able to think more critically about how and why poets have stylistic differences that are deliberate, unique, and transformative.

Now, thanks to the WRP’s online “Listening Booth,” anyone can listen to a selection of these poems from anywhere on the planet. This digitized collection includes over 5,000 audio recordings of great American poets from the past one hundred years, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, as well as newer voices such as Terrance Hayes, Julianna Spahr, Jeffrey Yang, and Jen Bervin. The WPR offers these recordings as part of a huge initiative to preserve their entire collection, which is a kind of scrapbook of all the great poets who have read their poems at Harvard over the years.

Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve emphasized the importance of recitation to students as they learn to appreciate poetry’s provocations. The Woodberry Poetry Room’s Listening Booth can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom. Here are a couple of examples:

1. In a literature course, the students might discuss how to read Ezra Pound’s wonderfully Anglo-Saxon inflected lines in “The Seafarer.” Once students have considered Pound’s cues—his lineation, the stresses in his lines, his diction, the dramatic situation of the speaker, and so on—you might share his reading of the poem from the WPR, which is full of the song-like inflections of many poets from the early twenty-first century. Students will be surprised by Pound’s gradual crescendo, and even the way he raises the pitch of his voice, which might spur an interesting discussion.
2. In a poetry workshop, have students listen to a more contemporary poet read his or her work. Students might be surprised to hear Sharon Olds read “The Woman: First Night” in a low-key, matter-of-fact tone. Students might discuss the juxtaposition between Olds’s visceral imagery and this quiet delivery of the lines, and why she uses that strategy.

These conversations reinforce poetry’s value as a spoken as well as written art, and they energize students to listen more actively to the hills and dales of any given poetic line. Who knows? Maybe they’ll enjoy the WPR enough to wile away a few afternoons of their own on this wonderful site.

You can follow the WPR on Twitter at @WPRHarvard to get updates on additions to the Listening Booth and related news.