Poetry presents its own set of challenges. Poetry frequently
uses idiosyncratic syntactic structures. Often words have
other than their conventional meanings. And the text is
structured to force the reader to fill in meaning from
an extensive background knowledge.
Consequently, while the strategies for dealing with poetry
are the same as for fictional prose and exposition: predicting,
confirming and integrating, the fact that not everything
is spelled out can make making sense of poetry difficult.
Do each of the activities. Then freewrite about your
thoughts, questions, connections, insights into reading
and learning that the activities taken together raised
for you.
