Poetry Study Goals

•           Read the poem more than once for better understanding
•           Try to get into the habit of reading sentence by sentence, rather than just the individual lines
•           Learn more literary terms
•           Learn to figure out who is the speaker of the poem
•           Read a few lines around a reference to understand the context

When reading poems I tend to just read a poem once or twice, and most of the time I still don’t have a strong understand of the poem afterwards. Reading a poem four times using the steps given in the AP book would really help my understanding poems. Learning more literary terms would help too. A lot. There’s a good amount of words that I need to learn before the start before the school year. I’m pretty sure that whenever I read a poem I don’t even think to figure who in the world is talking. I feel that knowing who’s talking would really help in understand what’s going on in the poem. When I come across a reference I don’t understand, I normally just sit there and stare at it, hoping to find out what it means. Reading around what I’m trying to understand should help my understanding of a poem.