Reading Slump? Read Some Poetry Instead.
There’s a particular kind of shame that comes with a reading slump especially if you’re someone who identifies as a reader. Having to confess that, well, frankly, I haven’t been reading lately despite occupying my space in a primarily literary world; I’ve been in one of those slumps lately.
Sometimes a book doesn’t hit the same when the season changes. Sometimes I’m stretched too thin. And sometimes it’s a genuinely physical problem: my shoulders hurt, my neck is stiff, my eyes give out faster than they used to. Between fatigue, the rampant over-busy-ification of life, and an increasingly creaky body, holding a book oftentimes feels like something I have to recover from.
But here’s the thing: a reading slump is almost never about books. It’s about the friction between where you are and what reading demands from you. And what I’ve found, over and over again, is that, for me, the fastest path out of a reading slump isn’t a new novel or a five-step reading challenge. It’s poetry.
Poetry asks less of you in time, stamina, and plot retention, while somehow delivering more. A poem can be read in a single breath (well, if your lungs are well-adapted to these things). You don’t have to remember what happened in chapter seven. You don’t have to like the protagonist. You just have to show up, for maybe ninety seconds, and give the thing your attention.
I’ve been thinking lately about what it even means to be a reader. Only around 25 to 30 percent of adults read even a single book in a given year. Given that, it seems odd to add qualifiers like “avid” or “voracious” as though reading is something so commonplace it needs superlatives to stand out. As if the act itself is not already a quiet act of resistance.
What I really want to teach isn’t writing but rather reading. Not teaching reading in the prescriptive, guide-you-to-a-specific-interpretation sense but reading as a way of learning how to give your attention more fully to the world. Poetry, I’ve come to believe, is the best instrument for that. And so when I’m stuck in a reading slump, I reach for a stack of poetry collections.
Sometimes I even press record, and read out loud for a while. That’s what I did this week and with these poems.
The Stack
Here’s what I read from, for anyone who wants to follow along or raid a library.
Juan Gelman — Dark Times Filled with Light (tr. Hardie St. Martin)
Gelman is an Argentinian poet I first encountered in a collected or selected called Oxen Rage, and he’s been rattling around in my head ever since. What I love about him is that his line breaks don’t follow the natural cadence of spoken language. There’s a discordance between attention-to-line and attention-to-meaning that becomes electrifying when you read it aloud. The page might confuse you; your voice will clarify everything.
I read “Hymn of Victory in Certain Circumstances,” a caustic and beautiful poem full of lies in the air and reptiles grown on birds. I read “Courage,” about the enormous sadness a man and a woman can build between them and I read the poem containing the titular line, “Things They Don’t Know,” which is tender and defiant and about love persisting under surveillance, under threat, under eight different roofs in a single month. If you haven’t read Gelman, please.
Dulce María Loynaz Absolute Solitude — (tr. James O’Connor, Archipelago Books)
Cuban, mid-twentieth century, and her poems are typically brief enough to hold in a single breath. Most of these prose poems are titled only with Roman numerals. I love how digestible they are, concentrated. Loynaz writes about solitude so well she admits she sometimes fears God will punish her by filling her life with it. She writes about poets as the keepers of birds and flowers that the world would otherwise forget. She is enormously encouraging, and I’m fairly certain she’d have no patience for billionaires.
Francis Ponge — Unfinished Ode to Mud (tr. Beverley Bie Brahic)
Okay. Ponge. He’s French, early twentieth century, and I hesitate to even call him a poet because what he does feels like something else. These sustained, almost journalistic studies of utterly inanimate things. A door. A table. A rose. He sat with these objects and gave them the kind of attention most people reserve for people they’re in love with.
The poem I read, “Speech Stifled Under the Roses,” is characteristically horny work. He is very clearly a man who finds everything somewhat erotic, and he’s not shy about it. What I find so thrilling about Ponge, though, is that the horniness is incidental to a deeper point: that everything, if you look at it long enough, becomes extraordinary. His fixation is almost instructional. You learn from him how to see.
Lee Si-young — Patterns (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé and Yoo Hui-sok, Green Integer)
Green Integer is one of those presses that’s difficult to find unless you’re already looking for it, which is a shame because they’ve published some of the best translated poetry I own. Lee Si-young is a Korean poet, and these poems are immediate, strange, and aching in all the right ways.
“New Dawn” imagines waking up transformed into a docile cow and somehow makes it feel like the most peaceful thing in the world. “Key” is about a man who kept every promise and fulfilled every obligation and one day sat on a bench and asked: was that my life? And there’s all number of poems that work as a direct-address urging the reader to read and write poems before the soul dries out and blows away in the wind. I am a sucker for poets who write unabashedly about how much they love poetry, and Lee Si-young is one of the best of them.
Tuệ Sỹ (Vietnamese poet) — Dreaming the Mountain (tr. Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins, Seedbank/Milkweed)
The poems here — “Dream of a Long Life” and “Sitting in the Graveyard” — have a quality of unmoored wandering, of someone trying to locate themselves in time and family and longing. There’s a line about leaving home to find space for oneself and arriving to learn that the mother, who had cried for the father, now cried for the wandering child instead. It wrecked me a little.
Aleš Šteger — The Book of Things (Slovenian Poet tr. Brian Henry)
I own three separate poetry collections titled The Book of Things — by three different authors from three different countries. Unironically, all three are good. Maybe that title just has a gravitational pull on people capable of writing bangers.
Šteger’s “Stomach,” “Chair,” and “Candle” are object studies in the same spirit as Ponge but stranger and more unsettling. “Chair” is a poem about sitting, yes, but also about the entire history of humanity that has warmed that piece of wood — centurions and surfs and all. “Candle” is the poem I ended on, and I think it was the right choice. It’s about the threshold of death, a candle that does not live and did not die, that does not know lies or truth, not sense or nonsense. When someone dies, someone has not died yet. I don’t have anything to add to that.
Get Out of Your Reading Slump
If you’re in a reading slump right now, here’s my honest advice: don’t fight it with a bigger book. Don’t push through a novel you don’t care about. Don’t set a goal. Instead, pick up a single poetry collection — ideally a translated one, because translation adds a layer of strangeness that makes even familiar feelings feel new — and read one poem. Try it out loud.
The reading slump isn’t broken by willpower. It’s broken by finding the right door back in. For me, every time, that door is a poem.
Most of what I’d unconsciously selected had something in common: a yearning for spiritual or emotional fulfillment that exists outside the daily grind. Just happiness. Rest. The wish to be a cow at dawn. An afternoon by the stream. The hope that the sadness might someday pass, and that a rose might bloom beside it.
I love poets who dream of nothing more grandiose than that.
Read some poetry. Stay cute.
