ignore that “meaning making” urge.
Don’t try to tie it all together right now.
Let the poem flow through you.

In the light of everything else poetry can and should embody, we forget that poems are really about pleasure in various forms. After all, their original intent was to thrill and charm an audience on the sensory level. Readers of poems are often taught to become “meaning-making animals,” to distill a poem’s mysteries aptly. Even poets can lose sight of the pleasure poetry brings, instead examining a piece for crafty tidbits they can “steal” from the writer. But what about indulging in what they love purely, i.e., great poems?

When I teach workshops, I make a conscious effort to retrain poets’ ears. With enough fine tuning, beginners can bring enveloping sensory images into their work. A stellar poetic image is one that includes many or all of the five senses—not just a visual. We are swallowed whole in these multi-sensory images. First, we must listen in on a poem’s world before we can understand how to borrow the poet’s tools for our own writing.

Today I’ve chosen a quite juicy poem that I love to read for pleasure, Octavio Paz’s “As One Listens to the Rain” from his 1988 collection, A Tree Within, translated by Eliot Weinberger. When I introduce this method, I tell students to close their eyes or find a quiet spot while I read the poem aloud. (I suggest you stop here and read the poem a couple of times silently to yourself now.)

After you begin to feel the poem’s cadence, read it aloud once without stopping. Go slowly to allow your brain to take in the images. Better yet, make this a couples or buddy activity and have someone read to you, steadily and clearly. For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to focus on the beginning and the end of this long-ish poem.

After you’ve read “As One Listens to the Rain,” sit a minute and do some very basic recall of what you heard. You might want to keep your eyes shut. At this stage, I tell my students to ignore that “meaning making” urge. Don’t try to tie it all together right now. Let the poem flow through you. It doesn’t matter what the poet meant by anything anyway—once the author let the poem out of its cage and published it, it became our poem!

My first question is basic—what stood out to you when you heard the poem read aloud? I discourage students from consulting the text to answer this question. There isn’t a right answer; their raw reactions are what I want. In that first clump of lines, I can see and hear the sound of “thin drizzle” leaping off the page. After that, “water that is air” is highlighted—I can feel the water cycle happening around me as I insert myself in the narrative.

Another early question might be, what section thrilled you when you heard it? And for me, that’s the neatly gift-wrapped lines, “figurations of mist / at the turn of the corner, // figurations of time / at the bend in this pause.” The image ties together the two activities of someone walking down the street and someone reading the poem so perfectly. I also love the pleasing repetition.

Then I might ask, what colors do you see in this poem? I see some misty rain, a gray sidewalk, and perhaps the streaks of sunset in the line, “the night has yet to arrive.” Later, students will note the skin tones in “footsteps” and the greens of the “grove,” “leaves,” and “garden.” We’re starting to create a palate for this piece now.

Another question is, how is this poem working on your senses? I’ll ask students to name the five senses we learned as children—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. I might note that the poem cheekily asks us to have “all five senses awake.” They’ll note the phrase, “footsteps in the next room” when we speak of sound. I’ll prod about the repetition in the poem. How does that repeated, “listen,” make them feel? They may also note that the rain is a multi-sensory experience—and it really is. We can use all five senses to recognize rain.

But what about the sound or touch of a “restless garden”? I think many of us might identify that image as including wind even though wind isn’t mentioned directly. “Night that is more night” might categorize itself as something one can feel or see, as well as the ominous: “your shadow covers this page.” “Places with no weight” speaks to touch, or a lack thereof. And of course, we know the smell of a wet sidewalk or trees.

It doesn’t matter what the poet meant by anything anyway—
once the author let the poem out of its cage...it became our poem!

My last question focuses on how the poem makes the readers feel. I’ll encourage students to eschew thoughts of how they should feel, or how they think the poet is trying to make them feel. I plead with them to resist the urge to make meaning just for a little longer. The answers are varied. They might say they feel “in love,” “drowsy,” “like I’m listening to a song,” or “a little scared.” Others might express that “it feels like it’s happening in a dream” or that the poem reads “like magic.” That last comment surfaces often. Instead of launching into a discussion of magical realism, the school of poetics which Paz is solidly a part of, my students arrived there without any discussion of meaning or context, and they arrived in style. I’ll agree— “As One Listens to the Rain” entrances and magic is definitely afoot. This world is shimmering; it’s hyperreal in the best way.

What is the value in reading a poem in this visceral manner? As a poet myself, it’s about giving the poem a chance to breathe, to speak to readers, and for us to actually listen. That’s what I’d want the audience to do when reading my poems. When we layer meanings on poems, or label the poem immediately, we suppress its ability to talk to us. If we allow ourselves to feel, the poem expresses itself like the flower at the bottom of a teacup under hot water. Read for pleasure next time and see what a poem has to say to you. Just listen for it—you may be delighted.

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Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net.