how can you understand poetry?

Ah, but that is the point of poetry: to narrowly skirt the line on whose other side lies total gibberish. A poem should suggest meaning, but you should never be sure of what it's saying. A poem that you fully understand is a terrible poem that fails in poetry's one objective: to mystify the reader.

Here is an example of a perfectly good poem:

I raked leaves today
down
down
down
down
down
off the roof onto
your job interview came in the mail?

Powerfully suggestive, endlessly evocative, but ultimately impossible to parse.

Here, by contrast, is a shitty poem:

Mark lent me his ruler this morning

What makes it bad? The lack of mystery, of the suspense of un-knowing, or antiknowing, or "knowing without knowledge".

Let's take a look at another great classic that you'll probably recognize from school:

Running my hand through your hair
my finger caught a knot.
I pushed gently
but the knot wouldn't not not not not yield.

Did the knot come untangled, did it "yield"? Did the speaker get his hand out of the other person's hair, or is it still stuck in there on that knot? The poem leaves this question open, with the possibility of several alternatives. "Not" is repeated so many times that the reader would have a tremendously difficult time figuring out exactly how "yield" is being is modified. The puzzle is rendered utterly insoluble by the addition of the homophone "knot", which multiplies our confusion to an irreducible degree.

Is that guy's hand stuck in that girl's hair? Great fucking poem.

I know the spark inside your eyes was just the match I used to set myself on fire. ♫

"Mulher, irmã, escuta-me: não ames,

Quando a teus pés um homem terno e curvo

Jurar amor, chorar pranto de sangue,

Não creias, não mulher: ele te engana!

As lágrimas são galas de mentira

E o juramento manto de perfídia."


rs

zombie vampires from hell.

Your wish is what I want I'll take it on my knees
Don’t worry baby it feels better the more it bleeds

I’d give you anything to make you happy
What do you want, what do you need
I swear to god I'd give you anything

And right now I’m running with guns to get money
To buy back the beauty I sold short cuz I couldn’t see
What was right in front of me
If give you anything to make you happy

I could never love you
But I’m a cup
So drink and drink from me
Till there is none.

But there's a point at which you
realize that nobody is
all bad
all bad
all bad.