What to do with class poems

I had a question from one among you about what to do when you present someone else's poem to the class. I think I covered this, to some extent, in the syllabus, but let me expand on those thoughts.

What does not interest me is "simply workshopping poems," or what I think that means. To workshop a poem is to go over it with a fine-toothed comb, to look to improve the poem's "craft," its vocabulary, its wording, and so on. These are good goals, but let's try to get at them through other means.

Start by reading the poem as you would any poem, for its meaning, its music (or anti-music), what is at stake in it, what claims the poet is making on the reader. What is the poem's work? Then look at ways in which the poem's formal qualities, or lacks thereof (if such a thing is possible), contribute to these claims, these meanings, this music.

It's hard to figure out what a poet is doing based on a single poem, or even several. But consider this an experiment. What might the poet's notion be of what poetry does, or what it can do?

If we have a sense of such claims and such ambitions, which are sometimes unclear even to the poet, then my hope is that the poet will know better how to revise her or his poem.

Susan