How to read a poem---20 strategies

7. A poem cannot be paraphrased. In fact, a poem’s greatest potential lies in the opposite of paraphrase: ambiguity. Ambiguity is at the center of what is it to be a human being. We really have no idea what’s going to happen from moment to moment, but we have to act as if we do. (Mark Yakich at the Atlantic)

To read strategies 1-6 and 8-20, click the above hyperlinked text.