The enigmas of poems are curious to the mind. You may feel unintelligent after reading the poems once, not being able to understand the meanings and the transitions between lines. The second time is even more frustrating and you want to give up, but you don’t, until you have read them a few times more, lost interest and started playing games on your phone.
That’s exactly how the experience of reading the poems was for me. It’s not like I hate poems, but the inflated and fancy language of most poems is hard to understand, and that’s why it bores me. So, when i tried reading the Brooklyn poems , I felt like my mind was unable to absorb anything.
However, when we read the poems animatedly together as a class while standing up, I did sort of begin to grasp the meaning of it, and found them to be interesting. It could have been the way we were reading it, or because we read it together as a class, or maybe because I was putting more interest in trying to understand and enjoy it, that made me finally understand some, if not all of the poem. And what I found even more intriguing was that in translating the same verse, different people had interpreted a particular verse quite differently from each other, and in a way, that not only revealed the thinking processes and ideas of individuals, but also reflected their personalities.