Still, it helps if you have somebody to guide you through the process. The Poetry Foundation features poetry interpretation essays from some of the best poets and journalists in the business.
It's a whole new toolkit for writers, and I recommend all fledgling writers spend some time drinking straight from the barrel. The writer Ignoblus showed me this essay about a Robert Hass poem, the perfect example of how one poet took a bewildering political moment and turned it into poetic history.
Check it out:
"The pleasure in 'The Nineteenth Century as a Song' is the poem’s easy movement across an uneasy era, the way it touches down on increasingly discomforting subjects as casually as a bird hops from branch to branch of a tree."
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