In an effort to learn more about the teaching of reading and interpretation of poetry, a structured experiment was devised whereby college English majors used a combination of reading, writing and discussion to study James Wright's poem "A Blessing." The primary aim was to involve the students emotionally in a poem. Students were encouraged to give immediate, uninhibited responses and to reconstruct their own versions of reality as triggered by the poetic text. Before reading the poem, students wrote accounts of personal experiences in order to sensitize them to the mood of the text. Students next read the poem quickly, wrote their general impressions of it, and discussed what they had written with small groups of peers. The poem was then re-read more systematically, and both visual and linguistic symbols were used to interpret it. This was followed by a second discussion in small groups, a more definitive written account describing and evaluating the poem, and finally a discussion of the poem by the class as a whole. The experiment revealed the importance of the movement from individual study to large group discussion and the power of physical engagement with a poem--using visual techniques as well as linguistic ones--as interpretive tools. (Eight references are attached.) (MHC)