Sherry Chandler » Couple of observations on how the reader recreates the poem
Couple of observations on how the reader recreates the poem
One of my serendipity moments in reading. Today I found this in William Stafford’s “Introduction to Since Feeling is First,” from Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Michigan Press, 1979):
You could look at reading a poem this way: if you are thinking and there is a window nearby, you may look out—far. Your thinking will connect now and then to the scene, whenever something out there strikes your attention. Or, even more aptly, you might have a friend with you, and you would interchange, offer beginnings, slanted ideas, linked progressions. There would be a series of mental incidents, not predictable, never to be fully anticipated without experience that comes about through following the sequence onward, point by point. Your experience would be richer—more would happen—than if you had been alone.
Reading is like that. It is not all your own ideas, and not all the other person’s ideas. You toss back and forth against a live backboard. And, particularly if it is a congenial poem—or friend—you are reading or hearing, you furnish a good half of the life. The travel circuit of an idea or impression is a sequence of rebounding between you and the companion, between you and the page.
And yesterday, I read this from the preface to Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign (Wesleyan Poetry, 1994):
But writing, like reading, implies in any case a very peculiar form of presence. It is presence at another moment. In this anachronism, this unsettled time, the intimacy between writer and reader (unlike other intimacies) seems the closer for its definition in deferral. Taking up any book to read it, how am I with the writer? The with is without the usual conversational confronting; for I identify myself as (I don’t identify myself over against) the unfolding. I am with the writer not en face, as an opposite respondent, but á tête, as a kind of mind-reader.
And as a writer, how am I with the reader? This is an engagement with a very non-particular someone, an other very like a self, unseeable, a grounding figure which, when I do take the trouble to imagine it (for one need not imagine a being to have one), I imagine as a fellow-imaginer: as an understanding—even an underwriting—inmate. Any engagement in acts of reading, between that figure and myself, is engagement without argument, engagement without preliminaries, engagement without (in any of the usual senses) even a meeting of the minds: there was never, after all, a separation. To be a writer “with” a reader is rather like being, oneself of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign. By comparison with this intimacy, the fondest act of physical love takes place between strangers.
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