Reading a reading of the reading read

Hi, folks, I'm going to post something here (even though I was holding back) with the hope that this may get some ideas generated here that we can then explore here as an online community and then bring back with us into the class room. Many may say that Reader-response criticism recognizes the reader as an active agent who brings a work to life, completing a text's meaning through interpretation. Okay, this seems fine. But what if the reader instead collaborates with the poet, acts on some level as writer, and instead of interpreting the poem's meaning, completes the poem, notices aspects of the poem, becomes awe-struck by the poem, considers incorporating into one's own quotidian discourse aspects of the poem's form and concerns? In other words, what if the reader pretty much leaves the poem alone, working neither in a workshop setting to change the poem nor interpret/translate the poem. What if the reader simply communes with the poem? Remember that Emily Dickinson once wrote that "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." What is it that takes the top of your head off?

I notice in workshop a sort of knee-jerk tendency to say, "Well, I like/do not Iike X..." or "Well, if I were writing the poem, I'd do X..." or "Well, this reminds me of that time in 5th grade when...". What if instead we attempted to note things about the poem's form, the poem's process, listening to the poem's music, experiencing the poem's architecture? In our readings we've so far been introduced to practically an entire language with which to speak about a poem, but I notice a tendency to shy away from that discourse. Why is that? What if instead of saying "I don't like this line," we instead could say something like "Well, Williams has said that a line of poetry ought to...". I've noticed however folks responding to the essays on poetics by saying things like "I just don't get it," or "I just can't read this." Well, why is that?

I'd like you to try to think about the above questions and maybe some of the following:

What is it that's posing the difficulty? Is it that the essays sometimes ulitilize non sequiturs? Is it that the essays sometimes come up with stipulative definitions of key terms? What is it? Ask yourself how long you typically spend reading a particular essay on poetics? Is that long enough? Do you use a pen while reading? Do you ever do any online research of the author to try to situate that author in a context?

What may be some benefits of rethinking some of your habits of attention? Take the tops of your heads off, folks. It may be scary, but that's okay. You'll get through it.

Let's go!

Scott