Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry

Reading and Reading

Reading and Reading Elizabeth Robinson it’s a truism that any text worth reading is worth reading again. This is particularly the case with difficult texts such as formally experimental poetry. yet it’s worthwhile in any case to give close consideration to what happens to the text and reader after multiple readings. one might expect, from a more conventionally oriented standpoint, that subsequent readings help the reader “to establish a text which, in the now universally accepted formulation, most nearly represents the author’s original (or final) intentions” (McGann 81). (McGann acknowledges, however, that readings that focus primarily on establishing authorial intention presume that the author is the locus of textual authority, and “the work is critically simplified through this process. . . . The result is that the dynamic social relations which always exist in literary production . . . tend to become obscured.” [81]) The strategy for interpreting the text based on authorial intention seems to understand the material in something like literalist or originalist terms. its textual history is traced, respected, and therefore further instantiated, with each reading. as McGann notes, “all acts of information transmission produce various sorts of corruption from the original material” (81), and ostensibly the best reading is one which offers the “purest” version of that original . one can grant that the “originalist” approach has value, especially as it abets the reader in accessing useful historical and other contextual information . yet an alternative approach, one that understands texts as points of departure and poses the challenges of innovative poetry, for example, also merits attention. There are ancient traditions that not only attend to texts differently and more dynamically but with markedly less preoccupation and loyalty to the “trueness” of the original. Consider the practice of Lectio divina, which is thought to have started with origen and the other desert fathers in the third reading and reading 19 century. By way of repeated readings of sacred texts, origen and his followers hoped to enter into meanings frankly beyond those offered by the literal text. (The practice was, by the fifth century, institutionalized in the rule of st. Benedict.) Granted, the religious read toward and for divine meaning, but that they labeled this “anagnosis” (reading) makes clear they welcomed ambiguity, surprise, and even a troubling of the text. one contemporary monastic website discusses the way that Lectio divina radicalizes the practice of reading (and rereading): “one does not engage in Lectio divina to acquire disinterested, intellectual knowledge. The intent of Lectio divina is to make the reading of scripture . . . a two way street for God and us. Cyprian of Carthage put it perfectly: ‘Be assiduous in prayer and in reading. in the one you speak to God, in the other God speaks to you’” (“Lectio divina”). What is germane here is that this ancient practice of reading and rereading insists on a sense of reciprocity between reader and text: each is involved in an interchange whose outcome, meaning, and value cannot be ascertained beforehand and which is subject to change with each reading—as when one element of the constellation (text, reader, or instance of reading) differs from that of a previous occasion. as Hank Lazer notes in his essay in this collection, if one defers a consideration of what a text means and what its theme is and instead continues to make observations and pose questions about it, its “‘difficulty’” can be a source of interest and pleasure, not just an “obstacle.” The reading and rereading of a text then become interactive and variable. a contemporary version of such a reading practice can be extrapolated from Murray Gell-Mann’s theory of the “complex adaptive system.” such systems are not static but undergo continual evolution; they change and they learn. returning to a text, rereading it, demonstrates to the reader how perception and apprehension (indeed, content itself) are themselves variable. such an approach justifies Harold Bloom’s assertion that criticism (and here i would substitute “reading” for “criticism”) “may not be an act of judging, but it is always an act of deciding, and what it tries to decide is meaning” (3). as a reader reconsiders a poem multiple times, but each time with varying insights and valuations, her investment in the process of reading is likely to increase. This does not ensure, however, that meaning becomes more stable: what emerges is that there is no final reading for, or of, any given text. The act of reading has become relational, malleable: reading again is thus an excellent demonstration...