“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, January 10, 2012

How to Read Any Poem, Anywhere: Part 1



The first of a series of twenty.

3 comments:

Christopher Schaberg said...

Laughing my ass off, here. What a wonderful way to start a new semester! Thanks for this, Tim. Excited to follow these over the semester...

John Muse said...

Loved listening to this. This morning I read Barthes' "Style and Its Image"—I begin teaching next week—and noticed a version of an OOO claim therein, one I would like to explore. You probably know the text. He too says its forms all the way down. About a line of Balzac: "the 'first' content of the sentence is another form... and style is established in the effort of transformation applied not to ideas but to forms..."

I look forward to hearing you talk more about form and force. What force meets the force of the poem? If the encounter of poem as papery, inky, white and black quasi-object and a reader can organize and affect this reader, then what's the right way to describe the reader's vulnerability, openness, etc. You've made me rethink my typical rejoinder: poems invite, solicit, etc. That now sounds mealy-mouthed. Some might, but not all.

-j

Tomás Elsinger said...

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