more on . . . poets on reading . . .

Stephen Ratcliffe
Listening to Reading
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)

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Ron Padgett
Creative Reading:
What It Is, How to Do It, and Why
(Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997)

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This post follows on John Olson’s essay “Extreme Reading,” posted here last week. After the essay went up, Olson himself e-mailed me, reminding me of two books that ought to be read and remembered by all extreme readers. This present post, then, serves both as a kind of supplement to “Extreme Reading,” and my shout-out for two books, each by a contemporary poet, that present terrific takes on reading.

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Stephen Ratcliffe
Listening to Reading
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)

Listening to Reading is a collection of essays on particular books by contemporary poets. There are two kinds of essays. The first type, which Ratcliffe calls “analytic close readings,” are a very familiar type, at least in intent: their purpose is to explain the poetry which is written about. The second kind of essay is remarkably non-traditional: called by Ratcliffe “reading-as-writing-itself,” their purpose is “to perform /demonstrate that writing by doing/enacting it.” As Ratcliffe puts it, this is “writing that in listening to reading engages its subject on, and in, its own terms.”

For those who like extreme reading, and particularly for those (I’m raising my hand here) who enjoy doing that with poetry, Ratcliffe’s book is a primary source. It includes key advice about how to read or engage with a text, and maybe even more serves as an inspiration: all the essays – and especially the performative pieces – serve as object lessons in the wonders a focused and deep reader can bring about.

With regard to advice about how to read, Ratcliffe asserts two main points. The first is embodied in the book’s title: Listening to Reading. Ratcliffe insists that words are only fully present when they enter through the ear, that poems have an acoustic dimension (a sound/shape) and meaning does not exist separately from that. If the poem is read silently, it must be read not only with the eyes, but also the ears. We must listen to reading.

The other key piece of advice concerns attention. Attention is all, Ratcliffe says, borrowing in part on this (with direct acknowledgement) from Ezra Pound. Ratcliffe advises:

read[] the poem closely, with the same act of attention – focused at both micro- and wide-angle range – to the surface, tilt, and interior thrust of a particular structure in words that the scientist brings to his study of observable (or supposed) phenomena.

This advice fits right in with any notion of extreme reading, I think. Last week, I used an image of a man peering into a microscope to illustrate Olson’s essay, and Ratcliffe’s insistence on scientist-like attention when reading certainly is consistent with that. But remember, Ratcliffe calls for not just visual, but auditory attention:

Look – no, strike that – LISTEN (sorry to shout, but I do so to emphasize Ratciliffe’s fervor regarding the sound/shape of poems): I can’t say enough about the richness of Ratcliffe’s book. If you like contemporary poetry, and extreme reading, this is a book to read, and read again.

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Ron Padgett
Creative Reading:
What It Is, How to Do It, and Why
(Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997)

Remember the following couplet from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (also used by Allen Ginsberg as an epigraph on the title page of Howl and Other Poems)?

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Of course you do! Well, that’s precisely the kind of rebellious freedom that Ron Padgett advocates in Creative Reading. Padgett’s basic thesis is that the reader – to really have fun – needs to get “aggressive” (his word) and do what s/he wants with the text (italics below as in the original):

. . . the book is there for you to use as you see fit. It may have content you want to extract, it may be in a writing style you want to learn, it may lend itself to self-parody, or it may invite radical revision, rearrangement, or complete transformation. In all these cases, the book is raw material for you to shape. When you come to it ready to take it apart and put it back together, it has lost its inviolability, its implied claim to immutability, its intimidating authority. You become the new author. You assume authority.

In the key chapter of his book, Padgett lists and describes almost twenty creative reading techniques. It’s a tour-de-force. It begins with suggestions about changing single words in a text and reading alternate lines. It progresses to a discussion of reading a page repeatedly, “column confusion,” “fold-ins,” “day-toning,” “night-toning,” stencils and much else. It’s an extreme libertine reading primer like no other.

Padgett also has a chapter entitled “Reading in Unusual Situations.” Remember those images I used last week to illustrate John Olson’s essay, showing a person reading on a city street, in a humongous chair outdoors, or while jammed upside down between the walls in hallway? Well, Padgett in a few lucid paragraphs not only discusses similar situations, but explains why you feel the way you do when you see somebody else reading like that.

Padgett’s book is geared towards teachers, so sometimes it can trend toward the obvious and the exhaustive. But outweighing all that, and outweighing it by about two dozen complete sets of the O.E.D., are the many anecdotes or references Padgett puts into the book based on his experiences as a poet, writer, deep reader, and engaged member of the human race.

The book’s index (and hooray for an index!) includes dozens and dozens of proper names. And it’s not just the relatively well-known (Tristan Tzara, for example, and his recipe for dada cut-up poems) that turn up. Admittedly, I probably don’t get out of the house as much as I should, but new to me were names such as Marc Sapporo, author of a 1962 French novel that came in a box, with pages unbound and unnumbered, and John Waldman, a speed reading specialist who as a WWII soldier managed to get two trashy mystery novels for the price of one by reading only the odd-numbered pages of a book the first time through it, and then the second time, a few weeks later, reading through only the even-numbered pages.

My favorite anecdote in the book involves Padgett himself and concerns the creative reading technique he calls “typing.” To explain this particular technique, I’m going to type the opening paragraph of Padgett’s section on it, an explicative approach (as you may have already figured out) that is exactly perfect for this particular subject:

Typing. In the early 1960s, I learned that one of the best ways
to read an author was to type up his or her work at some length. I had
typed up brief selections from other people’s work – individual poems or
paragraphs, bits of dialogue, extracts from an essay – but it wasn’t until I
typed an entire collection of poems (the 66 poems in the first edition of
Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets) that I understood how close you can get to an-
other’s work by this means.

That’s a heck of a parenthetical tidbit, ain’t it?!! I’d forgotten or not known that Padgett -- I think this is how the story goes -- typed up the Berrigan masterwork for its first mimeoed publication. Think how fun that must have been! Padgett in the section from which the passage above is excerpted concisely explains what typing Sonnets taught him about Berrigan’s emphasis on single words, which kind of words he favored, the role of vowels, and other matters, including the poems’ line breaks, which he was able to focus on because (think here of the “old-fashioned” manual typewriter) he had to use the carriage return at the end of each line.

Typing out a poem: it’s a beautiful creative reading technique, a wonderful way to get in a little extreme reading.