Receptivity is not passivity: Reading as a Poet, Reading to Poesis
Or, lots of poetic reflecting and a fresh poem
Reader, I have erred of late—made mistakes, yes, and gone wandering too, that animal growingly aware that I am not quite home in my interpreted world.
My PhD, essentially in literary history of a certain corpus, throws me into a funny relationship with reading literature. As I study for my comprehensive exams linearity has flooded into my reading practices for poetry, transforming—to my detriment and its—the shared world an author offers me into so much information about that world. I’ve been speed-reading interpreted reports from those sculpted worlds, where I used to languorously dwell in them a time, my own cartographer.
In other words, I have encountered both narratives and lyric as artifacts of time more than space and thought that it was good. Valuing data over qualities, I forgot a basic mathematical fact: that when we trace a path in a multi-dimensional manifold we journey a collapsed version of it, seeing at most sequential facets and projections. Losing some things we have known, and mostly unable to know what other phenomena exist in the real space. Glimpsing fragmentary reconstructions, mistaken if we take them for the territory. And it is so much easier to project and linearize over time, to understand the 1- and 2-D parts—to understand in part, through mirrors, darkly—than to glimpse the illumined whole in a flash!
But slow reading, the art, is the foundation of my humanities field, even as it has pursued scientific status. Buying fully in to the importance of being a creator over a collector or creating more than I consume, I was no longer sensitive to less dualistic ways of being—a curator, say, or an active receiver. Being receptive to the world, after all, is quite the active and activating experience. It sensitizes my system—embodied heart and mind—to orient to what matters and thus reorient as often as I let the input move me.
So I aspire now to be a sensitive reciever, neither information glutton nor “content” creator. It’s starting closer to where I am when I am most alive and engaged. I trust the creating will take care of itself in dialogue and dialectic.
The late-Latin word curiosus had negative connotations: a scholar too mired in piddling details or devouring knowledge instead of mulling it over. The German for curiosity is Neugier, related to Gier, greed—curiosity is greed for the new. This is the curiosity of rabbit holes, the heady neurochemical elixir of Wikipedia-ing your way to somewhere you can’t find home from.
So what does a generative curiosity look like, in place of a consumptive one?
What does it take to go from running through rabbit holes to architecting our own warrens with the raw drive of curiosity, for chisels the skills we’ve built as apprentices to the world?
Poetry Practice in Community
It’s easier to get to when I start from where I am and find companions for the road.
Seeking dialogue that will draw me into my creativity has pushed me to err in the ancient Latin sense of wandering the world. My greatest find there—a return, nostos with no algia—is the vibrant online community of modern poetry readers at ModPo. There I’m able to create experiences by reacting to poems, to have branching conversations on forum threads that miraculously coalesce into stable monuments, landmarks in an evolving-revolving community of receptive readers.
The group is in the off-season right now, “SloPo”—so while the speed of connections is rapid and the velocity voluble, there’s even more of a focus on group reading over getting through the sprawling curriculum in focus each autumn. No flammable friction, but a grounding viscosity to the medium we are immersed in together.
The most resonant poem I’ve discovered there so far is Major Jackson’s Double View of the Adirondacks as Reflected Over Lake Champlain from Waterfront Park, a snapshot of the impression a studied mountain ridge makes on the slow, deep waters of a hurting soul, a scrapbook of such snapshots across the score of human life-time as the ridge develops geologically.
I’m home there, so I have more to give. My favorite post to contribute was one on poet Danez Smith’s collection Don’t Call Us Dead, in particular “not an elegy for Mike Brown”, which I remember reading one night as I was immersed in Ancient Greek that summer of 2014–a language and a classroom painfully quiet about systemic police violence in this country, heartbreakingly timid about “getting political.”
Slow-Reading Poetic Nonfiction
I’ve bathed again in the balm of curator-reader Maria Popova’s lifework The Marginalian in parallel, when I do want *together* to unfold over time and not be concentrated in the space of community. Popova recently renamed her newsletter, which used to be called Brain Pickings. I love that her new title is truer to her, a self-recognition of what readers saw she has already become. For me, instead, it feeds my aspiration to move from a creator picking my own brain for nuggets to share to an engaged receiver of text-worlds transmitting my still-forming reactions in their margins. The latter practice has, too, an ancient history in the craft of reading that is comfortingly close to how I want to read for my PhD.
And as I read my chapbook evolves…
When I explained my chapbook’s working title to Sandbox readers, it was a monolingual collection with paired photos. Many months and a summer of German immersion later, it’s bilingual and as much about sense-motion, sounding, *tanzen* and story as the static look. As I retune my reception, my old occupation with being in spaces has waltzed back in and taken up shop. In singing I always have preferred the staying texture of chords to the nimble coloring of counterpoint, been struck by the layering of overtones in a rehearsal room even when I fumble the tempo.
But maybe Deciduous Green still has a place in the collection’s framing. I think this apparent departure from vision can be rendered sensible when I alert awareness to the dance, story, motion, the evolution of characters, the contingent histories that underlie the contents of a photograph, the topology of developing imagescape. After all, as physicist Brian Greene has the authority to remind us when he excerpts from the Duino Elegies for The Universe in Verse, anything static can suddenly bloom into kinesis, potential does become poesis. Or as Rilke tells it in the passage Green picked, there is
this space of Being, a little darker than all
the surrounding green, with little waves at the edge
of every leaf (like a breeze’s smile)—
As for visibility, Rilke dethrones it:
Earth, is it not this that you want: to rise
invisibly in us? — Is that not your dream,
to be invisible, one day? — Earth! Invisible!
This desire to make things invisible as a way of beloving the world (yes, I will that a middle verb)—it’s striking, when so much poetry is given to making the ephemeral visible or hyper-visible, to thick, lush freeze-frames, when love is yoked to what or who is seen.
In the linked audio Greene says of his selections
Rilke... celebrates the capacity of we humans to take in qualities of the world and turn them into something invisible, something ephemeral, something that nevertheless is full of meaning, and value, and purpose, namely human reflection, human sensibility, human conscious awareness.
That’s my book’s project now, then. To explore the motion of the awareness in what we see, the invisible undulations slowly radiating from the still. To play with scales.
I needed to see objects more closely to become a fuller subject, but lately I’m more interested in soft focus on the space between and around the seer and the seen, in hearing without needing to be one who hears.
I expect the trees will stick around, though. As much as has been made of rhizomes and the intelligence of interconnected forests, there is a wisdom to the individual tree that’s worth lifting up. Marilyn Nelson runs with the hypothetical of a empire of octopuses in this magisterial animated poem for “The Universe in Verse”, departing with “what if” because as far as we know, octopuses are singularly solitary creatures. I’m into society, of course, or at least community. But right now I wonder how else we can juxtapose its parts, want to follow the moves threads make one next to the other when the quilt-work they will form is still passing from an imagination into the world.
A Parting Poem
I endeavor to make these dispatches more poetic in themselves, whether or not they include bits of poems. I’ve opened my creative process here before, but, going with today’s theme, I’d rather see what happens if I stay in my process as I report on it. I’m bored of reflexive declarations. So I’ll give a poem I drafted recently the closing word today, written after reading Paul Celan’s poems Soviele Gestirne (So Many Constellations) and Zurich, Hotel zum Storchen.
We here
We were folded in
To dimension ten
It’s so small, Otherworld.
Inside temple we’d heard of the Nation
Here our chosen domain
An in-ner side
Hardly worth claiming
Thus ours Now.
You and I, we
are
Endurable.
This fits.
Our space for two always fits more
The problem coming with the realm
Whelmed to a room
And we’d rather
Not have
Our space
I mean the us-envelope
Loom
Reiching into dominion.
When WE sings Hear, oh!—
i pray.
You swoop in
We two breathless
Reaching
into Otherworld the only way out being
up in to
Vacuum
No!
Cold. So cold.
So
Down stairs
Outside
Beside an oak
Whereby
You and I are above
Near Absolute Zero
Before which the light
Is a of a lamp not our Sun
By which we radiate
Heat not destruction.
Our nigh habitable realm
Apt? Adapt, adept.
We do not measure dimension ten.
We claim in it our selves.
It is—
The Name can see us there.
WE passes us over.