Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: David McAleavey
Subject: Re: Teaching close reading
This thread may have more relevance on the T-AMLIT list, or perhaps on some
other, but I have to agree with Tenney Nathanson that the university’s emphasis
on theory & cultural criticism takes both undergrads and graduate students
away from close reading. How crucial is close reading to writers, to poets
particularly? The students I teach who have most interest in close reading are
those who take as many creative writing courses as they can.
But the different types of reading – pertinent to different types of writing –a
"close reading" of works by most of those subscribing to this list might not
much resemble, task by specific task, a close reading appropriate to poems
written by those in that other, dominant, not-precisely-parallel tradition (as can
be found discussed, say, on the CAP-L list).
But it could be that NT’s point is that no matter the difference in poetic
ideology or practice, a critical reading strategy which involves reading-with-apurpose
(i.e., to explore cultural or economical conditions imbedded in various
texts) may not need to include close reading strategies. Reading for "pleasure,"
however, or reading to "understand the author’s meaning or purpose" – those
tasks do involve close reading (no matter the poetics, I suspect).
The grad-level seminars I’ve been teaching the past two years make me think
students haven’t learned much about close reading; but most find it valuable to
get an introduction. Minds are malleable….
Most of my teachers, I think, were excellent, so maybe my experience differs
from the norm. Still, I did have some losers thrown in there, and surely some of
them were just being tendentious under the guise of doing "close reading."
From such you wouldn’t learn much of anything, of ear or eye. We’ve all had
enough bad teaching to know what it’s like to feel stepped on.
The best writers, theorists or poets, have paid a lot of attention to things – for
example, to the prosody of the first seven Cantos. "Close reading," the way I
intended it, is just a subset of "paying attention." Reading page after page of
"close readings" of poems, on the other hand, wears thin pretty quickly. Let’s
just read the poems, I want to say!