Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

In my earlier post I spoke simplistically of teaching strategies of close reading
pertinent to different types of writing. That’s not right. We certainly can learn
strategies for reading, as we can learn strategies for finding our way through the
woods; but we can’t know in advance the "type," if there is such a thing, of a
piece of writing. We really do have to read it, I guess.
I had tried to suggest by using "scare-quotes" that I understand "reading for
pleasure" to be a complicated if not illusory notion, but yes, as a practical
matter, people who read poetry frequently will tend, I think, to read it carefully.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is open to poetries which do things differently
from what they like to have done, or what they are used to liking. Pound’s
problem with Whitman may have been that Pound didn’t see carefulness in
Whitman’s work. Or maybe he just didn’t like it and so couldn’t read it
carefully.
And now I’ll tiptoe back to the shadows..