Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Kenneth Sherwood
Subject: Intimacy and intimations of a micropoetics
1. Confusions of terminology: "close reading" v. intimate reading as if theory
and ‘to read’ can nae share the same bed. And deconstructions be damned,
there is not a spirit of MIS-READING (in the academy anyway) despite the
prevalence of misreadings there.
2. Fact is that "close reading" as method gallops toward singularity, imperial
resolution of the chord and production of the cadence. So to Charles A., if only
"close reading" could be for pleasure. How would we name it?
3. Within the hallowed halls if prophylactic theory promotes safe texts and
declining intimacy, our loneliness may not be quelled through explication.
Brooks and Warren are at peace and the students don’t read, agreed, but the
spirit of "close readings" climactic S&M mastery over the poem lingers.
4. "I can’t read this poem; I don’t understand it at all."
Sure if anecdotal evidence of an authoritarian effect of close reading’s ethic of
closure.
5. Good to talk about the "pleasures" of "textually intimate" readings. Of course
the risk of accumulating first a mass and then a theory.
In fact to talk so (as some have begun to do) would perhaps bridge the gap (an
imagined gap as Ron Silliman (will the real Ron please stand up) demonstrates
in various theoretical yet intimate readings in New Sentence) between the two
threads on this list and between theory and "just reading the poem."
5b. Just Do It?
6. Pleasure this week of hearing Ric Caddel (from NE England) read and give a
reading of Bunting, an intimate reading complete with overhead projector that
gave intimate elucidation, made it possible to hear with the ears
7. Suppose the theory monolith has turned the academy’s ears away from
particulars of reading, strayed from the text ye little lost lambs; causal
(coincincident) correlation with with the fading of poetry (however read,