Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Hank Lazer
Subject: close reading
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the postings of the last several days. I find the list
taking more and more of my time, but I am learning and engaged. Thanks to
all.
When I was at the [20th Century Literature] conference in Louisville, it was
great to meet a number of you that I’d had only known via e.
Of the current discussion, probably winding down?, on close reading, I wanted
to raise a related issue. Peter had asked what would be the opposite of close
reading. Inattentive reading? Non-intensive reading? As others have pointed
out, the allegedly conservative nature of close reading has to do with its
institutionalization via a textbook: Understanding Poetry. (It’s my impression,
that Jed Rasula’s forthcoming? just released? book will discuss this history.) In
my opinion, recent theory "advances," particularly those stemming from
deconstruction, have, in a different context, reiterated "close reading"
methodologies, but with much greater play and with different metaphysical
stakes.
But the issue that I would like to raise is the relationship of close reading to
theme-based reading. It seems to me that much close reading ultimately gets
down to a process of unification of the explanation of the poem by means of a
thematized understanding. While much (most? all?)
newer/innovative/experimental (take your pick) poetries have to one degree or
another overthrown such habits of unification and closure, many discussions of
poetry end up defending "new" poetries as having rather traditional modes of
meaning (as theme). As various of y’all have pointed out, cultural and
contextual readings DO lead in different directions (and sometimes away from
a close consideration of that great new critical polestar, the text itself). But even
so, especially in the domain of the multicultural, many readings boil down to
assertions about "content" (a close cousin of "theme").
In one of my poems in Doublespace, I had written that to be "thematized is
demonized."
Is close reading inevitably tied to "theme"? Is "thematizing" inevitably
associated with retro modes of mastery–a kind of strip-mining of the text?