Wednesday 14 April 2010

Pulled off at tangents

Today I started by looking the the CILIP weekly update. I think this it great and I always find something of interest. This weeks was no exception, a real gem and am now buzzing with ideas and things I want to do.
But through following a link to MIT open courseware I came across two poems on reading.
I used to panic when I read poetry as I thought I was meant to find stuff hidden in their to help me understand what the poet was thinking when he wrote the poem. But since reading Rosenblatt, Zimmermann, Keene and others I now realise that I just need to think about what the poem means to me, how I connect with it, how it makes me feel, what connections I make, what queries I have. etc. In other words I use the reading strategies that I teach to the students.

My confusion here is in the second poem and I am wondering why the pages bore no print.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book
The house was quiet and the world was calm

The words were spoken as if there was no book
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

The Reader
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of somber pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shriveled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.

The somber pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven

Wallace Stevens

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