How do you read? How do you write?
In a class this week, I had assigned Allen Ginsberg's “Kaddish.” When the class convened, students seemed a bit unimpressed with Ginsberg. I asked, “Did you read it out loud or quietly to yourself?” Every student had read it like they would read a novel. We spent the next half hour reading aloud. Their sense of the poem changed rather quickly.
When I am writing an email or an essay or letter, I almost always say the words out loud as I write (as I am right now). I write more quickly and am generally happier with the results. There is a payoff for me, I suppose, to bridge the abstract linkage of words and concepts with some sort motion and sound. And, when I read other people's poetry, I tend to want to read it out loud, trying different voices, patterns, attitudes, physical postures, etc. Some works seem best understood while pacing. Others want me on the grass, underneath a tree. Some poems want a room with an echo. O
thers want to be memorized and spit back at appropriate moments.
However, I do not always speak the words when reading digital poetry. Some works contain too many non-alphabetic elements to permit such recitation. Some provide a voice. And others seem to have enough interactive elements to engage my desire to do something as I read. But on the occasions when I have been lecturing on a specific work, I sometimes take the time to recite a passage. In any case, my experience of the work tends to be enhanced by some notion of “presence,” that somebody is doing something with me, for me, to me, even if I don't know what they look like or how they did it.
My first question is: Do any members of this community read works of electronic literature out loud, either as you read another person's work or as you write your own? My second question is: When you create or read something that cannot be vocalized, what other ways do you perform the work?
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4 Responses to “How do you read? How do you write?”.
Perhaps a fundamental difference between the print and the digital poetic experience is that digital poetries tend to have their own hints and whispers of a “presence” before the reader enters the environment of the text. Unlike print poetry, ePoetic works often perform and act their presences. The relationships we create, form, perpetuate, and initiate as we interact with the digital text seem to demand a new set of responses. These pieces do not simply ask that you read them beneath a tree; they GIVE you the tree.
Great post. I am asking similar questions here: http://texturalliterature.blogspot.com/.
asg
While working on a piece, I often read some of the sentences out loud to see if they make the kind of sense I hope they make. Sometimes I HAVE to do this, because my voice (or someone else’s) is part of the audio.
I recommend reading out loud to my students in composition and creative writing classes, and we always read poetry out loud in literature classes (it’s historically an oral form, and like you suggest, I encourage them to think of each reading as a new performance, a new way of negotiating the text).
But within your post, it seems the larger question is whether reading out loud will remain a useful tool for us, and our students, when we are looking at works of digital literature. As you also suggest, it depends on the piece; however, if I was teaching digital lit (which I rarely do), I can easily see that there might be some pieces we would read out loud, but many would not lend themselves to that approach. The reasons for this might be text (because of its animation or random generation) that is difficult or impossible to read; an over-abundance of text, so that reading would be too time-consuming; text that is simply part of a multimedia presentation, where to separate it from its visual and audio contexts might threaten the integrity of the piece; and text which is not worth singling out for the special attention of an oral delivery.
Does this open up new opportunities, and innovative practices, for literary analysis and classroom approaches toward discussion and criticism? Absolutely.
I sometimes read bits of my writing out loud to make sure the piece can be read aloud even though nothing I’ve ever written, plays aside, has been specifically designed to exist anywhere other than on the printed page. In fact I’ve never read publicly and only ever recorded a single poem for a wee film recently. So, no, I don’t read what I find online out loud unless I want my wife to know about something whereupon I have been known to recite a few lines. If the thing is too long (and for me that would be over six or eight lines) I just send her the link. I have never written anything than couldn’t, if the mood struck you, be vocalised.
Amanda,
I like that description, “They give you the tree.” And that is something that I guess I am trying to get at. It certainly resonates with contemporary thinking in regards to subjectivity and consciousness. The whole puzzle of what we do when we read walks us back from superficial understandings of interactivity and really disturbs the question of electronic literature in a nice way. For instance, I often read Ezra Pound’s “Nicotine.” As someone who has spent a great deal of my life inhaling smoke, it’s a piece that seizes upon experience…. I can feel it in my lungs when I read it. It’s a magical piece that conjures up deep sensual experience for me. To think of a contemporary work that tends to give me an immediate visceral response of some sort…. maybe Jhave Johnston’s PlantLife might evoke a similar response. The more abstract the piece, the more intellectual work I need to do to get into the piece. In other words, it takes a bit of concentration to conjure up the necessary associations and live momentarily within the imaginary space of the work.
Alan,
Thanks, too, for your insights here. “My Summer Vacation” is the kind of piece which operates along similar lines. As the world is created and the “reality” at the center of the piece sinks in…. it is the kind of piece that makes me shudder when I read it. I guess at some level we are talking about how signs and the relationship between signs can synch up with experience. I guess trying electronic literature in a traditional literary classroom can help us think about the “reality” of symbols. At the very least, I think it would be an interesting way to think about symbolism in the Modern era. Some things are true, but not in the way we expected them to be.