Responding to a question someone asked on Alas about my “Reading is Fundamental” post

January 12th, 2012 § 0 comments

RonF, in my recent post on read­ing, Because Read­ing is Fun­da­men­tal, which I cross-posted over at Alas, asked if I could give an exam­ple of the kind of read­ing I was talk­ing about when I wrote

but it has been years since I have been able to cre­ate at the cen­ter of my life a space for the kind of read­ing that nour­ishes me as a writer, read­ing that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that expe­ri­ence, that con­nects me to lan­guage in ways that are chal­leng­ing and revi­tal­iz­ing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world sim­ply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me pos­si­bil­i­ties of being I would not oth­er­wise have imagined.

His ques­tion is a good one, but I don’t really have the time to dig into any of the books I was think­ing about when I wrote that pas­sage, so I thought I would answer him by shar­ing an excerpt of an essay I am work­ing on. The excerpt, though not the essay, tells the story of how I began to read poetry and how that read­ing led me to want to write poetry, and so it is about read­ing that took place a long time ago, but the expe­ri­ence it talks about is the kind of expe­ri­ence I was talk­ing about in the post. Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog will likely not need any back­ground to under­stand some of the larger con­text, since I have writ­ten about it many times before, but for those of you who may not have read some of my pre­vi­ous post, it may be use­ful to know that part of the con­text for the excerpt is the fact that I was sex­u­ally abused as a boy and that read­ing and writ­ing played a cen­tral role in my com­ing to terms with that fact. Here’s the excerpt:

The first vol­ume of poetry I remem­ber tak­ing down from the shelf in the pub­lic library across the street from where I lived was Con­rad Aiken’s Selected Poems. I was four­teen or fif­teen years old. I read the first eigh­teen lines or so of the first poem in the book, “Palimpsest: The Deceit­ful Por­trait” (Aiken’s poem is the first one in the pdf), and I knew I needed to make poetry part of my life.

Well, as you say, we live for small hori­zons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
See­ing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret mean­ings,—
Yet know so lit­tle of them; only see­ing
The small bright cir­cle of our con­scious­ness,
Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—
Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morn­ing,
I walked in a cer­tain hall­way, try­ing to find
A cer­tain door: I found one, tried it, opened,
and there in a spa­cious cham­ber, brightly lighted,
A hun­dred men played music, loudly, swiftly,
While one tall woman sent her voice above them
In pow­er­ful incan­ta­tion… Clos­ing then the door
I heard it die behind me, fade to whis­per,—
And walked in a quiet hall­way as before.
Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,
Is all we know of those we call our friends.

To say that I iden­ti­fied with the woman in these lines would be an under­state­ment. I might have been keep­ing my own door well hid­den and tightly locked — I did, after all, have real secrets to keep — but I also needed some­one to open it who would hear my voice, as Aiken’s speaker had heard the woman’s, car­ry­ing it back into his own life and thus reduc­ing, by how­ever small a degree, her iso­la­tion. What I thought con­sciously at the time, how­ever, was that I wanted to under­stand how Aiken had made that woman so real for me, how his words had left me feel­ing that his speaker had heard me too; and so I started read­ing a lot of poetry, tak­ing books off the library shelf pretty much at ran­dom, jump­ing from Aiken to Frost to Sand­berg to Eliot to Williams — I don’t remem­ber if I read any women at the time — and finally to e. e. cum­mings, whose work, espe­cially his sex­ual love poems, spoke to me at least as pow­er­fully as Aiken’s poem did. Take, for exam­ple, the first three lines of the last poem in & [And], cum­mings’ sec­ond pub­lished volume:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Mus­cles bet­ter and nerves more.

Nowhere else in my life — not in the pornog­ra­phy I was look­ing at or the sex edu­ca­tion clas-ses I’d taken, not in what my male friends who’d had sex had to say or in the sex­ual wis­dom the adult men I knew occa­sion­ally chose to share, and cer­tainly not in own expe­ri­ence — nowhere else had I heard a man state so plainly that, what­ever else it might mean, being sex­ual with some­one could also be about lik­ing his own body. I des­per­ately wanted to feel that way myself, and so I de-voured as much cum­mings as I could, try­ing to inter­nal­ize his vocab­u­lary and tech­nique and then to use them in my own poems about sex, which I failed at for years, well into my early twen­ties, when I was sit­ting in the work­shop where my teacher told us about her “cunt poem” chal­lenge. In part, this fail­ure had to do with my imma­tu­rity both as a poet and as a lover, but it also had to do with the fact that I couldn’t just write the con­se­quences of hav­ing been sex­u­ally abused away. Learn­ing to like my body meant unlearn­ing the self-hatred, phys­i­cal and oth­er­wise, that I’d been taught by my abusers, and that meant puz­zling through the par­tic­u­lar form this self-hatred took in me.

I also thought it might be fun to list some of the books and writ­ers that have had this kind of effect on me since then, even though the specifics might be very dif­fer­ent. Here are some, in no par­tic­u­lar order, that I see on my book­shelves right now, though most of them are books I read years, and some of them decades, ago:

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