Confession: I opened a copy of Crime and Punishment for the first time this past month. Part of the pandemic reading program, maybe--get to those books that have rested untouched on your shelves for 30 years. I majored in Modern American Poetry, after all. Why would I spend time reading a fat Russian novel of the 19th Century? As it turns out, for the poetry.
The copy I've moved around with me for all these years isn't mine, actually, but my sister's. I must have borrowed it intending to read the novel which then got lost among the other books of my library. Her name is elegantly autographed on the title page and, given the book's brittle, yellowed pages, it clearly is a text from some course at university (we attended the same school, three years apart) in the late 1960s.
What strikes me about this copy as I plow through it are the occasional marginal notes in my sister's unmistakable hand: blue ballpoint ink, a cursive that only a professional elementary school teacher would have developed. Those notes are frequent in the first dozen pages before tapering off to stray marginal ticks, an underlined phrase here and there, then nothing for over a hundred pages. Then suddenly a rush of underlines and comments on the the translation's text in the margins. The notes have that cadence of pedagogy you'll probably recognize in many of your own college textbooks, reflecting a remark or some idea your professor (or TA?) told you to be on the lookout for as you read the next few chapters of the assignment.
But what really intrigues me are the 150-page gaps throughout. Was my sister skipping whole chapters (no doubt like I did, like some of my own students did), kind of reading her own Cliff Notes text of the novel? Maybe. But what if she was in fact reacting to the novel's meta-text at those points where her marginal notes appear? By meta-text I mean of course that aspect of any writing, especially artistic writing, that reveals itself as artifice: the style, tone, voice, syntax, narrative structure, cadence and figure of creation.
What if she'd become caught up in--implicated in--the story Dostoyevsky tells and only occasionally became aware that she was actually reading and that the text was performing? Isn't this when you, too, underline a word or phrase of a text, or record a thought in the margin of something you're reading? You become aware of a repetition, a certain flow of language, a performance. Now, all creative texts perform continuously; they are performative. We note their performance more readily at certain junctures than at others, say, in purple patches, or especially lyrical passages, or in unusually constructed forms of expression. We are awakened to what we're actually about: reading texts.
I think this is the "poetry" of any writing, that portion where the text draws attention to itself, to what it is and to what we are as its reader. Poetry is the one verbal art almost completely devoted to its status as pure text. The story it tells is the story of its own writing, which is retold with every new reading.
Of course, poems can be about something besides themselves, and that is in fact how most people read and write poems, as other ways of stating something about the world. My friends at Wednesdays@One usually react to the poems we share on this level alone, at least initially: How true that expression is! How accurate! How real! But we don't (can't) discuss poems very long before their textuality asserts itself. We begin to note rhymes and rhythms, images and lines, locutions and hyperbole, ellipses and "loaded" expressions. We begin to see where a poem succeeds and fails, on its own terms and also on the terms of convention. We start to unpack the poem.
That's when we really start to get down to the work of Wednesdays@One.
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