"What moves you most in a work of literature?" (11.30.20)

Evidently, I spend a lot of time reading the Sunday New York Times each week.  I am looking forward to, though doubting it will come about actually, a year of Sunday reading that is not merely about tribal politics and a rundown of the week's smelliest tweets.

The title of this blog I quote from this week's Book Review, the regular "By the Book" interview, this week with poet Claudia Rankine.  This is one of the questions the interviewer puts to Ms Rankine.  Her response is enlightening (reassuring? confirming and validating?) for us writers of poetry: "When I'm held by the beauty of the language, first and foremost, as opposed to simply being carried along by the plot."

Now, she may be speaking of reading novels and other forms of prose literature, which is the interviewer's focus, but Ms Rankine's remark comes from poetry.  To the extent that a poem is a work of art, it is NOT a plotline or an essay or a history (this last including all those forms of history: memoir, autobiography, biography, events current or distant).  It is language given shape, and in that, artistic meaning.

If you've not yet read any of Claudia Rankine's poetry, you should probably do so, just to make deeper sense out of the last bit of the paragraph above.  Artistic meaning.  Her poems are at once direct and emotional, but incredibly dense, layered, voiced.  They usually are not "linear": this happened, then this, next this, finally this.  I am still trying to understand (i.e., interiorize) most of the poems I've read by her.  Race is probably one barrier to my understanding.  Another is artistry, or that tendency in works of art to resist interpretation, re-statement, paraphrasing.

"What's it mean, what's it about?" applied to a poem doesn't yield a paraphrase or a discussion of referents.  Not first and foremost.  The only answer is "itself."

And "itself" is shaped language.  First and foremost, as Rankine says, of course, though she never says clearly what secondary or ancillary aspects of works of literature move her.  She implies these are indeed such things as plotline (being carried away by a story, a narrative, characters and relations among them), theme or subject matter (e.g., "whiteness," biography, voice and point of view).  But the language first and foremost.  

That's how a poet would understand the act of reading, right, as complement to the act of writing?