Reading is Practicing
“Reading poetry you have to use creativity—your own. A lot of your own,” B said.
Reading poetry is recreating or practicing that exat same thing that happens when you write. You have to stay really concentrated, really focused, on something you do not understand. You have to stay in that no-place. The strategies each person develops for doing that is their creativity.
This is why new writers are constantly urged by their teachers to read, read, read. It’s writing practice.
During my mid life crisis, a few years ago, right before I discovered face blindness, etc., I got into a habit of reading Easy Books. I’d never read easy books in my life; I thought English majors weren’t allowed to read anything that was EZ. When I discovered we could and no one really cared at all, I went nuts. I binged. I took up mysteries. Now, I’m out of practice reading hard books. My reading muscles got slack.
Reading some harder books—poetry, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Melville, Dickinson, Durrell—makes it easier to write because you can concentrate for longer in that world in that way.
Reading harder books is co-creating.
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It took me most of my adult life to realize that I must allow myself to read poetry like a sentence in German, where the verb is at the end. I’m a greedy reader, a fast reader, so I let myself do that first read quickly, to get the big picture then immediately go back, satiated, to make sense of it, slowly.
SV
Stephanie, I love this! Poetry is EXACTLY like a sentence in German. You read it once in order to learn how to go about understanding it. Yum.
Greetings from Germany!
I am so thankful to Stephanie Vanderslice for her comment on poetry being read as one would a sentence in German.
Heather I love this post. I’ve been forcing myself to feel guilty for not liking poetry…Please don’t hate me. I found poetry messy and just hard. I thought it was similar to jazz- goes on and on and on, with no sensible structure in place. Well, I didn’t see it. Of course deep down I knew this was not true; I was told it was not true; but didn’t make me like either jazz or poetry. You see what I’ve alwayes liked is clarity.
But what a great point you are making about practicing writing by reading poetry. I am eager to try it. Where do I start from? Gosh it’s exciting!