This sort of reading, reading for the elements of technique and style is done largely by students and other writers. How does Cormac McCarthay describe a landscape book to book? What is the typical plot trajectory of Marian Zimmer-Bradley's dozens of novels? Writers and scholars want to examine how the magician does the trick on the page.
As my class moved on, we began discussing another way of reading: emotively. The reader approached a book of poems, one poem at a time, and examined how the poem made them feel. It was hard for my students to stop analyzing their feelings. I repeatedly had to tell them, "You are going too far" or "Don't explain why." I wanted the class to become aware of how they felt about a piece of writing independently of how the author did that or what the poem might mean. It lead to a great discussion on how an emotional response to reading can be linked (for the reader) to an associative memory that has nothing to do with the text. One student responded, "I was upset by this poem about the boy being bullied in the pool because the same thing happened to me when I was little. I thought I deserved to be dunked."
Thankfully, the class did not veer into a kind of group literature therapy, but it could have done so once we got our brains turned off and our feelings turned on.
As I read another book of poems, I saw that I read poems that moved me in three kinds of ways. On the first read, I read emotively. If the poem moved me, I would reread it. On the second read, I looked at the syntax. I read sentence to sentence to get the "meaning" of what the writer had put into words. On the third and final pass, I looked for the writer's technique. I created a map of sounds that the writer used throughout the poem, line to line.
In looking how I read a poem, I discovered new things about myself. For one, I found that on a first read that the literal meaning of a poem has less weight for me than how I respond to it emotionally. Who knew I was so able to let go of "what is going on" in a poem? I didn't. I had always assumed that I got my emotions from the sentence level choices. Once I understood the what I figured out the mood.
Consider thinking about your own reading habits. How do you come to the page? What does this tell you about how you process what you are reading?
For example. The first image I showed you in this post has nothing to do with the subject matter. You might assume the bird is a robin. It is spring. You have likely seen robins hopping across the lawn in search of food and nesting material. Why post a picture of a robin? But then you would be wrong again. It is a matter of perception.
The bird in the first photo is actually an Oregon Towhee. I saw one yesterday in town and almost mistook it for a robin. A closer look revealed it to be the towhee. Let this be a metaphor. We may think that we read in a certain manner (robin) and discover something else entirely (towhee). You find an actual robin below.
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