Ten Meditations in Poetry’s Hut

1.

Let’s begin with a basic claim, not as truth or fact, but as possibility: reading is a form of experience. Hands hold the book’s heft; eyes read the words; the body is involved, though we forget so. Reading seems something more than or less than experience, occurring, as it does, in some two-fold world, happening simultaneously in the author’s mind and the reader’s mind with only the thin printed page as conduit between. Of course, that page is no pure conduit: a word is an imperfect conductor, as given to insulating properties as to conductive ones. Somewhere in Shakespeare’s language lingers the remnant heat of Shakespeare’s thoughts; somewhere in those words is the blast-furnace of his genius. At times that genius burns through the page into the mind, but at other times the language holds its heat, and the page seems only to warm by virtue of the living hands in which it’s held. Those hands are our hands. Reading forges experience inside of experience; the book unfolds in the mind, unfolds in the imagination, not as book but as world, as life or a form of life, even as the book sits in the hands, even as it speaks into the eyes that read it. Reading, at times, is an experience that obscures experience—an experience that mars itself—when we feel we’re reading successfully, that is deeply and vividly, we forget there is a book being read, we forget our hands hold the book, we see with different eyes than the eyes through which we see. It is like a dream, reading.