Been reading – very slowly – Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality here all week and not got very far. You’ll find the whole poem here. But I’m only up to this bit;
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Today I’ve got a piece in the Comment section of The Observer about why we need a reading revolution. In it, I remember seeing a baby, one of those gorgeous chunky one-year-olds, leaping up in his mother’s arms on a doorstep in North Birkenhead and thinking ‘that baby will never read Wordsworth’. That thought (or was it a feeling?) helped propel me into creating The Reader.
Poetry matters because we might have forgotten, as Gillian Clarke writes in Miracle on St Davids Day, that we have anything to say. Of a mute labouring man in a mental health ward, moved to speech by poetry, she writes;
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
What we, in the our time, call ‘mental health’ or ’emotional experience’ is really about inner being, the most complicated, uncharted, rewarding and dangerous parts of human experience. I wish we had other names for this stuff. Our present vocabulary feels as unhelpful as grunts would be in working out the impact of black holes on the development of the universe. For one thing, calling it ‘mental health’ allows a good half of the population to think it is nothing to do with them. But everyone has inner life, emotional experience. Our ability to understand and learn from it is a vital part of our human survival kit, as the psychotherapist Wilfred Bion writes;
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
The World Health Organisation tells us that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. We are failing to learn from our own emotional experience partly because we do not have the language to think about it; at best we talk about this stuff in terms of ‘mental health’. But we should be speaking of ‘human experience’.
That’s why we need great literature – Wordsworth, Kate Beaton, George Herbert, George Eliot, George Saunders, Frank O’Hara, Frank O’Connor, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Anton Chekov, Jeanette Winterson, Tolstoi, Dave McKee, Shirley Hughes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Jon Klassen, Marilynne Robinson and all the rest of them.
We need great literature and we need to relate to it in a different way. Our current way organising education so often turns it into dead stuff, despite the best efforts of good teachers. Great literature isn’t dead, it is just waiting for readers to make contact. Pupils who are being taught there are correct answers are not readers, they are exam-passers.
As a young mature student of twenty-five, the previously benefits-living single mother of a five-year old child, I first read Wordsworth in the summer between first and second year when I was thinking of dropping out of my university course due to class-dislocation. My goodness, but I felt unhappy and out-of-place.I can remember, across a lifetime now, the shock of recognition I felt when I first read these words;
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Though I felt massively excited by these lines, I did not ‘understand’ a word.
I did not know what the ‘Tree’ was.
I did not know whether the ‘single field’ was real or not.
I did not know why it was a ‘pansy’.
Not knowing doesn’t matter.
Being moved, being touched, being excited in ways you don’t understand is what matters. It leaves you in a place where you can ask questions. And why is asking questions good? Because that’s how we learn!
I did not know what ‘the visionary gleam’ was but I knew I knew about its absence.
I did not know what ‘the glory’ was, nor ‘the dream’ neither, but I knew I missed them both.
The words spoke to some feeling I had and did not understand.
The feeling was about ‘something that is gone’.
There is no amount of on-curriculum study that would have made any of this clearer to me – I had to absorb the questions and realise, over years, that they were clues to hard-to-reach parts of my self. I’ve been reading this poem for thirty-six years. It still works, I still don’t understand it, it still gets me to ask questions!
What we’ve found in sixteen years of Shared Reading is that working out feelings and language with other people is easier than doing it on your own. I am grateful to the University curriculum for making me read Wordsworth and I’ve tried to translate that into Shared Reading (don’t just read what you already know and like). Without that looming second-year course on Romantics I’d never have read Wordsworth of my own volition, because it was too far, it seemed from my own experience. But that’s the thing about great writing, it is never far from your own experience. That’s what makes it great.
What to read in a Shared Reading group
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth
Blossoming! I saw this same tree yesterday but didn’t have my camera, so it was good to find it in my back collection, and realise I’ve loved it before. The picture does not do the reality justice – the centres of the white blossoms are dark pink.
Thinking of the surprise of finding lovely stuff growing – last night I was looking at The Reader’s videos on You Tube, trying to decide what I should show when I go to Uppsala next week, and I was surprised and delighted when I stumbled across a film from Shared Reading New South Wales. I didn’t know there was Shared Reading in NSW! My colleague Megg tells me that Christopher started out in one of her groups in Kensington and Chelsea and then did Read to Lead…great to see Shared Reading seeds settling around the world.
This morning I continued reading All The Days of My Life and found there are many poems I’d like to read – I’d forgotten that I used to really love Dennis Haskell’s ‘One Clear Call’, a moving poem about Tennyson’s ‘Crossing The Bar’ and the reality of poetry. I used often to read the two poems together.
But I came to ‘Intimations of Immortality’ and thought, it is always worth rereading and I wondered if many people running Shared Reading groups ever simply do a whole long poem like this? This is perfect for an hour and a half, maybe two hours reading, though you have to watch the time – because really it’s a four-hour poem. Sometimes I meet people who tell me that Shared Reading means reading a short story and poem. And I say, no, Shared Reading is about sharing the reading, not the format of the reading matter. You might read a scene from Hamlet and no poem. Or you might be a starting out on a novel and want only the novel because you’ve got to concentrate and it is hard to find the time. Or you might decide to read a longish poem.
If you were reading this poem, you’d start by knowing that some people in your group would find the length and the language off-putting, so the first job is to make sure you really love it before you take it along, or if love is not yet possible, at least you need to think you might really love it if you got into it. You’ve got to trust it to work out.
Thought I might read a little each day this week. There’s a link to the whole poem here.
Practising Imagination
Thinking about imagination and direct experience this morning. I was slightly aware, as I looked through All The Days of My Life yesterday, that my attitude to poems, to literature in general, has changed in a significant way over the last…shall I say ten years? This is something to do with my instinct about a key element of Shared Reading.
It’s out of print now – be great if The Reader could get it back into print, please – but worth tracking down a secondhand copy of ATDOML as this anthology is a very particular one, with a personal take on both poetry and life experience. It was put together by my husband Phil Davis, for me, when I was a teacher in Continuing Education, reading a lot of poetry with my students and wanting a book with all the good ones in. So he made it. It came out in 1999, just after we had started The Reader magazine and just before I began ‘Get Into Reading’, which would become Shared Reading and The Reader as it is now.
What I realised as I looked through the book yesterday was that I know almost every poem in this collection, have read all of them at least once and some of them many, many times. They are part an inner geography/library that connect to the growth (as Wordsworth might put it) of this reader’s mind. And yet some of these poems I am unlikely to read anymore because they do not allow me to think directly about my own experience. I suddenly feel as if concentrating on a key problem in Shared Reading (got to make it personal) has sent me off at an angle, small at first, that is only now realised as too big. I’ve gone off course!
Take, for example, ‘The Voice’ by Thomas Hardy;
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
This wonderful poem, which I think I first read in let us 1982, in Brian Nellist’s University of Liverpool English Department third year Victorians and Moderns tutorial, has almost fallen out of my reading repertoire. Why? I tend to read poems that allow me meditate on my own life and problems. This poem is more like a story, requiring me to practice imagination. I think I do practice imagination in reading but nearly always in prose or Shakespeare. But when I choose a poem I’m often looking for and choosing poems that reveal something directly about me, to me.
Let’s read this poem about Thomas Hardy, then.
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Hardy begins with ‘woman much missed’ which is, in any context, an odd formulation. We might have expected ‘woman’ as an address but ‘much missed’ is direct, personal, confessional, really. Is he speaking to her – Woman – or to himself?
We hear a man haunted by a voice, ‘how you call to me, call to me,’ an echo. He has been longing to see (‘much missed’), to hear her, and now she is here, calling, but there is no comfort for him. What the voice is saying seems complicated and nostalgic and also, perhaps, guilt-inducing. Is this why he started with ‘much missed’? In what sense does he miss her ? Because he didn’t seem to miss her when she ‘had changed from the one who was all to me’;
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Those three lines are awful to imagine. The ‘woman much missed’ may not be the same woman who has died, but an earlier version of that woman, with whom Hardy fell in love ‘at first, when our day was fair.’ By the time the real physical woman died, he no longer loved, she had changed ‘from the one who was all to me.’
As I read in this way, I am tussling with words and syntax, trying to understand as many layers of meaning as I can reveal by reading, by noticing. This is our basic equipment in Shared Reading ( if this was parkrun, it would be putting one foot in front of the other to achieve locomotion). You can call it ‘close reading’ but I call it reading. It means noticing and becoming conscious of as much as you can.
But I am doing something more than reading (‘close reading’, ‘analysing’, ‘taking apart’, ‘deconstructing’) the words, spaces, line-endings, punctuation and rhythm. These elements add together to come more than the sum of the parts: I am getting inside Thomas Hardy’s experience. as I unpack the layers of thought and feeling, my brain experiences the language and the language-experience as if it were my own. Mirror neurones! Imagination!
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
A noticing reader will be aware of the commas on either side of ‘then’ on the first line of this stanza. The first reading of ‘then’ is straightforward, a conversational pattern we hardly notice in daily use; ‘let me view you, then,’ where ‘then’ probably means ‘in that case.’ I used it in exactly that way at the start of this post.
So the whole line means – on one level – is it you? yes? in that case, show me.
But ‘then’ is also a time word. And the next line takes us back to the past, ‘then’ is picked up, an echo, like the voice itself, and we understand a terrible jarring feeling happening over and over again in side this man grieving for someone who left him (or whom he left) long before she died.
As I read, I am inside the experience of the poem, inside the mind of the writer of the poem following through the written marks on the page, like tracks, his thought patterns. And the harder I read, the further inside his thought-processes I get. Thus reading the poem, in this way, teaches me to practice imagination.
Now I am in his shoes as he stands there, no longer quite hearing the voice, almost no longer haunted. Yet how bleak that feels;
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
In fact by the time we get the word ‘dissolved’ the voice seems completely gone. And ‘wistlessness’ – is this a word Hardy has made up? Wist=know, so wistless seems to mean ‘heedless’ or ‘not knowing’? Does the line mean ‘you, being dissolved, cannot know (me) (anything), are not there? Have ceased to haunt me. She is now ‘Heard no more again far or near?’
But something has happened this morning which makes me think I need to add in poems of not-my-experience to my daily readings. I don’t want to narrow down my imagination, got to keep practising.
What to read in a Shared Reading group: two poems by Derek Walcott
I wanted to write about Derek Walcott today, as he has just died, ‘called home’, to take a phrase from one of his great poems.
When I heard the news, two poems came immediately to mind. ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ (which you can read in today’s Sunday Times) and ‘Love After Love’, a poem that has been read in many Shared Reading groups over the years.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ was the first of Derek Walcott’s poems I read, when I was still teaching at the University. I found it – in an anthology of some sort, name now lost to me – and took it to my Friday Afternoon Poetry class. That class was one of the strands of DNA that went into the mix to bring The Reader and Shared Reading into being.
I started it – hhhm, don’t remember, so far back it goes, but it may have been in the 1980s. It was still quite near to the time when I had finished my Ph.D and was finding my feet as a teacher of literature. I knew I was afraid of poetry, and thought that if I was so afraid, other people would be suffering the same anxiety. So I advertised the class as ‘Afraid of poetry? come along to share your fears and read together in a relaxed group.’ Ten, fifteen, maybe eighteen of us would meet from 1.00-5.00 on the last Friday of the month for four hours of (what I’d now call) Shared Reading. I think that class is where I first met my long-time colleague, Kate McDonnell.
The morning of the class, I would choose a poem – or possibly two – in the same way I do for this blog – am I interested in this? Does it touch something? Is there a match for something live in me? Can I enter it?
And then for a whole afternoon, the group would sit and read together, teasing out meanings, a concentrated, collaborative experience.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ seems to come at a time when the poet is uncertain about his work, and the letter is an unlikely blessing, a benediction, call to arms.Like the religious poetry of the seventeenth century, this poem helps create a space in me, where something religious might happen. I have read the poem many times since that first time, and remain moved by the word ‘home’, as Walcott himself is:
The strength of one frail hand in a dim room
Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,
Restores my sacred duty to the Word.
‘Home, home,’ she can write, with such short time to live,
Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;
It’s a poem about what survives death and what survives life, too. How thin and frail the threads that sometimes hold us in place, yet how, despite their frailty, they sometimes are ‘steel.’
The other poem, ‘Love after Love’, I think I first had from Kate McDonnell, once we had got The Reader going ( in the days when we still called it ‘Get Into Reading’).
No, no – now I remember also reading this in those Continuing Education classes at the University. Perhaps having found ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ I went and sought more of Derek Walcott’s work. I recall the room I read it in. Perhaps Kate was present. It’s a well-known, much-anthologised poem, but that doesn’t take away from its strength or reality at all. Many times I have seen new readers profoundly moved to recognition by the poem.
Recently someone told me they had had an occasion in their Share Reading group when the conversation had become very personal, group members sharing profoundly personal information. This didn’t usually happen, they told me. We’re very good about sticking closely to the text, not going off. I was surprised by this. Yes, of course, – we need to stick closely to the text, but what does the text stick to, if not to us?
It may be that in a group where little personal thought is shared it is still happening – inside the individual readers – but I’d hope all group members would speak from the personal: because, really, what else is there?
When I read a poem , I’m trying to match it against what I know, so as I start this one, I see my own front door – both literally and metaphorically – I see my life’s time and my sense of self:
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
I can hardly imagine what anyone could do with such a poem if not read it personally, connecting it to your own experience. ‘You will love again the stranger who was yourself.’ Surely , readers are required by the very language – ‘you’, ‘yourself’ – in this line to think of themselves? To remember times when we didn’t love ourselves, when we were self-estranged?
This leads me to ask myself, are only some pieces of literature suitable for Shared Reading? A colleagues recently told me how much better a book was working out in his group than a previous novel. Why? Because it allows more of the personal?
So though anyone might enjoy a thriller, a thriller wont yield much to a Shared Reading group because it is not about real things. This isn’t about form – look again, Lincoln in The Bardo, not at all ‘realism’ – it’s about content, meaning, belief and thought. Lincoln in the Bardo is made in fancy dress, but it is absolutely about types of deepest reality. This is what we look for in good reading for Shared Reading groups. You’ve got to want to look in the mirror.
It may not be necessary to confess everything you see there: some or all of that recognition might remain private. But the most powerful groups I’ve been in have shared not only the literature through slow reading aloud, but also direct, real personal response and recognition, the most serious of which have always, like the poem ‘Love After Love’, involved some pain;
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.Feast on your life.
The peeling of that image from the mirror always hurts. But those moments of true intimacy, of revelation, are always the best moments of the best groups: they create the steel threads which help hold us in place.
Shared Reading is about sharing not only the reading, but also ourselves.
King Baby Rules!
Top Reads 2016
King Baby by Kate Beaton (Walker Books)
The Dear One @BIGpicturebooks put this terrific book in my hand on a recent visit to Walker Books HQ. I’ve never seen a poor Walker book so I happily accepted, along with a slice of the wonderful cake she’d bought in for our meeting.
D, Anton, Cake and books at Walker
But I didn’t read it until the following weekend when my family was visiting and I thought, ‘I’ll try it out on Chester.’
Chester is five and has a tiny baby sister, Agnes.
I’ve only once or twice* seen a book read with such appetite. We stayed there, where we started, on the kitchen floor, reading it once, twice, three times, each time Chester’s eyes seemed held, almost despite himself, to the pages, his body shuddering with small laughter. It was the uneasy, rather adult, laughter of surprised recognition.
Yes, they do adore you!
And yes! Babies do demand a lot of their attention!
And – hmm, yes, the gap of consciousness between me and those misunderstanding adults!
And – huh – what a lots of mess a baby makes!
And I, mother of two and grandmother of four, was laughing too. That maniacal ego! That utterly preoccupying determination to be more, oh, I recognised it all right. Six times my offspring over I recognised it.
Kate Beaton has made a tremendous book, a real contender for this reader’s no.1 Book of the Year spot. Especially good for exhausted parents expecting their second baby, but everyone with any kind of memory of anyone’s early childhood will recognise this all too human, all too fleeting human reality. Top read!
*I have written about one of those reading occasions in The Reader magazine and will reprint it here sometime.
A DIY Manual for Humans
Top Reads 2016
A Little, Aloud with Love, ed. Angela Macmillan
I feel a little proud of this one, Aunty-proud, because I saw it grow from the early days through to publication and life in the wide world. The third in The Reader’s A Little Aloud series, this is a gorgeous collection of prose and poetry for reading aloud to someone you love, put together by my long-time best friend and colleague, one of the three founders of The Reader, Angie Macmillan.
From Angie’s introduction, in which she describes a shared reading session in a Care Home where she as group leader is the only member under the age of eighty-five, to the final poem in the book, Anne Bradstreet’s quietly affirming ‘To My Dear and Loving Husband’, there is much good reading, good sharing, in this lovely volume. Shared Reading group members, the afterword following the Bradstreet poem tells us, have taken the poem home to give to their partners. And in the Care Home group, Angie notes,
The poems and books that are important to us at The Reader as the tools of our trade are the ones that make connections at a deeply personal level. Everyone in the nursing home could make such a connection with Burns’ great poem (‘My love is like a red, red rose’) and thus we came together in shared experience both of the poem and in something understood between us.
The book finds many kinds and phases of love, giving all of us something to connect with, recognise and share. You might read this with your sister as much as your partner, with a work colleague or your old, old mother-in law. You would share excitement and underlying anxiety in Mr Rochester’s garden-at-night-proposal to Jane Eyre, or perhaps the not knowing where or what love is in George Saunders’ unpredictable (always unpredictable, George) ‘Puppy’. Anyone in a domestic love relationship will enjoy the terrific daily love in the pair of poems on ‘Holding Up’ – U.A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Atlas’ (‘There is a kind of love called maintenance/which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it’) and Michael Blumenthal’s ‘A Marriage’.
You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you…
…
But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.
A Little Aloud, with Love helps us hold up the ceiling by giving us words for the everyday of love as well as the grand dramatic moments.
Reading a poem or one of the prose pieces each week, it will last you and your beloveds all year.
readerjanedavis 