The Intensity of The Reader: Reading as a Guest / a Thief in the Classroom / in the Wreckage
“I want a heart-broken university.
I want the university to grieve and dream itself: at the same time.”
My friend, K, sends me a poem / a pack of considerable bones or a scented gate that has this line in it: “I can’t act in poetry.” There are hooks and they emerge and catch my wounds or wound me / and I hold onto them or hold them. I have been continuously thinking of this phrase “I can’t act” in terms of trying to describe what my relationship to reading in the academy is / what my relationship to reading in the classroom is / what my relationship to reading for the poem is / what reading is when you are a thing with access or excess / A thing with access or excess that has “come from another form in the ground.”
Like many of us, my reading or entrance into seeing what I read as part of constellated or dark forests, as part of a complex collection of caves layered with both crystal and a grey roughness, is not linear. Sometimes, I think it is especially non-linear in that my access to contemporary poetry, in college and even in high school, was relatively plentiful and real. I don’t remember what my exact relationship to the word canon, and the currents of tyranny that threaten around it, was. I do remember that I often jumped irreverently from book to book, from literary school to literary school, that I instinctually and already was practicing happenstance and chance as a means to find / create / explode / eradicate meaning. What was I doing? Prioritizing intensity over history. What was I doing? Searching for looping, hanging, annotations, footnotes, a territory where impulse could also create pulsation, a place where horror / flourishing was real and textured (like in the soil or in the jewel or on the cliff). I confused learning with trying to live. I can’t act, I said to the professor who asked me to continue working to make my sentences less poetic. Your ideas are observant but unpredictable, she said, in the ways they flesh themselves out. I imagined the roots at the dark but thriving bottom of the sea waving / glistening. I was writing my senior thesis on female poets living in the United Kingdom who had come from elsewhere. I was reading Grace Nichols, Fleur Adcock, Jeni Couzyn, Jackie Kay. I went to the British Library and asked for certain books that had to be brought up from secret stores. They checked my pockets and bag for pens (so I wouldn’t make a mark). I also went to the shelves at UW-Madison and simply grabbed / gleaned. I was stupid and trying to understand the body as it held its welted surface. I was stupid and trying to understand the body as it was displaced differently, otherwise. I didn’t know how to else to respond / but unprofessionally.
Who isn’t haunted by their education?
Who isn’t haunted by their education?
Who isn’t haunted by their education?
Who isn’t haunted by their education?
Aren’t you?
By its welted surface.
Last summer, N and I drove to Nova Scotia to stay in Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home. I kept a journal as we went / up / the country ours / Canada’s. I broke it / expanded it into a poem. I read K’s book on the porch twice while wearing fisherman’s boots covered in salt / mud. “i’m pretty sure i’m alive because f scott fitzgerald died / and when i survive i will be the fight landed” (“The Boxer”). What’s important to repeat here, though, / outside of the poem / outside of the reading / is what it felt like to be in Bishop’s house / surrounded by the reality of her ghost / rather than the projections of her ghost I experienced in my MFA.
The reading I did in graduate school / in the shadows / in the light / changed the way I thought of myself as a student / and, in turn, a reader. I was an undergraduate reading Beckett (“Then in my eyes and in my head a fine rain begins to fall, as from a rose, highly important.”) for the first time in a Modern Irish and English Literature course when I called my mother and tried to explain that I realized I was very sick / anorexic. Writing with my friend E has helped me begin to understand that this expression of my body was very much related to my desire to be a perfect girlstudent / to prove I was not a guest / a thief / to prove I was intelligent / that I would do anything to feel alive in language / despite the fact that my sentences were too poetic / observant but unpredictable / in the ways they fleshed themselves out. The result of shaking. The result of trembling / before. How can I be real, How can I speak, I asked myself to the point that my body touched its own explosion and bled. In graduate school, I realized I could no longer / disappear. Instead, I would study / openly. Instead, I flowered and observed the damage my existence / my refusal caused in a poetry workshop (my first in the program) with a professor who taught us Bishop’s Geography III. We were being taught that we would never live up to Bishop. We were being taught that our poems and our reactions to Bishop’s poems / how we allowed them to influence us / could not be enough or correct. We were so very / unprofessional. I understood that I was witnessing an attempt to rip apart me / anyone in the class who did not perform a formal kind of reading / a formal kind of lyric / a clear or closed / whiteness. Revere particularly and appropriately / or die / seemed to be the extensive bowels of the classroom on fire.
“A kind of oblivion hovers over the canon,” says N, quoting Gerald Bruns and making toast.
So it was painful to be in Bishop’s house. Or I felt / I hated her and was angry / at myself for feeling this way so close to the tides of the Bay of Fundy which draw back and expose / drastically / at rates or lengths I could never have imagined. Why had I been given the page as if it were something I wasn’t allowed to imagine / to fathom / to expand? Why was I only instructed on / how to look at the page as instructed? Why did the practice of admiration seem to continually occur to me in the classroom as a means to avoid asking ourselves who gets to speak, who is bruising? Why had I been told I could never correctly relate to Bishop’s pain / the ghosts that move through her house, creating noise and an energy / gripping. Her mother. Her purple or black dress ripping as she screams / is taken away. “I am flawed on the lawn,” is how I misremember the line in Bishop’s “Cold Spring” that, in actuality says, “the violet was flawed on the lawn.” Our first morning in the house, we woke up to a car crashing in the fog just outside our window. Everyone was fine, including the small baby, but I understood in that startling that being in this place was never going to be peaceful, that reading / practicing reading here or in this world isn’t going to be / shouldn’t be comfortable or exact. Protrusion / transformation / the violet emerging / coursing through the grass / Such movement requires. It requires from us.
A shard /
My resistance to Bishop because of a man / a professor who didn’t want to speak with / bodies / but at them. My resistance to Bishop because of a man / a professor who sometimes seemed genuinely disgusted by me / others.
A shard /
The canon bored into students / into living beings / as The Canon / as a monument / as a monarchy / as a military / students / living beings can’t and shouldn’t see themselves in / but should subject themselves to.
A shard /
Do I witness reading as a bud filled with flower / or a bud filled with pus / or both?
A shard /
How do I witness reading as my education / my practice / and as life?
A shard /
Can I never call myself / a scholar / if I continue this way?
A shard /
Who teaches us what distance is / who or what we are distant from / who or what we are near to / when it comes to reading?
A shard is a broken thing that wounds you or it doesn’t. A shard is a petal. A shard is a piece of sea glass, a part of the inside / of the animal. A shard is lost but remains, swirls. Last spring, I moved to the jungle or the swamp. I’m not always sure which it is. There is a beach and on the way to the beach, sometimes, I notice that the woods are on fucking fire. I took a job as an adjunct. Sometimes I notice that the woods are on fucking fire or I cry in my car. My partner, N, who is working on his dissertation for his PhD, suggested I sit in on a graduate class on Modernism with him this past semester. You can just / soak it up, he said. It will remind how porous you can be. What is an evocative circulation, I ask myself and nod. I wrote a letter to the professor. He agreed to have me, and I immediately registered that I felt I was “getting away with something,” not being a student / still being the wrong kind of student, but still being allowed to be a presence / but still being allowed to be continually educated. I remember a section title in Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s book, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. It flashes across my insides / the extensive bowels of my desire on fire. “THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE.” I would speak as a guest / a thief. I would read as a guest / a thief. I would survive or learn or both, as always. The word criminal or thief isn’t appearing and situated here as a means to suggest anything about morals. It appears or is situated here as a means to suggest everything about power. The subversive intellectual (to borrow another term from Harney and Moten), the thing with access or excess, she is the violet flawed on the lawn. She is the body that does not have a voice or any area / room in the canon but takes from it anyway, but pours herself into it, but pours herself into the mouths and texts that thrive in the encampment outside of the canon, despite it. A persistence or a pestilence. I almost typed petulance, a girl with feelings who can’t help herself. A girl so raw.
“You wail a mimic-mouth into / beaded rhythms of us-ness, fragrance of a cosmos where roads are not / partitioned. No roads. No marks to mark up the whole big wide world, the holes of universes untethered from time. In absence of wholeness / catch glimpses of the sides of selves.”
What if we agreed to suffer in the classroom? The course on Modernism, as exposure to text and conversation often does, changed my life / altered the way I moved through the world / the way I thought about flowers / made me feel like a sinkhole sucking or engorged / a place where the earth collapses but also holds at some point. That is why reading will always be such a supple, intimate act of terrorism. You can’t help but be swept up / and swimming with whatever current is gutting you, / hooked into you, your wounds, your infectious plethora. Something I always read to my students on the first day of class, in order to frighten / incite / soothe them, is a quote from Lisa Robertson’s essay, “Time in the Codex.” “I feel astonished that any institution could have placed such an object in my hands, then left me alone with it,” says Robertson. “Reading misuses privileges, abuses authorities, demands interference.” What if we agreed to suffer in the classroom? To be impelled or impaled. Such activity would roil / us.
My professor for Modernism / this course was male and kind in a way that I’m used to / not used to. He was fiercely intelligent and challenging, open and wary in a productive way that meant he asked a lot of rich, important questions. Of course the course changed my life / collapsed or unfolded some distance between me and the earth / Art. “Deserts of love,” is a phrase by Raúl Zurita that I think of every time I open a book / every time I hold my arm outside the window of the car and let it drift. When is the last time / the first time you read Virginia Woolf? Of course the course changed my life because it gave me Woolf uncovered / her book, To the Lighthouse.
Had I read Woolf before? Yes, in a course. I had loved it but my love was not fully lit, was more a “soft bomb of potential” (Robertson) set to mutate in the future. Something I always tell my students on the first day of class, in order to frighten / incite / soothe them, is that it might not fully occur to them what a text or a writer they read in my class means to them until time / years have gone by, until something happens to them and suddenly there the words are, washed up but still there / changed, radiating. “And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all” (To the Lighthouse). The book / a chrysalis. The book / an incubation.
Reading Woolf’s book, I could not stop feeling what was happening to me. “She was just beginning, just moving, just descending” (To the Lighthouse). Do you call your proximity to the sentence an encounter / or do you call it an event? Mrs. Ramsey, Lily Briscoe the Painter, Cam Ramsey on the boat with her father and brother repeating each other, their struggle among hard islands of men / hard islands of men speaking / hard islands of men breaking into them breaking through me / hard islands of men demanding sympathy / ease / obedience / I felt it happen to me. I felt it break me through. The vines or the mud / poured out of me / onto my dress / into my arms.
…[Lily] took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her picture.
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it different of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealized; that was how Paunceforte[1] would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write…” (To the Lighthouse)
What if we agreed to suffer in the classroom? My wonderful professor cautioned us against reading too much feminism into Woolf’s work. I understand why he said it, what it has to do with politics / regions of criticism in academia, what it has to do with being an intelligent, malleable reader. However, when I read the above passage, about Lily the Painter standing outside, facing the lighthouse in the distance, with her canvas broken / but also so alive / shedding, I feel intensity crawling over history. Sometimes I think To Desire is To Salvage. We read in a classroom. We read in a wreckage. “[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was still alive) was thrown back in the sea]” (To The Lighthouse). We read as many bodies as we do corpses. We read as a body / We read as a corpse.
We read in a wreckage and in a wreckage distance disappears or is contorted or it contains a rhythm which can alter / altar. Is Woolf that far away / when I am facing the page? Do I read the above quote by Lily the Painter / the dying fish and think viscera? Yes, the living horde. Should I view reading as equipment and writing as artwork? No, I won’t / I can’t act. Reading is artwork, a hungry vault. “And she thought, standing there with her book open, one could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water” (To the Lighthouse). Woolf’s writing does not stand “the test of time” so much as its particular, radical urgency insists on continuing, on creating a future for a woman / a reader / a figure bombarded by the page / its action. Woolf supersedes the “toleration” / the approval of what continues to be a canon / an exclusivity dictated by conservativeness / maleness / fear. Instead, she enacts / displays a permission to be relentless. Reading Woolf isn’t about experiencing what can or should be contained in the canon (as sculpture[2], as preservation society avec plaque) and how exactly, what words should be used or learned to express her properly. To read Woolf is to witness the sentence’s necessity, its flooded garland, persist in crashing against notions of corral, of captivity.
[Cam] did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as the boat sailed on, how her father’s anger about the points of the compass, James’s obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had slipped, all had pass, all had streamed away. What then came next? Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there in the dark, the slumberous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light…
Rather, in these sentences, we have captivation, a holding via known / unknown vibration. Rather, we have a girl so raw / a girl who says, “I can’t act” / moving through language, to please herself, to experience herself, to thread through the world(s) as a thief or a guest in it, as body of knowledge scraping itself outside of force.
Lily the Painter, upon completing her painting at the very end of To The Lighthouse, refers to it as a vision. That is what I know, now, or what I have been working towards saying. To read is to have a vision. To try to create a scholarship is to have a vision. To discuss reading is to have a vision, to acknowledge reading as it happens to you is to have a vision. A vision requires dirt and dream. A vision requires disorder and the strength to touch it / attention. A vision requires the destruction of the future and the past as concepts which are untouching / untouchable.
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
“Love had a thousand shapes”
(To The Lighthouse).
Of course the course changed my life. Of course I could not help but steal everything / from the course as it surrounded me. Of course the course bled into me / from where I wasn’t supposed to be. I stole for a further use. I stole so I might have a vision in which Woolf or I / a body / a corpse speak(s) in a shard / in a shared space of the wreckage. I read for a further use that suggests reading / in the classroom can’t only affirm space we know. I read for a further use that suggests reading / in the classroom possesses the ability to create space / an ongoing, turbulent association. A healing / A wreckage / A violent / A vivid / A living ceremony / of approach. Tethered / Untethered.
[1]A fictional impressionist painter and practitioner of a style artists like Cézanne and Matisse were moving away from at the time / to the absolute horror of some.
[2] What if we believed in magic rather than being a face on the $? I don’t want to be worshipped. I want to be loved, says Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. What if we wanted to care for each other?
Carrie Lorig is the author of The Pulp Vs. The Throne (Artifice Books). Chapbooks include Reading as a Wildflower Activist (H_NGM_N Books), NODS.(Magic Helicopter Press), with Nick Sturm, Labor Day (Forklift, OH), and with Sara Woods, stonepoems (Solar Luxuriance Press). She also serves an associate books editor for Big Lucks, is the co-poetry editor for NOO Journal, and frequently writes reviews for ENTROPY.