Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On Found Poetry, Metaphor, and Transpiration
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16 February 2025 Reading as InhalationIt's a tempting metaphor, that. We breathe in words, ideas, worlds. Certainly in many senses, our acts of reading are a "taking in," a cognitive absorption of the ideas of another. The idea is not new, but paired with its complement, "Writing is Exhaling," it is often attributed to literacy expert and LitWorld founder Pam Allyn. This makes sense as a limited metaphor and poetic aphorism to promote literacy and writing: "If you read, you should make it valuable, as nature intended, by writing, too." Can't argue with the ethic. Exhale. But metaphors--as powerful, prevalent, polysemous, and persuasive as they are--are also limited by their own framings. The "War on Drugs" presumed in its 1980s 'truism' that a military-style campaign might be waged against an inanimate force; the result was the ill-considered persecution and incarceration of more victims of addiction than its arrest of the problem, and a majority of this 'war's' victims were marginalized communities. Are there times when the poetry needs to be set aside? I would suggest first that reading the written word is anything but "natural." There is little about its arbitrary assemblage that lends itself to the automatic and unconscious healthy breath. In fact, it's quite the reverse: brains must be trained, eyes disciplined, attention spans regimented (and these, too, are metaphors!). More, the strongest readers never sacrifice the conscious working of the reading experience: instead they are highly attenuated to the work before them, brains activated and alert, working and resisting the new. It's a phenomenological undertaking; that is, it becomes part of living, of actively adapting our experiences into our psyches, into our sense of self-identity, and ultimately into how our revised consciousness re-reads the world the next day. George Poulet describes part of our encounter with a new idea this way: “This thought which is alien to me and yet in me, must also have in me a subject which is alien to me.” In other words, the reader is an active, conscious participant in the act of taking in newness, in adapting it into persona. What ideas we select to read (or not to), however, is hardly an arbitrary choice itself. When I (and many others) describe reading as a political choice, I mean it in the broadest sense of the politic, but absolutely in the sense of personal development, in the establishment of identity (and the social identities which politically or communally result). Literacy, reading, education, are absolutely about this development. They might sometimes (too often) today be figured as indoctrination, brainwashing, drilling, grooming, inculcating. But they cannot be, if the act of reading is understood as critically conscious of its natural approach to language and idea. In other words, reading words is not natural, but the human working with symbols is, and our phenomenological integration of idea and experience is. It is made indoctrination only when we are not permitted to question or challenge the idea in that act of integration, when we are denied healthy and necessary inquiry. Encountering a new idea is not the terror before us; the real monster is Tangled's Mother Gothel, claiming to protect by denying the healthy engagement. Reading is active, is political, is personal, is thoughtful, is creative in its integrations and entanglements. Writing is, as well, but this is harder still as it is matched with the external appropriations of active readers around us. In brief, others read us. Scary. With great respect for the work LitWorld and thinkers and educators like Pam Allyn do, let's not under-value the personal and risk-taking investments in these language acts under a clever motivational metaphor of breathing. We don't breathe our language. We wrestle with it; it can be exhausting; we escape with it; it's a familiar succor; we explore with it; it can be dangerous. And it should be. Literary Nomads ExhalationsValentine Fabio/Marvell is just such a case of phenomenological integration after vigorous readings of him. We have so many reasons to set writers like him aside these days: too difficult, too out of touch, too old, too sexist, too too-something. Accessibility is one fallback for reading choices these days, and it isn't without merit. This also partly explain the proliferation of YA literature: it's easier, and doesn't dig "too deeply" into difficult ideas, specifically designed for readers still forming their skill sets. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is more and more difficult to pin down, though. Is there any value to a poem which leaves us in a state of uncertainty, of ambiguity, of discomfort? I hope you've been tuning in to the podcast!
And don't forget that you can ask a question for the podcast to wrestle with, too!
Not Like BreathingA quick update on my own Readership Challenge. The yellow checks are "In Progress." I love that 'ad astra' has got me thinking about choosing readings based on publishers. (And the way they are imagining these, most are "one and done" in 2025 but being built into our regular habits.) Follow them on InstaGram to find out more: https://www.instagram.com/adastra_stories/ Last Chance! Booker ListsThe Booker Prize will announce its 2025 long list on February 25. What have you read, global reach, written in the past year, that should be nominated? Anyone who can name a title that actually appears on the Booker Long List will get a (secret) prize from Waywords! (Must enter before the list is announced, of course.) My choice is Nigerian writer Nnedi Okorafor. Who's yours?
Holding My Breath in AnticipationStretching this breathing thing further and further, would love to hear what you think of the "fingertrap sestina" I put together. And surprise: the exercise of producing a new form of poetry is part of the upcoming Unwoven Teacher's Guide! (And here you thought I had forgotten . . . !) And while I'm waiting for your thoughts, you can make plans for this week's noteworthy days: Early Recommendation from My Reading:Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. Lispector has been on my reading list for far too long, so this posthumous book might be a surprising first introduction. Even so, it's right up my alley with an autobiographical/fictional author wracking himself over the life of and responsibility to a fictional character he has created. Largely written as dramatic dialogue, each begins to find lament and anxiety over parallel subjects, of course recognizing that the metaphysical and even existential challenges align within the Author's own subconscious. What part of it might ultimately find release? A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, Brazil (1978/2012 in English)
“She was a man, a woman, a child, a gangly teenager, he was straight hair, curls, clean bald, Afros, dreadlocks, she was thin lips, thick lips, he was shining smile, gap tooth, yellow grimace, she was blue-Black, cream-colored, he was freckled, peppered with pimples, ugly as sin, as beautiful as a white woman—”
Patricia Smith never disappoints. Call this piece a story of revenge-horror or noir race-politics. However you categorize it, and whatever you walk away with, just don't forget her name. . . .
Our Last BreathWe can write back. We can even turn the terrifying, alien words we meet into poetry. Devolver Individual strikes
Drawing breath, aspiring, reading, perspiring, writing, inspiring, together conspiring while respiring, still Steve What's Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!