Making A Difference

Something fresh for me: I've just finished reading Garrison Keillor's poetry anthology Good Poems from cover to cover, keeping to the sequence of the placing of the poems. I don't think I've ever done this with any poetry anthology before and I suspect it's not something that readers generally do. A poetry anthology is more obviously for dipping into in a sort of random manner, and that's what I'd been doing previous to the read-through, such that I was familiar with quite a number of the individual poems as I read them.

So what difference did it make, going cover to cover? Well it certainly made me far more aware of the deliberateness of the editor's sequencing - I suppose that's pretty obviously bound to be the case. But I think it altered how I read the poems themselves. I certainly read more at one sitting than I normally would have done, almost as if I were attempting to maintain a kind of momentum. Of course this was done in the knowledge that I would inevitably revisit most of what I was reading, because that's what you do with poetry. But it meant that I was less inclined to dwell on a poem, or one part of a poem, and that felt curiously liberating.

We don't really talk much about exactly how we read things, or listen to music, or look at paintings and by not doing so we miss opportunities to widen our frame of response. I didn't really begin to understand serious music until I stopped trying to understand it and just listened.