Tag: Close reading

Relating to a Poem – Personal Experience and Imagination

One way to talk about a poem is to talk about how you relate to it. How you may identify with the speaker of it, like a main character in a story or movie. Or how you share the emotions running through the poem. Or how you are sympathetic to a particular situation, event, or character in the poem because you’ve had similar experiences.

But what if you don’t relate to a particular poem in any of these ways? Or what if the way you relate to the poem is by taking a different or opposing viewpoint? What then? Do you chuck the poem aside, spit in its eye, take it out back, and smack it around a little, before burying it at the back of the bookshelf? That would be one method of readerly response. All reading, in one way or another, is call-and-response. The call is the set of words on the page, and the response is your reaction in reading them.

But here is the thing: you have the ability to relate to anything. Your imagination is as powerful as any reality you have experienced or are presently experiencing. If you have a certain response to a poem—especially an adverse one—have it. Let it run its course. Then, re-read the poem, questioning what you think you know about it in order to enter the poem on its own terms.

The Poetry Reader: An Anthology
Mark Yakich

Close Reading Kafka, with ChatGpt

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning. Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach, the cook, but today she did not come.”

Annotation: where description collapses into self
1. Apparent fact – but already contaminated
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”
This sounds like explanation of an external situation. But notice: No evidence. No witness. No uncertainty marker except “must”. This is not world-description. It is K.’s assumption. The world has not yet been described at all — only K.’s defensive inference.

2. Moral assertion posing as fact
“for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” Key phrase: “without having done anything wrong.” Arrest is an external event. Innocence is an internal claim. Kafka fuses them grammatically, as if innocence were observable. The “world” here is already being narrated from inside K.’s self-justifying consciousness.

3. Routine as psychological anchor
“Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach.” This is a real-world habit. But its function is psychological: K. defines reality by routine. Normalcy is his measure of legitimacy. The description is telling us how K. stabilizes his sense of self.

4. The disturbance (pure projection)
“but today she did not come.”
Objectively: someone is late.
Subjectively: A violation
A threat. A sign that order has broken. Kafka gives us no external confirmation that this matters. The importance of the event exists only in K.’s inner framework.

What we learn
About the world:
Almost nothing verifiable. Only actions stripped of motive
About Josef K.:
He equates innocence with order. He treats routine as legitimacy. He assumes accusation requires malice. He experiences authority as intrusion, not structure.

The world is opaque. The self is over-exposed.

Thinking Shakespeare

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 82

How do actors breathe life into Shakespeare’s texts? How do they take language that’s centuries old and make it sound so real and immediate?
Barry Edelstein, the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director at The Old Globe in San Diego, is one of the nation’s most experienced Shakespeare directors. Twice a year, The Old Globe holds an event called Thinking Shakespeare Live! – a master class where you get to watch actors act and Edelstein direct – in essence, pulling back the curtain on the rehearsal room.

 

EDELSTEIN: It depends on the guy playing Marcellus doing a take after you say, “The air bites shrewdly.” So, your listeners will have to imagine that in the beat between the two halves of the line that the other guy is looking at you with a look of perplexity on his face and then you’ll get it. Go ahead.

BOGAEV: “The air bites shrewdly.”

EDELSTEIN: Huh?

BOGAEV: “It is very cold.”

EDELSTEIN: Oh. Right, so that’s, right he doesn’t say “huh” and he doesn’t say, “oh,” but there you go, that’s the idea.

BOGAEV: [LAUGH] Well, I can see it.

EDELSTEIN: Very good, see that’s it, you’re now a Shakespearean actor because we are asking ourselves, “Why am I talking this way?” And it’s never good enough to simply say, “Well, because it’s a Shakespeare play, and that’s how Shakespeare writes.” In the rehearsal room we’re trying to create human reality.

BOGAEV: So, it is this marriage of “Why am I saying these words now?” and “How is the language built?” because this is how you organize your master class, and your teaching, and I think we just talked about heightened language. You also include in these four categories “antithesis.” Now remind us what antithesis in rhetoric is.

EDELSTEIN: Antithesis is… sure. Antithesis is the big, big, big, big thing of Shakespeare. That’s the technique that he relies on really most. And antithesis is very simply opposition.