When they came to a resting place with their initial response writing, they were to exchange papers with someone else and continue with their written responses, now circling between the poem and their accumulating marginalia. This exchange process was to be repeated until, minimally, each reader had marked something on everyone else's copy. They could, of course, return to any copy more than once, depending upon the written conversation that seemed to be developing. How long this would take wasn't clear; I just asked them to follow these procedures until they entered a comfortable rhythm of sharing their written responses with each other.
The poem I gave them was "First Gestures" by Julia Kasdorf:
Among the first we learn is goodbye,
a tiny wrist between Dad's forefinger
and thumb forced to wave bye-bye to Mom,
whose hand sails brightly behind a windshield.
Then it's done to make us follow:
in a crowded mall, a woman waves, "Bye,
we're leaving," and the boy stands firm
sobbing, until at last he runs after her
among shoppers drifting by like sharks
who must drag their great hulks
underwater, even in sleep, or drown.
Living, we cover vast territories;
imagine your life drawn on a map--
a scribble on the town where you grew up,
each bus trip traced between school
and home, or a clean line across the sea
to a place you flew once. Think of the time
and things we accumulate, all the while growing
more conscious of losing and leaving. Aging,
our bodies collect wrinkles and scars
for each place the world would not give
under our own weight; our thoughts get
laced with strange aches, sweet as the final
chord that hangs in a guitar's blond torso.
Think how a particular ridge of hills
from a summer of your childhood grows
in significance, or one hour of light--
late afternoon, say, when thick sun flings
the shadow of Virginia creeper vines
across the wall of a tiny, white room
where a woman makes love for the first time.
Its leaves tremble like small hands
against the screen, while she sobs
in the arms of a bewildered man, too young
to see that as we gather losses
we may also grow in love--
as in passion, the body shudders
and clutches what it must release.
Their written "conversation" lasted close to an hour, though the participants--Hester and Alex, who were working on doctorates in English, and Doreen and Andreas, who were working on doctorates in English education--reported they could easily have spent double the time if they hadn't had previous commitments. The marginalia were rich and multi-faceted, but presenting their written words in sequential fashion fails to capture the participants' reported experience of feeling freer and freer as they went along. They also described their written exchanges as being circular, as yielding a sense of "all-at-onceness"--something difficult to render in any linear transcript. Their written conversation did reveal, however, that their readings grew more complex and satisfying as a result of being part of a social venture. Beginning with their own insights, they reached out in tentative and non-dogmatic ways to incorporate and build on each other's responses. By combining all the strands into an ongoing inquiry, we see the democratic play enjoyed by these four readers.
As expected, the beginning point of this democratic conversation is a continual attempt to just make sense of the unfamiliar text. Doreen, for instance, tries to piece together line 5, "What's the antecedent--What's done to 'make us follow'? Why the colon after that?" Then associating the wave with "underwater" [11] she continues her questioning, "Is it the wave that makes us follow? Wave as seduction?" At the very end of the poem, Andreas asks, "What must be released?" and, trying to sort out images between the first and last stanzas, wonders, "Boy firm / leaves (woman?) trembling (sobbing?) Is the firm boy now bewildered man?" These questions, as ways into the poem, also engage the readers in considering their own understandings of human behavior. The very first line provokes Doreen to write, "They teach us to say goodbye--no--we learn it." This triggers Alex to respond, "What do we learn? To replace our feeling of loss with a gesture. Here, if anywhere, is a place where the world refuses to give way, the sweep of our arm is the first line." Finally, Andreas offers this rejoinder, "Hey--I'm not sure here--We learn a gesture, social meaning is constructed around that gesture, we repeat it, it sounds like I'm a behaviorist here--Is it one or the other? Are we taught and do we learn consciously?"
In this mutual exploration, the readers imagine themselves within the events of the first stanza and take account of their feelings. Hester detects a "hint of violence" in lines 2-3, and Alex agrees, "For some weird reason I feel nervous about this image--like the baby's wrist will be crushed." But Andreas expresses an opposite feeling, "Hmm--I felt safe here--as if being guided and held securely!" Doreen, on the other hand, joins the majority when she adds, "But it's about force--not safe for me." Further, she notes that "The separation is forced" [6-7], to which Alex adds, "Forced to leave the mother. From this comes the bewilderment--which is just another way of refusing, then, to be there for her." This in turn gets Alex wondering about the father's role in this departure, "Why isn't Dad more implicated? Why doesn't he do something? Or do we take away from the mother the power to separate from us--while we also blame her for it."
For Andreas, however, Alex's question leads nowhere, "Implicated in what, I wonder?" But Andreas does wonder about the word "Mom" when he writes, "Why not Mommy? Softer. Mom tough on the lips, not mn...mom--closed mouth, tight lipped utterance with a gasping center." The concern here is very much about families, about the mother and father relationship and their responsibility for the child. Hester joins in, "Yes! The father is urging this separation from the mother--jealous? (Sorry, I can't help it--I've been trying not to be reductively Freudian--but there you are.)" She is then supported by Doreen, who connects the mother in the first stanza to the woman in the third, "Yes--and both times it's the woman who leaves--named Mom in one place, woman in another."
There is much agitated response to the shark image. Andreas notes, "Not something I would associate with shoppers." But Alex does try to connect the image to the place, "Except maybe at xmas when you need to hold your breath just to be able to stomach another trip to the mall." Despite this interpretive move, Hester remains dissatisfied, "Why sharks--who perceives them as dangerous--author, boy, woman?" Alex confesses that he "actually forgot the danger. Maybe it was because they seemed lumbering, like shoppers. My guess is that they're like boys, bewildered but possessing sharp teeth." Hester extends the image but doesn't reverse its feeling of danger, "cave of the sleeping sharks in Mexico--nurse sharks, fairly benign, but still ominous." And she wonders, "What does underwater mean to the shoppers?"
Next, Andreas, who used to work in New York's financial district, makes a personal connection to the sharks, "Evokes images of wall street for me--less an image of dragging heaviness/ more an image of a slow, deliberate search for prey, search for nourishment for 'their great hulks'--not plodding, perhaps appearing to drift, but more likely plotting." Finally, Hester makes a key remark about perspective, "Why the strange union of a terrifying animal and an unwieldy, lumbering, almost stupidly benign mindlessness? Is this how children think of grown-ups?" which Andreas confirms as a "Great question! I'm inclined to think so." Alex then connects the closing lines of this stanza to another text, "What do the shoppers drag themselves under? The misery of being alienated from the means of production? Makes me think of 1984, gray people with dust in their pores lumbering along, as if in sleep, but a dreamless sleep, that you wake from feeling tired and lumpy." And Doreen adds a coda, "And underwater--dragging--moving slowly."
The second stanza exposes two fault lines for the readers: the image of the map and the contrast between a poetry of abstract ideas and a poetry of narrative presence. Andreas expresses his appreciation of the speculative ideas of the second stanza, "I like the shift here--it sucks me into the poem." But Doreen disagrees, "Somehow this stanza pushes me away." To which Alex jokes, knowing well Doreen's preferences, "Because there's no story in it." Then Hester gives a reason why she likes the second stanza, "Funny, I liked this stanza best--maybe because it seemed the least gendered. Also the least claustrophobic--movement outwards, solitary." She sees the map as a dynamic image pointing to lines 15-16, "For some reason this is a really satisfying image to me. Visual evidence of your existence marked on a communal document, the tracing of lines repeated representing a span of time, but captured all at once symbolically on the paper." This contribution leads Alex to write, "Traced now makes me think of taking the pattern from someone else--the only way I used to be able to draw." To which Andreas adds a humorous personal touch, "Still the only way I do!"
The map metaphor is felt by Doreen to be a constraining image, "Cover up?" but Hester responds to her by pushing in the opposite direction. First, she confirms Doreen's reading, "Interesting that you see it as covering up and I saw it more as revealing." Then she goes on to negotiate the gap between the two responses, "Although actually my satisfaction and your dissatisfaction seem related--it's a very...I can't think of the word--almost capitalist metaphor. Possession. Marking your territory by urinating like (male) animals. The Western Territories, conquering the West." This fronting of the gender agenda causes Alex to speculate, "Interesting--mapping as a capitalist. Maps do come with the accumulation of sufficient capital for mercantilist ventures. If men mark a place, they also describe women as already marked--having a scent." This, however, cues Doreen's issue about power and agency, and so she writes of the map, "Who draws it? The map is two dimensional--I don't want to imagine my life drawn on a map." Finally, there is a gender split regarding the torso in the stanza's concluding line. Hester identifies this as a "woman" but Alex argues, "man. blond has no 'e.' (I realize that's French, but it's how I read it, like a blond young man.)"
This split foreshadows the final disagreements, as the four readers position their own histories in relation to the love-making event of the concluding stanza. Who are these two figures in terms of age, experience, power? How does gender pull us back to what the boy is learning about gestures at the beginning of the poem? Doreen focuses on who fails to do the seeing in line 35, "Does the woman see? The man is too young to see--but is the woman? Maybe--yes--I think she is too young to see--maybe not, there's only one comma." Then she wonders about the loss, "Always--the loss of reaching the top--of going over the top?" Meanwhile, the men are seeing a clear age split between the man and the woman. Next to the first stanza, Alex writes, "Again, like below, the woman is wise, the boy young. She makes up here for the crying she'll do later. The bewilderment that protects him below makes him impotent here." Andreas comments, "--Yes, but she seems more vulnerable (to me). She seems to have no agency here--he is bewildered, she sobs--what (else) is she feeling? Thinking? Doing? She's 'in the arms of. . .' Engulfed, Overwhelmed?" And Hester, continuing to employ her economic metaphor, wonders, "Possessed? How can the young man imagine the thoughts of the woman who is primarily a possession?" To which Alex replies, "No--he doesn't have thoughts--so why should she? Or, rather, his thoughts are to himself--why would this make her cry?"
There is a sense of the erotic here that generates a response from the men. Andreas writes next to the beginning of the third stanza, "Very Sexual Imagery." This gets Alex thinking, "Wow, I like that. I hadn't seen it and now it seems more fun. To me there's a playfulness in remembering that kind of ridge that contrasts with the weeping about to come. But maybe that's because I'm a boy." Then Doreen, wanting to find her own gender firmly inscribed in the poem, forcefully responds to Alex with, "--A boy? I'm not sure what I want to say about that. It makes me go back to the poem to look for the word 'girl'--because I know the word 'man' is in the poem." In her usual fashion, Hester moves to a mediated position of abstraction, "Men are narrative constructions and have different ages; 'women' are a constant."
Later on, Andreas makes a partial underline in Virginia and draws an arrow to "make love." This provokes another connection Alex had not been alert to, "I didn't get the pun either. Now I see the vine as also trembling. Where's the boy? Where's his imagery? Now I see 'grow' [36] as part of the metaphor. But it hasn't felt much like growing to me--it's seemed more depressing and bleak. Well, not bleak, but vacated. Like Gone with the Wind--a sad shadow. (All that Southern imagery from one word.)" Doreen then picks up on Alex's use of the word vacated, "This seems really interesting to me--vacated--she's gone--no one is there?" which provokes Alex to respond, "More like she's still there, but now the presence of the place is gone. It's governing spirit has been slain."
As the readers concentrate on the room where the love-making occurs, they cultivate a number of associations. Doreen writes, "Tiny--no space; white--no color--I can see the vines--creeper vines; creepy, shudders." Then Hester extensively expands on her own associations, "It made me think of a hospital. I have this persistent sense that this stanza is really about childbirth--all that tinyness and smallness, the white room, the sobbing woman, the man clueless as to how to help her, 'gather losses/grow in love'--birth, separation, 'the body shudders and clutches what it must release.' I read that as a sexual metaphor but I don't much like it--I'm more interested in how the young man is like a baby now--circling back to the first stanza." Alex had not seen the connection between the vines and "shudders" so he now responds to Doreen, "I wasn't reading them this way, but now the female does seem to be sneaking back up on the boy she threatened to abandon. She should have just stayed." But this comment about the female having left brings an incredulous rejoinder from Hester, "What?! She left him?"
Alex objects to the tears at the end, "For me, it doesn't have to be this way. The woman, too, can be too young. I don't like this part. It seems to traffic in a frustrating old idea of women as natural wisdom." To which first Hester writes, "I'm glad you don't like it." and then Doreen, "So am I." Andreas concludes by moving close to his own life, "Loss as opportunity? Love needs Pain? As I see this for a second time, I am uncomfortable with the images evoked--the context of my life now--the pain I am going through, the adjustments. . ." And then he writes next to the final line, "A Gesture."
Gradually interpretations take shape as the poem is seen as a totality, and likes and dislikes are more firmly articulated. Alex, for instance, relates "First Gestures" to a poem by Robert Lowell, "The movement of this poem is now reminding me a little of 'Skunk Hour.' But 'SH' seems to get closer to a place of renewal. This poem is nostalgic throughout, and while it sort of gracefully acknowledges the physicality at the end, it doesn't have the integrity of skunks (rats) nosing in the garbage--I see that as a brave, fruitful image. 'SH' is more melodramatic, but even so, for me, more satisfying."
The larger perspective also raises the question of authorship. Hester comments, "Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I feel convinced that the writer is a man--the baby at the beginning, the boy in the mall, the young man at the end. There seems to be an analogy between the woman and the baby I don't like very much." Alex offers his support for this thesis, "I agree. It's a man and I don't really like it. Or it's a woman--like James Tiptree [she/he, a woman science fiction writer writing as a man]. It seems like the poor boy is always at other people's command--except who ends up crying?" This query brings the gender discussion full circle, as Doreen responds, "I wasn't sure if the baby was a girl or boy--and I'm not sure how you see the analogy. I'm looking to see--what I see is that it is the 'woman who makes love for the first time'--ah--maybe there is that connection to the first line--'Among the first. . .'" Finally, Andreas adds, "And I read the baby as a boy, too. Though now the violence seen by others in the father's gesture points me to the baby being a girl. But this shifts for me, and I see the baby as a boy--in the same stanza 'the boy stands firm'--seems to point to the same child on a later stage."
What the readers wrote in conversation with each other comes to no conclusion, and this very openness signifies to me that reading as a social act encourages us to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty. As Doreen commented later on the experience, "I had a sense of how free we were to move any place we wanted; to explore with others, not alone--there was no map here--one layer at a time." By not attempting to determine a poem's meaning absolutely, the readers stay in relationship, both with the poem and with their co-readers.
The Poet Responds
In the case of this poem, the poet, Julia Kasdorf, was available to reflect on the "written conversation" as it related to her "intentions" and her sense of revision. Her remarks offer a further example of the textured layers of meaning and significance that surround the conversation that readers enter when they read socially.
Regarding the tension between narrative and exposition, Julia related her particular experience of poetic influence:
This other poet (object/subject of the poem) and his professional and artistic ambition posed some sort of challenge at the time, just before the publication of my first book, when I was doubting the value of the narrative/domestic/ethnic poetry I'd been writing--all things that have been called "small." I wanted to write a "large" poem, although I was entirely conscious of the tradition and values that reinforce this notion, a tradition I'd resisted even before I could reduce its complexity by "naming" it. Of course I knew better than to be upset by that tradition, yet I was, perhaps as a way of expressing my publication anxiety and fear of failure.
For Julia, this poem served to widen the scope of concerns that she might entertain as a poet:
So I suppose this could be viewed as a persona piece, a trying on of another perspective, resistance and adoration in near equal parts, responding to another in his terms. The tone turned out to be one I like, and I do not see it as an erasure of my voice, but a testing of my own range. I think this may be an important poem for me in the end, partly because of what I learned about writing and the possibilities that can come of conflict and collusion.
The poem satisfies her because "it represents another place from which to work."
Julia had not yet fully anticipated what readers might discover in this poem. She was "troubled by the violence people found, the mean gender politics, which may be there," though previously she'd not been aware of it because she had not consciously intended it. The poem, however, acts as a story: the writer can never completely control its meaning, which continues to bleed out of the form. Reflecting on the readers' comments did lead Julia to briefly consider a revision. First, she'd wondered, "The fact that I'm both attached to the sharks and bothered by them makes me think they should go. The image may be too weird on one hand and too obvious on another--shoppers sleep-walking, the persistence of life's narrative." But she concluded, "I feel more confident about the sharks, sinister as they are." The readers also alerted her to a confusion in line 35, which she feels she must clear up:
she is too young, not he. This was my intention, although I see the line is not punctuated or structured to communicate this. This shift, I think, makes a great difference in the poem's effect. And another draft has the woman weeping in the last line, rather than sobbing, which is probably a better choice.
By not allowing poems to be sacred objects, such dialogues enact the virtues of democratic permeability, without sacrificing integrity--not the reader's, not the poet's.
Reading, Time, and Democracy
The central characteristic that I discovered about these evolving written conversations was their temporal quality. As Rosenblatt tells us, "the poem" is best "thought of as an event in time" (1978, 12). While it may appear to be happening all at once, reading, and our social talk about it, exists in time--both the time it takes to actually complete a single reading and the longer stretch of time in which our original interpretations expand or change.
In the first case, for instance, we may take days to finish a work such as a novel. For no matter how compelling the story may be, our lives are filled with all kinds of events that interrupt our reading--and when we come back to a text our mood has sometimes shifted or new connections have been made in our mind. Further, even within the boundaries of shorter works, our responses and understandings will shift as we take in new information or different associations suddenly occur to us. Similarly, our experience with a text over time will never be quite the same because the conditions and perspectives of our lives change. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has served as an exciting adventure story for children, but bores many high school students forced to read it; then, miraculously, it returns as a great American novel under the microscope of college English professors, who help us frame the language and the plot in ways that resonate below the surface of things. In each case, when our position toward the text is altered, then our reading too must be altered--that is if we are to maintain some coherent sense of meaning--and these shifts will be very much influenced by how we share our opinions with others.
This temporal aspect of reading cannot be overemphasized. Time and its changes gives democracy the distinction of being an ongoing experiment with its citizens open to new experience, to new evidence. Democracy resists the urge to determine results in advance; it does not freeze time. When we keep our readings tied to time, we learn the importance of permeability in our lives. We learn how to stay with processes still in the making. Thus we need to listen when Steven Mailloux warns us, "By neglecting the temporal reading process . . . traditional holistic criticism not only distorts the actual effects literature produces; it also omits an important part of the author's intention and artistic technique" (1982, 71). Reading as a social act of meaning-building and mutual exchange mirrors the democratic enterprise itself, so we need to be cautious of classroom practices that set poems outside of time by neglecting personal response and dictating final interpretations.
Valuing Small Groups
The readers' words that have come to revolve around "Grandmother's ring" and "First Gestures" have convinced me that literature classes are best structured democratically around this kind of small group work. Building on the talk that occurs there, I have observed that student response is different when everyone returns to the large group, a public space where it's usually harder to appear reflective and tentative. While often students feel uncomfortable speaking before a larger audience, they are more involved, even when silent, if just previously they've been active participants in some small group. Also, I find teacher talk is more responsive to concerns that have been percolating up from the "written conversations." I can remark on activities and experiences as they're developing, rather than just repeating some lesson rehearsed at an earlier time. Teaching literature democratically requires balancing a rough plan with an ongoing improvised conversation; no plan and it's all confusion, all plan and it's a straitjacket. Using small groups gives me license to repeat student responses that I overhear in monitoring the class, and it allows me to reflect openly on how together we're making up things as we go along.
When a group seems stalled, I intrude with additional questions and observations to get them going again. Often these brief encounters lead to explicit conversation about group process. People share feelings of vulnerability and discuss how what is being said affects them. Andreas, for instance, indicated later that he had initially felt self-conscious, wondering if his responses would live up to the expectations of the others, whom he felt to be superior readers. This natural feeling of anxiety caused him to make very constrained and brief "responses" on his initial copy of the poem. But then, as he joined the flow and felt less threatened, his offerings became freer and more self-reflective--it was safe for him to be vulnerable. In general, students have reported that writing first ("holding a written conversation") sets up a zone of politeness and protection. They then come to feel secure enough to fully express their disagreements.
Talk about process is not accidental. To practice democratic relationships, to become sensitive to the process of social reading, requires constant attention of a conscious sort. Thus, periodically, each small group chooses one or two observers who, during the discussion, sit back and record the patterns of group interaction. Later they lead the group in a critical but caring consideration of its process. When students learn to work on a poem collaboratively, what I have to say forms a link with what they've been considering. How then might these links based on what students already know further strengthen their growing confidence as readers?