I passed out this sheet and we had a discussion of the points in black.    Class members comments are in blue.. .

The Reader's Request of Poets

Our class discussions in February lead us to the reflections included here as indented paragraphs.

1.  Tell me about something that I have already experienced and therefore that I am already concerned about.

But tell me also about WAR and LOVE and HUMAN LOSS and other experiences I have not yet had.   Give me the tools, the vocabulary, the images to experience these realities in my life.  Prepare me, format my imagination, upgrade my capacities to feel and think and experience at deeper levels.

2.  Tell it in such a way that you stimulate my feelings.

Yes, stimulate my feelings, but also the feelings of the COMMUNITIES I love and belong to.  And beyond feeling there is also mystical experience, personal and communal.  Help me with that.

3.  Tell me in a way that I can understand and remember.

I want to understand, but mysteriously, eventually, dynamically, holistically.  Help me "UNDERSTAND TOO LATE"  (Robert Francis, "Pitcher," in Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, p. 187).  Help me understand, but in relationship with you and in the flow your words, with all the complexities of that ever-changing relationship.  Help me to remember but also to FORGET -- so that I come back and read again, experience you and your poem again in a new way.

4.  Show me by the way you tell it what kind of person you are, so that I can decide whether I can trust you.

I want to know the YOU that is implied in this poem, as YOU exist simply in the boundaries and bonfire of these words.  But I also want to know something about YOU as you existed in the biological and social and historical world.   Were you a rebel? A spokesperson? A mystic? A failure?

The Poet's Request of Readers

1.  Read the poem aloud in your normal conversational voice, as if the poet were talking to you.  Speak loudly enough and slowly enough so that  the words are clear and observe the punctuation marks.

2.  Look up words and references that you don't recognize and also look up the time, place, and culture that the poet comes from.

3.  Identify the speaker of the poem and what happens in the poem.

4.  Separate what happened to the speaker from the way he felt about it, the way the poet felt about it, the way you, the reader, feel about it.

5.  Identify the poet's interpretation of what happened and separate it from the speaker's interpretation and from your own.

6.  Then talk with other readers about the poem as if the poet had spoken it to you over the telephone or mailed it to you in a letter and wanted an answer.  He does.  He wants to see whether you agree or disagree with his feeling and his interpretation, and he wants to know whether you think the poem was worth writing and whether he wrote well.

Original text by Alberta Turner, in Responses to Poetry, New York: Longman, 1990, pp. 6-7.