The Marriage of Writers and Readers
June 8th, 2008 bhenricksenThere’s a branch of literary criticism that studies the role that readers play in determining or completing the literary work. You can talk, for instance, about how Jane Austen’s awareness the audience’s expectations might have helped to shape Emma. On the other end of the writer-reader alliance, you can talk about how the way readers are wired determines their understanding of a story or poem. In a wonderful novel by Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler, a character representing the reader constantly tinkers with the plot.
The critic Wolfgang Iser argued that all literary works contain “gaps” that must be filled either consciously or otherwise by readers. This line of speculation is influenced by a large volume of psychological and philosophical writing about perception, and fancy words such as “phenomenology” are batted back and forth. Below is my contribution to this discussion.
Lovely Reader,
I will say a poem to your eyes
someday when we are by a lake
and raindrops whisper secrets in the trees.
You will move me somewhere with your eyes,
perhaps a shore where small ships nod
and oceans breathe contentedly.
The poem will be summer wind in grass,
or sounds the insects make at night,
and it will walk the pathways of your eyes
To find the sea and board a ship
that journeys where the oceans roll
in eyes that make the poem whole.
