Readerly Engagements: Poetic Processes in T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and John Ashbery

Scholarly research on 20th century experimental poetry has highlighted the characteristic fusion of aesthetic difficulty and indeterminacy embedded in these texts, attending to the disruptive experiences of reading this literature. This research contributes to developing a critical vocabulary of readerly engagements as embodied affordances in three experimental poems: T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' (1922), Gertrude Stein's 'Tender Buttons' (1914), and John Ashbery's 'Three Poems' (1972). Thus, I aim to re-cover the freeing potential of poetic reception, reified through three interrelated, but distinct, critical apparatuses for the readers: ingestion, digestion, and exhaustion. Far from acts of dissection, these experimental poems allow for re-generative possibilities, revealing the importance of the reader's role as they find themselves generated in the interstices of the texts. In dialogue with discussions around critical methods, this research employs experiential close reading, an approach that at once considers the poem's disjunctures alongside its potential proximity between reader and text.

Charting specific meaning orientations in the poems, I trace three specific sites of disorientation, cultivated between readers and the texts, in the poems' anti-logocentrism, disclosure, and openness. By shifting critical focus to the primacy of the reader, these poems delineate the possibility for soliciting a readerly re-generation. Compelled by the desire to articulate a critical vocabulary of these readerly engagements, I reify the affordances of reading experimental poetry through interrelated, but distinct, processes of digestion, ingestion, and exhaustion.

This research makes a case for the importance of the reader's role in poetry, interrogating their engagements in reading experimental literature. In developing a vocabulary of reading poetry, I aim to re-cover the act of reading as a creative act, generating new readerly practices, as readers find themselves engaging in the interstices of the texts. In so doing, I highlight experimental poetry's freeing potential for reading, which is far from a methodical dissection, but an active digestion.