I posted last week this reading of a Wordsworth poem (with some notes contextualizing it with other poems). But then... https://twitter.com/PreCursorPoets/status/1319723749902614529

...With bpNichol, I gave a bigger picture, not even just about him, but a wider poetic and technological context for what he is doing. https://twitter.com/PreCursorPoets/status/1320150263349628930

While Wordsworth was experimental in his own way at the time, his poems are very recognizable to us now, and you can just pick up any and go through it. Doing the same with the book of bpNichol writing feels like selling him short.

Part of this is that as you go through the 20th century, we have a growing list of methods for critical reading, but writers know these, too, and will sometimes write against these as constraints. Close reading in particular is often resisted.

I introduce some of the more recent value of such resistance here amid a context of counter-intelligence practices and online surveillance: https://twitter.com/PreCursorPoets/status/1299001045838856192

See also this comment from Jennifer Chang's "Statement of Purpose" in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She's writing about reading Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia as "an unintended audience."

Chang earlier wrote the poetry collection, The History of Anonymity. As she discusses in this essay, her sense of feeling invisible, of belonging and not belonging in a place, is at times aspirational and at times something she hates.

The History of Anonymity explores elements of personal identity, but obscured within landscapes and other material. I'll return to the book for more focused reading later in the week. https://twitter.com/ClaraCianfer/status/1319762975243313153

But a short point to end this thread is that it is not strictly a matter of wholly resisting close reading (such as through formal abstraction) or not. You can also isolate elements of hostility and trespass and navigate possibilities within more traditional expression.