One of my writing friends asked me a week ago whether I'd ever heard of a problem where writing is going fine, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it completely hurts to read. Hurts to read? I asked him. You mean like back pain?
"Sort of! My eyes just won't go there. I open books. I can't focus on them."
We were catching up over chicken sandwiches, followed by a tart with sliced pears and caramel sauce. Yum. But honestly, this is a hard time for my friend. His parents are unwell. In a short 8 months, he’s changed jobs and ended a marriage, and just lately, he’s moved onto some of his own medical tests.
He was surprised. But I wasn’t. At least, not very. I’ve known a number of colleagues, students, and members of my very own book-addicted family who have gone through a period of time where reading, once an outlet and a pleasure, felt almost palpably painful. The introspection. The quiet in one’s own head. Quiet that has to stay quiet enough to open to a writer’s voice, to another human’s point of view. Sustained focus. And all of this striking a self who no longer feels like the same, stable self.
I call it "reader's block" and it can feel just as insidious as the writer's version.
I do have a few strategies for dealing with it, though....
1. Try to read a single poem like a meditation every day.
Maybe twice per day. Give up on whole books and turn to the kinesthesia of repetition. Find and notice every piece of punctuation. Basically, run your mind mouth over the words multiple times and try to emblazon them into you.
I found this exercise during a time when I was going to shul regularly. During the month of Elul (usually sometime in September), there is a tradition of reading the same psalm every day. I have now done this three times--three whole months, exploring the words of this single poem. I'm amazed by how the poem begins to open--familiar, calming, and yet somehow also always fresh.
I would also note that Theodore Roethke was famous for asking his poetry workshop students to become so familiar with a single poem that they could transcribe every word, every punctuation mark, to take it wholly inside them and be able to write it out, and say it out, as if it had come from them.
2. Read an old book that you love again.
Focus on a new angle. Read in a new genre. Try biography. Or lyrical essay. Or science writing. Or your eight favorite books from high school. Or picture books for gradeschoolers. Or a book of poetry you loved when you were first in love.
One of my friends picked up all her Charlotte Brontes after her divorce...when the tomes of historical biography made her dizzy. I made it through a Readers' Blocked bedrest pregancy on the complete works of Pearl S. Buck--which I had read first in high school.
Ezra Pound in The A,B,C's or Reading recommends that to read a book completely, we must engage with it three times: once when we are younger than the viewpoint speaker or main character, once when we are the same age, and once when we are older and can look back.
3. Read directly into the heart of the problem.
Find poems 'for' someone about whom you are worried, poems you might imagine sharing with a friend who has died or a baby who has not yet been born. Make an anthology for yourself of these problem-resonant poems (and songs). If you had to share five poems with your dad, or your child, or your gradeschool teacher, what would they be?
Use a relationship, and deep thinking to ease the loneliness and alienation of reader's block.
(Note: I think reader's block most often strikes when the reader is going through a change of identity--the way becoming a parent can be a change of self, or losing one. I think that's why it helps, when the self is fragile, to have an "other" to direct your reading toward.)
4. Try reading in an alternate language....not English. (Or if you were raised in a nonanglophone household, then try reading in any language not your own.)
Your synapses will be fresher and safer there. You'll escape the stories of your life, the connotations clinging like yanked roots to each word. The naughty will be clean again. The devastated somewhat removed from the bodily-responses to it. And you'll notice language happening, beautiful, and distant all at once.
5. Try reading aloud, or listening to books on tape.
While the resistant self resists, the ears follow the words tumbling out, like water over rocks. If you're lucky, the story itself, or the poem itself, may lead you onward.
In any event, I know that there is a loneliness to Reader's Block. A head shut off from others. Shut off from the kind of trust that makes words matter. May your suffering ease. May you feel safe and well again--inside and out. May your own words keep coming out to meet ours.
Oh writer/reader, come back!
Love,
Jenny
This is a wonderful post Jenny. I've suffered! And one reason why reader's block is so devastating is because it's a loss of a previously reliable source of comfort. I love the idea of re-reading an old book. That's it! Thanks for these great solutions.
Posted by: Stacey | April 12, 2012 at 02:30 PM
Yes, I like that. It seems right. Just like you say...it's a loss of an old comfort. For me, there's an abandoned feeling to it. So 'comfort-loss' makes sense.
thanks for the encouraging words about the post--j.
Posted by: Jenny Factor | April 12, 2012 at 02:51 PM
"Reader's block" is a felicitous phrase for an all-too common ailment these days. I fear that reading anything on a screen limits your involvement in the text, but that is just one subsidiary reason for why we're reading less and more lazily.
Jenny, I wonder whether you would favor us with a column on reconciling the aims of great writing and the pursuit of social justice in the context of an MFA program and the practical curriculum decisions that go into the teaching and administration of such. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | April 12, 2012 at 11:19 PM
David, I'm glad for your comment. That's such an important discussion, and I hope my post wasn't unclear. I don't think I meant that generalized-thing, that thing Dana Gioia's NEA study of reading several years ago was intended to explore...a kind of shallowness of attention that impedes focus on a flat page alone. (David Ulin, of the LA Times and Antioch, as well as UC Riverside) actually has a great book on this subject. And I feel hopeful these days that actually the mind, the heart, the introspective "self" of our public world is adjusting. That we are not societally on our way into a reading-page-silence.
I think I meant something much more short-term in the life of a single otherwise happily-reading person, something more individual, and about which I have real compassion. It's not the tone of that person's life, it's just more of a single dissonant chord. And it always seems to accompany some short period of time when the person's head is simply too full--from changes, or losses. Oh I don't know.
And I believe--truly I believe--that Reading is a series of mental-motions--a kind of kinesthesia of thought. My suggestion of "strategies" generates from my experience finding that the more different motions I call "reading"--whether it's the "arguing with the page" motion (Mortimer Adler's "how to mark a book"), or the "reading multiple very different texts right next to each other" motion, or the "single poem again" motion, or the old book at a new life-stage motion--the more of these motions one uses, the easier it is to start to flow back into reading when the life is jangling off, and out of it. And--above all--for poets who are suddenly not reading to get back to a place where one can again look at a poem as an act of language with duration in time, where there is silence and expectation before the first words sputter out, and then a mental image or an idea or a connotation brought on by the words, and then more silence and then the next motion of reading....until the poem has happened for you, for us, as a jangly alive act in space and time.
And thank you for the suggestion on the blog post. I'd LOVE to do that. It's too late to start a post tonight, but I'll aim to say something about the intersection of literature and social justice before my week is up!
Posted by: Jenny Factor | April 13, 2012 at 02:01 AM
but perhaps I've just been unnecessarily argumentative. I do often wonder if there is something to a screen, something problematic about a screen.
(Maybe something happens inside us, in terms of focus and neurons, from holding a book --in our hands--as we read it. That tactile piece. A screen is colder and more distant and more visual.)
Posted by: Jenny Factor | April 13, 2012 at 02:06 AM
This is a fabulous, wonderful, fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-superlative post. And what you suggest is also terrific advice for someone at the end of a long semester of teaching composition and reading draft after draft of not-good-writing. Like me. My focus is gone from sheer exhaustion. A poem a day I can do.
Bravissima!
Posted by: Laura Orem | April 13, 2012 at 10:35 AM
Thanks, Laura! This means a lot to me. (If you DO want to pick an every-day-for-a-week poem, I'd be happy to do that with you. It's just a really rich activity for me.)
-j.
Posted by: Jenny Factor | April 13, 2012 at 12:23 PM
oh and I thought of one other kinesthesia that helps reader's block....reading aloud TO someone...so the flip side of listening...talking.
Posted by: Jenny Factor | April 13, 2012 at 12:30 PM