Someone I was reading recently – perhaps the name will come back to me – said that if you wanted to fully appreciate a literary text you should copy it out long hand. I had been commissioned to write a review of a book of poetry and this piece of advice came to mind. The poems were among the most rebarbative I have ever read and I was at a loss to know what to say about them. I felt like someone trying to scale a rock face with no hand- or toe-hold anywhere in sight. My mind skated over the words, occasionally snagging on involuntary associations. For example, ‘shoes’ and ‘waltz’ appearing on consecutive lines made me think of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. He often mentions women’s shoes, which he envied for their intimate contact with the feet of their wearers. Clearly this had nothing to do with the poem, or perhaps it did. I copied out several texts, which made me aware that I had misread a few words, but at the end of the exercise I was still unsure what I was going to say about the poems. Perhaps they were intended to be entirely abstract, their slipperiness and ability to prompt random word associations what their writer intended, a deep dive into how language finds ways to generate meaning no matter what we do to it. As for the person who recommended copying out literary texts, I have a feeling their name began with B…
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Simon Collings
Picture Nick Victor
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