Reading Like a Guest

Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.
                                                               —Jane Hirshfield, “A Room”

The glasses go over there, Joy tells me, moving them from beside the bowls and coffee mugs—where, wanting to help, I had placed them—over to the farthest cabinet, with the cereal boxes and canned beans. I keep them here. I would arrange my cupboard differently, but it is not my kitchen. Joy has her own logic: that cabinet, after all, is right above the sink. I wipe the counter, brew coffee, make my bed; I was raised to be a good house guest.

As a reader, I want always to be a good guest in other people’s poems. I turn to poetry to be inside, or beside, a particular heart and mind as it encounters tension and change. But no interiority is like any other. One premise of respect involves a tending to these distinctions: not only these are not my rooms, but these rooms, they’re yours.

Particularity, that yours-ness, is another way of describing style, or voice—how a poem enacts its patterns, from punctuation, to systems of images, to diction, to simile, and more. When I begin a poem, I look first, specifically, at its sense of line, both in unit and break. Does enjambment complicate or confirm syntax? What, syntactically, am I anticipating the sentence will say, and how will line accentuate or complicate what I’ve anticipated? For me, line is the first place in which the speaker and reader become companions inside the poem—it’s the entryway to where the poem’s mystery and meaning resides. 

When reading purely for pleasure, I can make preliminary judgments about line to decide whether to move further into the poem’s other rooms, and with what attentiveness and tonality. Initially put off by a poem’s style, I might quickly scan a poem and be persuaded to reconsider because of one glowing phrase or break; identifying immediately with a poem’s style, I might move more slowly and with more hope, but, in identification’s false gloss, find myself underwhelmed. In either case, I can let my own taste and first impression dictate my reading life, if I choose.      

To read in a submission queue, however, is to be responsible for ensuring that a true breadth of work be passed forward to the editors for further consideration. I must be prepared to meet any kind of poem and to maintain, throughout my time in it, awareness of the self’s interests and inclinations. I would not take my shoes off in a friend’s foyer and immediately criticize the wind chime in the doorway. I wouldn’t insist I sit solely in their room with the same orange couch I have at home. I wouldn’t rearrange the photos on the wall, move the coats to a different closet. Why, then, in the submission queue, treat my position as anything other than that of a humble guest?

So often, the difference between a thoughtful and dismissive queue reader comes down to the attitude with which one, in their very first reading, asks, Why is this here? Orienting myself to not only react but to continue through a poem with openness is the very premise, I think, of a reader’s integrity, particularly for platforms that claim to not adhere to any specific poetics. Such an approach can be liberating—it does not matter what I do or do not like; it does not even matter what I do or do not immediately understand or find legible. My job is not to be an arbiter but a steward, to react to each poem with curiosity, not certainty.

Some might call the good guest’s orientation negative capability, for its refusal to assert dominance via judgment. The term commonly relates to the poet’s discovery through writing the poem—the notion that a poem, as a site of thought, knows more than the poet writing it, or knows what the poet doesn’t yet know they know. The poet’s ability to dwell in that unknowing is what allows the poem to emerge. Another word for negative capability might simply be intuition: understanding without conscious reasoning. But intuition is not innate, it is a muscle to be strengthened and honed. So much of what I know about how to harness negative capability and train intuition, I have learned from the process of reading in editorial queues. Rather than reaching after reason—in the form of expectations of, bias for, or repulsion against any aesthetic or subject, contextual or formal tool—negative capability insists that the reader situate themself in the poem at hand and at least attempt to sense what it wants to do even if that differs from what the reader wants.

Instead of hubris, humility: I do not and cannot know all the ways a poem can work to be the most particular version of itself. What I can know is that I have made the best possible effort to dwell in the poem’s own particularity, in its imperatives rather than mine. Framing the work of the queue reader around reading, rather than judgment, prioritizes and protects the poems. Reading in this way, I have resisted moments I loved that were not, in the end, true to the poem, and loved moments I resisted that, it turns out, were. I have pushed forward styles I hate and declined ones I adore. I have read more than ever and asked for more help from books, essays, and peers. My work as a queue reader has been more instructive than any generative advice, including negative capability’s standard lesson: it has taught me that a poem, whether mine or another’s, never needs my subjectivity set aside, but, rather, needs it recognized and reckoned with.

A good guest doesn’t pretend they live in someone else’s home, they acknowledge their status and appreciate their temporary dwelling. In the queue, when I stopped evaluating from a place of certainty—whether of false objectivity or burdening judgment—and began reading with curiosity, my standards for the substantial and the transformative in my poems, the poems of others, and in myself, were both raised and expanded.

The best part of visiting a friend’s home for the first time is taking a tour through all their treasured things. It’s one of my favorite intimacies.

Joy shows me a fridge magnet of a frazzled pink Pekinese, the living room’s stained-glass strap-on, a stoned Furby beside the vanity—in pencil and crayon. Spurred by her objects, she tells me stories and reveals opinions I would not have otherwise learned. Her sharing fills each room like another treasured object—every small thing takes on its glow: the toothbrush in its holder, the coasters on the end table stacked and awaiting use. That’s the glow I want to facilitate in the readers’ queue, the glow of having listened. I love poems, I remember; I want the attitude with which I approach the queue to reflect that love.      

After Joy and I have finished gabbing, I go alone into my guest room. Lying on the air mattress, looking through the stained-glass window’s burnt orange, my mind vibrates, capable and galvanized, imagining the home I’ll return to and how to better it for when I have visitors of my own.