After Reading

I start reading poetry books at their end, which is also what is before the book, proceed and precede blurred. By this I mean that as always, poetry fucks with time, with relation.

What I mean literally is that I start by reading the acknowledgments section of a book, mumbling the names of the poet’s influences, mentors, and friends: the readers who read the author before me and who may after. The readers who make my reading possible.

Acknowledgments draw different forms of relation than citation: there is greater ambiguity here. They illuminate how literary lineages are often non-linear: rather than moving from one point to another, they oscillate or spread outward like breath, its weight only perceptible when it softens the glare of glass.  

“Your breath is so much more than your breath. Your body so many bodies. Your poems given to you. The cities inside us, all of whom spoke us, thought us, dreamt us, dream us into being.”  ~Ross Gay

*

When my beloved visits me, we spend a lot of time reading together, their legs stretched out onto my lap, or mine on theirs, one hand holding our books, the other the other’s hand. We will read our own books, until one of us laughs, visibly reacts, or asks “can I read you something?” and our two readings, by proxy of our breaths’ relation, become in relation, too.

As I write this, they are sitting on the couch reading Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay. As I write this, I think of the poem they read to me earlier, the lines “I fall in love. The things / the wind is telling me.”

How often we are just writing what the wind is telling, is bringing to us. How often I am just writing out my beloveds’ breath.

In his acknowledgments, Ross Gay writes to Aracelis Girmay: “I am indebted to so much language and thought and feeling and care from your books/hearts, I mean, I don’t know how to write poems without them (I don’t know how to be without them).”

In my introductory level physics class, one of the first problems we were asked to do was calculate the probability that one inhalation could be made up of any of the molecules that Isaac Newton breathed.

I’m not invested in breathing Isaac Newton’s breath in particular, but I do believe that in this problem lies something important: to be made up of each other’s breath. For our being, and therefore, of course our writing, to be made up of each other.

For our reading is an act of reanimation of the author’s breath, for our reading is so many breaths, for the breaths make home of our specific bodies and of the world.

*

“A poem’s practice, the practice of poetry, must always defy the logic of property. By which I mean practicing the truth of gift and gratitude.” ~ Ross Gay

*

In recent years, effort has been undertaken to make the writer/poet identity less exclusionary and less bound up in publishing and property: You are a writer if you write. You are a poet if you write poems, if you have ever written a single poem.

Reading, on the other hand, hasn’t made the same shift. In professional literary settings, calling someone a reader means being a reader for. I am a reader for The Offing. My partner is a reader for Hayden’s Ferry Review. My roommate is a reader for Futurepoem. And so forth.

As opposed to being a reader of, which implies an origin or cause, an act of belonging, being a reader for implies a destination or purpose. In other words, the difference is both temporal and spatial—a difference of migration. For reaches forward, moves toward; of gestures backward, comes from.

Reading for most often means reading for an institution: it deems that institution the destination and the purpose, the place to get to, the reason behind the reading. Reading for the institution means reading as a certain kind of disembodiment.

After reading for, I click on one of the silhouettes of hands on Submittable: thumbs up, thumbs down, and, in between, a hand flattened, twin arcs floating above and below the nailless thumb to indicate the possibility of motion where there is none.

Reading for is what can make the reading of possible after—the destination creates the origin.

And yet this migration refuses the linear logic of time and of property—of hands separated from bodies. There is never simply a static motion from one to another, from for to of: this was once yours and now it is mine. This reading, like writing, like migration, like breath, cycles and recycles, blurring origin and destination.

*

“A thinking after—after as in time, and after as in influence, or inspiration or aspiration or breath, as in: Be Holding, after Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake.  But also after as in care. Like looking after.” ~ Ross Gay

 

*

Let me go back.

I became a reader of The Offing years before I became a reader for it. By this I mean that I began at the destination, at the after.

Reading The Offing’s Back of the Envelope section in particular helped me better understand the way that my scientific background could become part of my writing. Reading made me recognize the way that my writing was possible, the ways I could be possible.

The act of reading is always an act of reading after—after the readers who made every poem, every piece, every book possible for us to be read.

After Ross Gay, who said before me, “This never ends.” This defies direction, points toward the infinite. This meaning reading, meaning writing, meaning being, meaning after, meaning thanks.

*

“And reader, always, always: thank you. This never ends. Bound in gratitude.” ~ Ross Gay

*

After Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Mark Zastrow, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Mimi Wong, S. Brook Corfman, Shoshana Olidort, Ahana Ganguly, Erin O’Malley, readers of and readers for.

*

All quotations from Ross Gay’s acknowledgments in Be Holding.