In the digital age, headlines, tweets, posts, and updates have trained us to glance at short form text and quickly absorb its meaning. But lyric poetry demands that we slow down, read line for line, word for word, syllable for syllable, even letter for letter, preferably over and over again. Both the power and the politics of a poem lie at least partially in the labor of synchronizing the time of the poem with the time of the reader, a work that is distributed between the poet’s composition process and the reader’s hermeneutic process. Poetry demands, that is, highly focused, microscopic, and slow reading practices at the same time as it successfully uses immediate effects and the allure of quick glances to captivate the reader–a combination of conflicting tasks unfamiliar (or un-useful) to most other short compositions in today’s media and text ecologies. 

This seminar proposes an experimental format to explore the relationship between single poems and shared reading practices: papers will each focus on one poem from any language, tradition, or period. From a constellation of unique and independent poetic texts, the seminar will build an as-yet unknown sharedness among a community of reception. We see the open inquiry mode of this seminar as comparativeness in practice, arising from our engagement with different models of sustained attention, our methods of teaching poems and being taught by poems, the variety of our hermeneutic cultures and disciplinary backgrounds, and our willingness to let poems confront us with what we do not know. 

We invite participants to use a single poem to:

• intervene in concepts of time (time as a mediated experience, the relationship between time and rhythm, fast and slow time, etc.)
• address and engage with concepts of hermeneutics (Foucauldian groundlessness, Bourdieu’s sociology of literature, translation as interpretation, etc.)
• experiment with the phenomenology of reading (esp. while foregrounding the reader’s positionality)
• encounter a poem’s form in relationship to the social and cultural forms with which it is surrounded and imbricated
• offer a historical analysis of different interpretive approaches
• examine its “biographical” context to propose readings, counter-readings, or speculative readings 

Structures for presentations might be based on interventions into the interpretation of canonical poems, Chinese-style zhujie annotations, explications de texte, experiments in poetry teaching, reports on research archives (including reception research), or the reading journal/personal essay. Organizers will be looking for contributions that speak towards a larger community of readers of poetry from all languages, eras, and cultures; we are seeking contributions that center how to read, rather than which poems to read and what to think about them.