I should have asked you to clarify rather than objecting to your diction. The word "exactly" bothered me because I thought it imprecise, that it was not what you meant...exactly.

Good readers attempt to read the text as the author intended, yes, and are to do so with all the maps and tools and tests available.

Let me add that there may be more than one kind of sympathetic reader and reading. And, I hesitate to confine good reading to one characterized by academic precision.

Sometimes I want to know how the chair was made, the whole process from felling the tree to the final tooling. Sometimes I just want to sit in it. Does the latter make me an unsympathetic or poor reader? The chair was made to sit in, no?

I've been thinking a lot about your earlier post, particularly in relation to some of the comments Nick Piombino left at my blog on Hart Crane and my own understanding of the poem as performative utterance, a dialogic exchange, if you will. Your idea of the poem as a "record of process" sent me into a fit (in a good way). I don't view the poem as an object, a product, and I wonder how your "records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly," my "dialogue and/or speech act," and Nick's "reservoir of feeling, thought and ideas that people are unable to identify...in everyday life" might commingle. Notice that all three ideas place as much emphasis on the writer as the reader? These differing, yet somehow similar ideas all seem to reject the "expressive" model of poetry, no?

I need to think this out.

No doubt this a meandering tributary of your original thought, but is there a reader response theory of poetry that is akin to that of Culler, where literary competency plays a part in achieving "a" "correct" reading (out of many possible correct responses?)

I bring what I bring to the poem or text. I may not know any of the history of the writer or his influences, but I am still afforded a chance at an at least plausible/credible experiential flash of connection.

J: I can say (provisionally) that I think good reading begins with the attempt to read the text as the author meant it to be read...we should enter into the writer's productive subjectivity, his or her imagined or created author or authority, the proximate if not ultimate source of the poem.

R: What do you think of my current approach to such sympathetic reading--to read text as you would read a love letter? It's not my idea, this love letter bit, but it is working toward appreciation of text (literary text, at least) with my students in a way that the "rote 'problemization'" surely misses. As in letters from a lover, we read closely, carefully, repeatedly, and search for clues to how s/he wants us to read it, regardless of the opacity (opaqueness?) of the language/style/form. It's not solving problem of supposition (might actually encourage it?), but it seems to bring intention to the fore for both reader and writer in a meaningful way.