reading groups

two ends of the spectrum

people talk a lot about having trouble reading books. i’m fortunate that it’s very easy for me to read novels and pretty easy for me to read history & biography—“easy” here meaning that it doesn’t take much discipline or structure. or other people. on the other hand i’m also very interested in poetry and psychology, and i do find those hard to read without discipline/structure/other people. in the past couple of years i have read much more poetry & psychology than i have in many years before, because i’ve been in a poetry reading group & a psychology reading group. the groups have been run completely differently but have both been successful in the only way that matters—successful for ME!

i’ve talked before about poetry night. i’m sort of in charge of poetry night, yaxel started it & we run it together. it began as a monthly-ish private book club where members took turns suggesting the reading. but it changed rapidly through several iterations into what it is today, which is more or less the opposite of what it started as. for one thing, it’s public & anyone can show up or not show up, no expectations (although lots of people come regularly & i love them the most). also yaxel & i run it as benevolent co-tyrants now instead of trying to be democratic about it, & yaxel is actually the final authority on making sure it happens. also also we don’t have any required reading between sessions, everything we talk about gets read out loud during the meeting. also also also we expect it to only hold people’s interest in the winter, this is yaxel’s insight, a planned end date.

so basically this is the lowest-investment reading group possible for attendees, & i think that’s a large part of why it works. it’s kind of weird because what i’m doing for/at poetry night is so different from what most of the attendees are doing for/at poetry night, that i can’t really speak to what the attendees are getting out of it. but it’s been great for me! the amount of commitment it requires is perfect. every two-ish weeks i spend a morning digging around for a poet we haven’t covered yet, & i’ve been introduced to a lot of new poets & poems that way. plus i think poetry is just meant to be a group experience. hearing people read the poems out loud is great, hearing wht people have to say about the poems has made many of the poems permanently more enjoyable for me, having to articulate my opinions and questions about the poetry forces me to think more clearly. spending an hour on 3 poems makes me slow down enough to enjoy & appreciate little nuances.

there are some downsides; we usually read lyric poetry because it’s short, & i’ve been scared to change the model enough to move us through a longish poem. there is a whole world of poetry that does not fit into the poetry night structure. that being said, i’ve been more deeply invested in poetry in the last two years because of poetry night, so i can’t complain.

the psychology group is a very different story. it’s much more demanding & it’s much more continuous, & i't’s private to support that continuity. we read 50-100 pages of primary materials a week, which build on each other, (first freud, then lacan) & members take turns giving pretty in-depth presentations on different sections of the reading. knowing that we’ll be trying to figure it out together, has kept me going when the material is rough.

what it does have in common with poetry night, though, is that one person is taking ultimate responsibility for what happens in the group. i think reading groups fail most because people aren’t willing to do that, or aren’t actually interested enough in the reading to keep up the responsibility