People who read poetry are the unsung customer base for independent bookstores: they are avid readers, they love books as physical objects, they will religiously attend author readings, they read books on a variety of subjects, and they buy more books annually than anyone else I know. By catering to the type of person who reads poetry, these successful bookstores have perhaps unwittingly remained focused on what devoted patrons of bookstores really value: variety over homogeneity, literature over media, humanity over technology, and community over price. By being the type of bookstore that poetry readers will go out of their way to visit, and by being a third place in our social lives that fosters community and human interaction, these stores have become—through the nuanced fact of their physical being—something that Amazon, by its very business model, is the antithesis of: a space where we experience history, and thus also time.

At first glance, the idea of “catering to poetry” may seem like a hard sell. After all, “no one reads poetry anymore,” and the truth is no one ever really did. Poetry books will remain a paltry portion of the market for a long time, but the people who read poetry will continue to spend hours browsing the aisles of their local bookstore—smartphones tucked quietly away in their coat pockets. If bookstores can learn to embrace these odd readers as secret representatives of the type of person who’s at the core of their customer base, rather than get sucked into a doomed downward spiral of price slashing on the latest best-selling hardcover, they will remain relevant and attractive to the customers they need in order to survive. Poetry, the least profitable and most esoteric of all the genres, can save the bookstore.

So, I received a Kindle Keyboard (WiFi & Free 3G) as an early birthday gift from my parents. Unfortunately this is the stock photo from Amazon and I have not in fact been enjoying it beach side (it’s finally rather cold in Maryland, I have to say), but I have been enjoying it for some morning reading in my sunny bedroom, warm and curled under the duvet with the morning’s cool air around me. This new gadget is as good a reason as any to indulge in a formerly common lazy morning ritual (rather than feel guilty about my reluctance to get out of bed).

Like many readers and writers, I hesitated to buy an e-reader for myself because I wondered how it might change my reading experience. When I read to study I always have a pen (or, these days, more likely a pencil) in hand and scribble ample notes in the margins, stars, and underlines. I feel a kinship with the physical object; I love the smell of the pages, the way the binding starts to wear after I’ve carried the book around for a while, and the accomplishment of seeing a bookmark move forward as I read my way through it. I think always of Whitman, who demands his readers to see the act of reading as intimate (to the point of sexual), as we literally touch him and his words and have a physical and visceral relationship with the book object itself. I think also of Elizabeth Willis, who has said in an interview that identity is as much about who we’ve read as it is about our family background or where we’re from geographically (I’m pretty sure this interview is online but I can’t find it at the moment… if any reader is particularly curious I can find it for you). Although I have Whitman and Willis to give an image to what I feel for the act of reading and the book object itself, I know many others share or have similar sentiments.

The habit of marking, though, is not just a habit left over from my days as a student. It’s one way I remember what I’m taking in, and it keeps the language itself material. I’m more tuned in to how an author USES language to achieve his or her means when I take the time to mark the instances where such use is particularly poignant. My poems, too, in the last several years, are an excessive example of this. They’ve become extended notes and marginalia in response to a source text. I’m not only making use of another’s language as material for my own poems (collage), I do it as an act of response. I am concerned with Olmsted’s argument, with Hawkes’s relationship to he land (more on this new project soon, I promise).

Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve already compartmentalized my reading experiences. The texts I’ll read through Kindle are simply not the texts I want to have that raw (if not obsessive) intimacy with. I immediately downloaded several free classics to my Kindle, including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which is my guilty pleasure read this winter (for whatever reason I tend to return to Austen during my winter break each year around this time…), some random word games, and The Primal Blueprint (I am curious about the argument behind primal eating, though I’ve intuitively been eating fairly primal for a while now, especially since I’ve had the luxury of being a loco-vore here on the Eastern Shore).

These are all readings where the material quality of language is not important. While I am grateful for the ability to make easy notes with the physical keyboard, I am less inclined to do so for books like these. The language is transparent; Austen sweeps me into another time and into the minds of her characters. Sisson educates me on his own research into “primal” behaviors that can serve us now. The language is a vehicle I don’t care to look at too closely; I’m not concerned with how the sentences are structured, I just want to read through it. In this way reading through an e-reader is a little like reading on the internet — I want it to be immediate and it is. I did, though, have to remind myself to slow down and not skim as I might with a web page. Once I did, the page disappeared. It no longer matters that I am reading on a digital page instead of a physical one. For these kinds of texts, there is little to no difference in how I consume them.

As soon as I start to type that my own shorthand is only possible through interacting with the physical object of the book, I quickly hit the “Back Space” key and revise that sentiment. I can just as easily type in an asterisk instead of a star, highlight (underline) language, and make “marginal” notes in my Kindle as I can in a book. So it’s not about the short-hand, it’s about the physical and visceral nature inherent in the act of marking up a text. There is an intention with it, some connection between the motion and my mind as it is working through a text.

I record these observations about my reading process not because I have anything profound to say in conclusion, but because I think we’re at a really interesting intersection of reading and writing that has to acknowledge that the digital format changes the way we read and think (see “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and all subsequent articles, popular and otherwise, on this topic). This post is just a marker in my own understanding of those changes, and feeling them shift as all of my work with texts of all kinds is increasingly digitized. I wonder how other writers feel about their relationships to digital texts. Anyone care to leave your mark here?

• The Verge Escapement Revolution, 1379: A Lecture & Demonstration for Ambitious Young Ladies
• Clepsydra (“Water Thief”): A Lecture & Demonstration for Ambitious Young Ladies
• The Hourglass–What is Coming While I am Writing Yeats: A Lecture & Workshop for Ambitious Young Ladies

It’s an excellent issue overall — go read it!

Over at This Recording a recent article, “In Which We Get Down to the Actual Writing” they provide an aggregate of excerpts from a bunch of famous writers talking about writing (that was a messy sentence, but you get my point). It’s always been my obsession to read manifestos and learn about writers’ processes through their own language, but lately it seems these texts are easier to find. There’s a new composition text Writing About Writing (2010) with essays with everyone from Mike Rose to Stephen King, the Paris Review has archived all of their interviews with writers back to the beginning of this series, and this recent web thing are great examples.

I am particularly grateful for these resources not only as a writer, but as an educator. I tried, at one point, to teach a composition course without any readings about writing (correction: I tried to teach a composition course where the only readings about writing were from a text book, which although helpful for analytical moves of the mind and pen, did not give an image of what it is like to undertake the writing process) and everything felt disconnected. I was wondering about the links between the readings we were doing and the writing as much as my students were. How can we expect our students (of any form of writing, not only creative writing) to find self-awareness in their own process and intentions if we don’t show them models of other writers describing how they work through ideas and what they feel the motivating factors for writing are?

As I say to my students in my current Composition and Literature syllabus, “The subject of this course is writing” (phrasing stolen from David Bartholomae). In part this approach is the product of my own creative “upbringing” — I can’t help but looks at any form of writing from a craft perspective. Part of it has to do with my Writing Center work. It has become increasingly obvious to me that my students should have access to the reading and thinking we do about writers in pedagogical training and/or as creative writers. As the Hejinian excerpt reads:

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, “Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.” Instead it seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

I am asking, in part, that my students be curious and work through their curiosities in writing. That advice feels prescriptive though. Be curious? How do I do that? I can just hear them thinking. In order to understand why curiosity can inspire us to “negotiate our mentalities” in written language it helps, I think, to show students other minds engaging in their own curiosity.

And so, we look at scholars looking at writing students (Bartholomae, Rose, Sommers, etc.). We read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. We look at writing projects that teach how to read them, books that have a purpose beyond entertainment (like Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder). We look at authors trying to negotiate their way into a form suitable for their purpose (whatever that might be).

I don’t think I am saying anything profound here, but I see so often in composition courses the process and the products of writing are assigned, prescribed, or limited by a professor’s singular perspective, or a text book’s catchy names for writing strategies. No wonder our students find writing to be difficult, boring, and unrewarding. Writing has become such a business we’ve lost all the romance of it, the excitement, the mystery.

By the end of the semester (and when they write their own “how and why I write” manifestos), I hope they’ve found at least one writer they can identify with, and feel a kinship with, either because there is something about that writer’s how and why they’d like to steal emulate, or because the writer has a similar process to their own, giving them permission to embrace the process they already employ (when, perhaps, they were embarrassed by it or felt their methods inadequate). We might not have solved the mystery, but at least we’ve made our way, at least a little, and with companions.