The analysis of transcripts such as those used above suggests a number of ways in which a project worker might learn from the experience of reading them. In the more synoptic section that follows, a number of shorter examples have been gathered together in order to provide a general catalogue of what has been found in the transcripts thus far. These instances have emerged initially from the reading of poetry, which usually can be tracked across a single session, making it easier to determine the shape of a happening. The latter part of this chapter will demonstrate how the findings from this toolkit get redeployed within the messier form of prose narrative, which brings in additional dimensions and a larger network of connections and crossovers between people and thoughts.
The examples given in this toolkit each relate to one of the three stages that were identified in the first session described above: Getting In, Staying In, and Breaking Through.148 What is shown in each case is an indicator or sign of this stage being achieved or beginning to happen, or alternatively the example will show how an intervention made by the project worker or another group member enables something to happen. But the process always begins with and depends upon getting into the little world of the poem, with establishing this as a presence within the room. The act of re-reading the poem will therefore be key to each stage, as a way of
reminding the group of what has been read, and reawakening its literary power. The
148 These might be compared with the ‘stages of change’ upon which a number of cognitive-
behavioural therapy interventions have been based, where one example of a change would be to stop an addictive behaviour, such as smoking. It has been shown that the same stages of change seem to be followed in individuals who improve without therapy as in clients who improve as a result of it. The article referenced below is one of the first studies in which an attempt is made to come up with a formulation of the processes and stages encountered within an extended range of psychotherapies. Four stages are identified: contemplation, determination, action and maintenance. The number of stages has since been represented differently, sometimes as three, five or six stages, but this basic progression has become a standard for many programmes of therapy.
James O. Prochaska and Carlo C. Di Clemente, ‘Transtheoretical Therapy: Toward a More Integrative Model of Change’, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 19 (1982), 276-88 (p. 282).
repeated ‘getting into’ is itself a way of ‘staying in’ until ‘staying in’ and ‘staying in’ produces breakthrough into felt meaning.
Deixis as a First ‘Getting in’
The reading begins with finding a part of the poem to focus in on, often before one has been able to grasp the poem as a whole. The project worker might suggest this to the group as a first move. But the prompt can come from any reader within the group, and might even begin in an apparently silent way. The person who at this moment is the reader points to a line or a group of words, the significance of which he or she may not yet be able to articulate. In an account from one project worker who runs a group in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre,149 she noted that there was one particular phrase in the text that one man seemed to be drawn to. She could see him underlining and, as she put it, almost stroking the words with his finger. He then read out loud, for the first time in this group, the phrase that he had been pointing to: ‘there could still be many … many drops of happy – of good fellowship – ahead’.150
The project worker felt that at this moment the man was seeing the possibility of another way of life offered to him on the page as also via the presence of those fellow readers sat around the table. But in these early stages it may be the project worker who has to spell out or intuit the meaning of such an action, for the reader is operating on a level closer to blind instinct, and it is important that the reader stays with this instinct rather than becoming too quickly self-conscious.
Deixis is a way of physically orienting oneself within the map of a poem. The next step on from this will be to locate the part or parts that the selected bit connects
149
A longer account, written by Jane Davis, Director of TRO, is given in the guide to quality shared reading practice prepared by Kate McDonnell for GIR group leaders. The guide is discussed further in chapter five.
150 George Saunders, ‘Tenth of December’, in Tenth of December (London: Bloomsbury, 2013),
up with, as a method of reading the poem from within it. But deixis also allows the reader to enter into the space created by the group, perhaps for the first time. For the less confident reader it is a way of participating, of ‘doing’ reading, without having to know what to say or needing to question whether one will be understood.
Repeated Forms: ‘Getting In’ becoming ‘Staying In’
The majority of a Get into Reading session is likely to be spent on the work of
staying in the poem, and so this is the section of the toolkit that will carry the greatest number of examples. All of these however are to do with a kind of repeating or revisiting of that which the poem has begun to establish.
Re-readings
In many settings the groups have to take place amidst a range of potential disruptions and distractions. But in the following example it was the group member rather than the project worker who took it upon herself to make sure that the poem was heard, despite the disturbance which was coming from another chatty group of people sitting close by who had met up in the library to talk about a book. As she was reading the following three stanzas, Julie got up from the table and went and stood for a moment by the other group, so that they could see what she was doing in trying to read. She then came calmly back to the table and handed the rest of the reading on to others in the group. Brendan Kennelly’s poem begins:
A man should clear a space for himself Like Dublin city on a Sunday morning About six o’clock.
Dublin and myself are rid of our traffic then And I’m walking.
Houses are solitary and dignified Streets are adventures
Twisting in and out and up and down my mind. The river is talking to itself
And doesn’t care if I eavesdrop. No longer cluttered with purpose The city turns to the mountains And takes time to listen to the sea. I witness all three communing in silence Under a relaxed sky.151
After the poem had been read in full, Julie commented on the experience of reading aloud:
Julie: I think it’s really good for the soul. You know if you can read, and
hear your voice, you know. It’s good to hear yourself strong.
Richard: Yes.
Julie: It helps, you know, like if everyone just wanted, if you were able to have a taste, each one have a little go.
Terry: Mmm definitely yeah.
Julie: Cause you can hear yourself, and the confidence it brings, even in other people …
In this instance the actual reading helps to reinforce not only a sense of the poem, but also a sense of self: echoing a deep need to be able to be heard and to hear oneself, or one’s own inner voice uttered out loud. This indeed is what the poem calls clearing a space, taking time to listen.
In another group152 there is a fairly quiet member who has told the project worker that he is willing to have a go at reading aloud at some point. One of the findings from the analysis of the transcripts is that it is often when a person reads aloud within a group for the first time that they will begin to say more afterwards in response to what is being read. The project worker will therefore be looking for moments when he or she might enable this to happen within a group. On this
151
Brendan Kennelly, ‘Clearing a Space’, in A Time for Voices: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1990), pp. 124-5.
152 This transcript has not been previously used but was collected for the earlier referenced study: ‘An
Investigation into the Therapeutic Benefits of Reading in Relation to Depression and Well-being’.
occasion the group is reading W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’,153 and has already heard it read once by the project worker:
Rick: He is waxing lyrical there
Project worker: He is
Rick: For want of a better way of phrasing … But to coin a phrase he is waxing lyrical. And I don’t know what the definition of lyric is, you know.
Project worker: It is a very sort of beautiful poem really. Let’s listen to it again shall we, would you like to take your turn now Doug or how do you feel?
Douglas: Oh we will have a bash. [reads the poem]
Final stanza:
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core. –
Project worker: Thanks Doug, beautifully read.
Rick: I think that’s beautiful. Is there such a thing as metre, I don’t know a lot about poetry – I know snippets here and there – but there is such a thing as, it’s the way he puts the words together, because it seems beautiful to me the way he, the way it hits you, you know. But you know what I am saying, it’s much more beautiful than what it says on paper you know.
Project worker: Yes it’s got like this deep rhythm to it, hasn’t it,
Rick: Yes that’s it,
Project worker: This resonance, which when Doug was reading then I was really, it seemed to have this resonance to it, this rhythm and I think the idea that it’s the words on the page but they are also, it’s the music of it isn’t it really.
Rick: Yes, yes
Project worker: That is bringing something out.
Douglas: Conjuring something else up in your mind.
153 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (from The Rose, 1893), in Collected Poems, ed. by
This example illustrates the difference between reading the poem and discussing its imagery or metre on the one hand, and listening to it and responding to its ‘music’ on the other. The group are here rediscovering what a poem is, and finding that it has a kind of life beyond the words on the page as a result of the reading aloud. It is from within that experience of its resonance that Douglas is able to make that comment about the effect of the poem on the mind.
Re-doings or repetitions
In the first example the repeated return to a particular part of the poem acts as a kind of homing device. It is the reader’s way of concentrating in on what seems to him or her most important. But often this happens not in relation to what the reader has picked out as their favourite line or lines, but to a part that the reader finds troubling, or difficult to grasp. Here the group takes place on a psychiatric ward, and the staff member picks up on the line which she likes, about the turtle doves. But Nigel’s response to the poem is different:
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings.
Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words; The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love:
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.154
Nigel: I don’t know why the true hearts have to break. In that last bit there.
Seems a bit strange.
Nigel again comes back to the concluding lines of each stanza:
154 Sir Edward Dyer, ‘A Modest Love’ (1602), in The Oxford Book Of Sixteenth Century Verse
Nigel: He’s not talking about love, the previous lines is he. Then he just
throws in ‘love is love, in beggars as in kings’. He ends up with a broken heart here and I can’t really see why he should end up with a broken heart. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well when he wrote it.
Staff member: Yes, or he’s a hurt man, a scorned man.
Project worker:Yes, maybe he was. It makes me think that you know the big romantic stories are often about, or they might have been about princes and kings, so you tend to think that the scale of love that they have is much bigger than what we might experience.
Staff member: Normal people, yes.
Project worker: And is the poem trying to say that that’s not the case. That it’s just
that maybe we don’t know how to measure it.
The project worker is thinking too that in the lyric poetry of this period the reader’s sense of the size of an emotion or experience is often also dependent upon the sound of the verse, so that that which on the page may look small or lacking in significance, in the reading of it is able to carry a deeper and more resonant power. Nigel later has another go at explaining the difficulty that he is having with the poem:
Nigel: It starts off talking about small things and characteristically small things doesn’t it. And then love is love, but that would be a small thing in a beggar and a large thing in a king, presumably. Although it’s the same emotion.
Project worker: Is that what you think?
Nigel: Well having examined Henry VIII’s activities in a recent set of classes
in the education department, he made a lot more fuss about what he was doing than anybody else would be likely to do.
Project worker: Mmm. But he also kind of had to, because of his position … This session stops very much short of breakthrough, but it is indicative of that attempt to stay in a particular area instead of leaving behind those moments of significance which we will be looking for within the poetry, as within the transcripts themselves. Also, because thoughts will sometimes continue to crop up in a non- chronological manner in response to the literature, a session may end up looking
more circular in shape rather than following a linear progression through the three different stages identified in this chapter. In this example the response to a particular part of the poem feels from the beginning too pressing to allow for that initially more steady process of ‘getting in’.
Where the group member is however at risk of getting stuck, the project worker’s recourse is to the poem, and to the poetry’s own thought, which the project worker may sometimes have to re-present to the group member not in the form of an explanation but of an idea, or a creative analogy. At other times the project worker may be able to provide the link between thoughts by remembering what has been said by particular people during the session, and calling upon these thoughts again in order to secure the work that the readers may not fully realize they have been doing. So in another example Joe, who has just recently left secondary school, but who apologises for being ‘really bad at poetry’ nevertheless at one point offers to read. He comments afterwards on what he identifies as the enjambement in the poem, and points to the lines copied below:
Give me one song of all your songs, that men May take your beauty winter’s fire beside.155 Carol follows on to the final stanza:
For memory passes
Of even the loveliest things, bravest in show; The mind to beauty most alert not know How the August grasses
Waved, by December’s
Glow, unless he see deep in the embers
The poet’s dream, gathered from cold print’s spaces.
Carol: And the ‘memory passes | Of even the loveliest things’. Sort of the sense of passing there in time, and the movement of time, through the seasons.
155 ‘O Tree of Pride’ (from poems dated 1917-19), in Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, ed. by P. J.
Project worker: Yes. So we’re getting the movement through the poem and the
passing of time. But still trying to hold onto something that’s not like letting it just pass by.
Carol: So yes it’s not, it’s wanting to just hold onto that glimpse of summer
in the transition into winter so, the mention of the ‘one single leaf of summer’s shade’ [in line 3] and the ‘one song of all your songs’ – to almost take in to the ‘winter’s fire’.
Project worker: Mmm! Yes it’s literally burning in the fire isn’t it at the end.
Carol: Yes.
Following a third reading of the poem there is some talk of the suggestion of comfort in that word ‘glow’ in the second to last line. Patrick continues:
There’s like a – erm you know this kind of warmth in the embers, whereas he is