Abstract
Abstract This essay responds to a challenge offered by the avowed bafflement of the critic and prosodist Derek Attridge faced with a poem by Denise Riley, ‘Lone Star Clattering’. It argues that Attridge’s adoption of an interpretative approach derived from Don Paterson, employing a step-by-step and constrictive cognitive framing, cannot succeed with a late Modernist lyric poem. Drawing on classroom experience with the same poem, it describes a prevalent cats-cradle approach as a variant on such constrictive reading, where a small group of external referents is grabbed onto, and the poem forced into unseemly conformity with them. The essay proposes instead a practice of feline reading characterized by a hovering casual interest, a constant scan of the sensual and mental fields so that their contours are felt, while sustaining a hair-trigger responsiveness to any unanticipated event along with a Keatsian tolerance of irresolution.
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