Reading the Event of the Poem: Derek Attridge and John Wilkinson on Denise Riley’s ‘Lone Star Clattering’

Abstract

Abstract In this brief introduction to Derek Attridge’s ‘The Event of a Poem’ and John Wilkinson’s ‘Reading Denise Riley with Derek Attridge’, David Nowell Smith outlines some of the key concepts and questions explored in Attridge’s and Wilkinson’s essays. The central question is a double one: How does meaning in a poem unfold, and how do we as readers make sense of this unfolding? To ask this question means focusing on meaning as a process rather than a content that lies notionally behind the words; it is to understand the poem as actualized in the event, and experience, of its encounter with its audience/reader. The introduction reflects on the peculiar challenges, and pleasures, posed by a poem, such as Denise Riley’s ‘Lone Star Clattering’, where the multiple registers, allusions, and references, would complicate our habitual meaning-making processes. What do individual reading histories bring to such a poem? And what kinds of attention would this poem demand of its readers?