Creative Reading

I was fascinated by Ron Padgett's ideas for creative reading. We always talk about creative writing and the relationship between writing and reading, so why not try creative reading?! When we first started this activity, I must admit that I was slightly annoyed by and skeptical about the purpose of skipping or repeating lines. But, as I worked through some of the other strategies, I began to realize that we were essentially deconstructing the text, removing (transferring?) the meaning from the words on the page and interpreting the piece through a new, unique perspective.

My favorite reading ideas were the stencil and the trickle down. I wish I had had a hard copy of "No Kinda Sense" because I wanted to create my own poem with Delpit's story, but I did create my very own heart-shaped stencil. As I moved my little blue stencil across and up and down the page, I tried to ignore the urge to move it from left to right like a magnifying glass. Instead I paused and really concentrated on the words inside the heart shape, trying to make a connection among them that related to my understanding of the text. I appreciated the fact that the stencil forced me to really slow down and focus on the words as individual units rather than an entire sentence or paragraph. I realized just how carefully writers choose their words, just how much a seemingly insignificant three- or four-letter unit can change the implication of a sentence - possibly even a whole story. Sometimes we miss the trees for the forest...