Contemporary American experimental poetry is generally considered to be difficult to read. The dissertation considers the nature of that ‘hard work’ of reading. The term ‘hard work’ comes from Ron Silliman, but the study also considers the writings of John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian. All three are poets whose writing appears to be overly demanding of its reader, as it is often, for instance, fragmented and repetitive. The dissertation proposes a way of engaging with these poems that is a communal effort.



The study begins from the assumption that complex poems may be regarded as polyphonic rather than as the speech of a singular presence. The assumption is examined particularly in relation to texts like Ashbery’s long poem ‘Litany’ (1979) and the short poems of Your Name Here (2000), Silliman’s long prose poems ‘Ketjak’ (1975) and ‘Ketjak2’: Caravan of Affect’ (2008), and Hejinian’s book-length poem My Life (1987). Considering this decentralization of presence first in the literary historical contexts of the beginning of Ashbery’s career in the 1950s and of Hejinian’s and Silliman’s careers in the 1970s, the dissertation compares these poets’ experimental approach to presence to more traditional understandings of presence in poetry and considers what implications these different approaches to presence have for the reader’s position.



Traditionally, reading a poem has been conceived of as uncovering a singular meaning that the author has inscribed in the text. Although this type of coherence is no longer embraced in criticism, the underlying assumption in writing academic criticism is still that the argument and therefore the resulting reading should be coherent. While aiming for coherence is sometimes necessary, there can also be alternative readings which take into account, for instance, the discrepancies of the contexts in the poem. The reader of a poem like those by Ashbery, Silliman, and Hejinian that the study considers in detail might consider one’s relations to each particular word, phrase, or sentence, as well as to other readers. Reading, in such a situation, becomes something that happens in the community of author(s) and readers, and departing from the singularity of one’s experience is encouraged. This situation also affects how, for instance, critical elements and everyday language, as presented in poems, can be read.



A communal approach to reading experimental poetry emphasizes the positions of the reader, the author, and the text equally rather than privileging one instance above the others, as many models of reading have done. Reading happens in a community constructed of otherness, where the reader’s relations to the elements of the text and the relations between the reader and the author are constantly in flux. The approach to reading that the study proposes, then, allows considering the strangeness of the elements of the text without the need to gain control over the meaning of the text. Traditional power relations have to be reconsidered, as the power no longer lies with any single instance like the author or the reader. 



Complex experimental writing such as the works of Ashbery, Hejinian, and Silliman that are discussed here is initially viewed as particularly inviting for the kind of communal approach presented in the dissertation. However, the study concludes that other kinds of poetic  writing might also be considered from this perspective, even though the particularities of such an approach would be different in each case.