Look at Your Fish (2016)

Back in my days of teaching literature as a grad student, I pitched a couple of variants of the same class: in one, we would read five (or even fewer) poems of no great length over the course of the entire class. The whole task would just be to sit with the damn things until they became unbearable, then sit with them some more, and finally see what we could say about them. The other, more challenging variant was that the student had to recite (not perform) the five poems; the entire interpretation would be the recitation—no essay to explain or defend it, just the recitation itself. I never got much traction with either of those ideas.

But I did always use the Agassiz stories at the beginning of each semester at least to encourage that kind of living with an object until you stop trying to impose yourself upon it and instead let it do its work on you. (Calling the practice “close reading” doesn’t really do it justice; it’s more like contemplation.) It’s not a bad skill to have, whether you’re looking at fish, poems, or anything else.

I was just remembering this essay today…

In the age of Facebook, Instagram, people will have to take a course to look at their fish.