Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading

Eger Journal of English Studies IV (2UU4

) 3-15 Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading István D. Rácz The Mnemonic of Poetry Sean O'Brien closes an essay with this aphorism: "This extremely literary poet tries to show us a world before literature gets at it" (146). Although it refers to Peter Didsbury, it could just as well be said about Peter Reading. On the one hand, Reading is a learned poet, whose life work has already shown an unparalleled variety of traditional and experimental forms of poetry; on the other hand, he is an outsider keeping a distance from literary life and trends. O'Brien has characterized him as a post-romantic poet, and pointed out that the basic principle in his verse is fancy rather than imagination. Both categories were introduced by Coleridge (and then adopted by a number of romantic essayists); the former means aggregation, the latter transformation (124). Although O'Brien's statement is an inevitable simplification of Reading's texts, it still calls our attention to something significant: Reading is a poet of accumulated experience. Selection seems to be more important to him than transformation in the romantic sense. Coleridge mote about choice, fancy, and association in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria: The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (167, emphasis in the original) This is only partly true for Reading's poetry: although nearly all of his poems can be interpreted as the representation of memory, association is not a guiding principle, Just the opposite can be discerned in his texts: Reading uses association itself as a subject matter, and he explores its mechanism. Therefore, I need to revise my previous remark: Reading is not simply a poet of memory

, it is more precise to say that he is a poet of the act of remembering. The target of memory can be practically anything (a text, a social event, a verse form, etc.), but the poet is always interested in what it