Where Are We Going With This?: Poetry and Symbolic Exclusion

This chapter draws on empirical evidence from reading groups and interviews in order to explore some of the ways in which working-class readers responded to, sought to make sense of, and articulated their engagements with, a selection of contemporary Scottish poems. In particular—arguing against what remain deep-rooted assumptions about poetry as a morally transformative object—it explores some of the ways in which readers found themselves effectively excluded from the meaningfulness of these poems. By looking, up-close, at the encounter between these poems and these readers, in other words, it tries to shed light on how a particular form of cultural exclusion takes shape, and on how readers responded to that experience. The chapter, in this respect, offers an empirical account of a kind of symbolic violence articulated through relationships to forms of literary culture such as poetry. At the same time, however, it contests the assumption that such violence is characterised by a kind of imperceptibility: what the engagement in these groups reveals, on the contrary, is that readers often developed nuanced critical responses to the experience of this kind of symbolic exclusion.