Not Within Us, But Between Us: Making Sense of Poetry

This chapter draws on empirical evidence from reading groups and interviews in order to explore the ways in which working-class readers made sense of a selection of contemporary Scottish poems. Acting as a counter-part to the preceding chapter, it explores a particular modality of reading poetry which was often in evidence in the course of these discussions. That way of reading contrasts with the ideal-typical vision of poetry reading as an essentially subjective and solitary activity. By contrast the way of reading which was evidence in these groups was deeply dialogical, taking shape according to the assumption that meaning is something which readers work out between themselves rather than for themselves. It was, moreover, a way of reading which insistently brought the poems in question into conversation with readers’ lived experiences, prioritising moral and social meaning ahead of aesthetic or formal qualities. This chapter, therefore, seeks to take these aspects of what Bourdieu called the ‘popular aesthetic’ seriously, and to show how those ways of engaging poetry not only empowered readers to make sense of the poems before them, but also cast those texts into a different light, remaking them by holding them accountable to social life and creating space for wider, critical reflection on the shape and organisation of aspects of that life.