Word: reader
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...poet who is attempting what many consider to be the most radical of recent experiments with language--the Dream Songs--John Berryman's poetic is ruthlessly functional. "The ordinary modern reader is sound asleep...Eliot understood this very well, in the Waste Land; it's necessary to kick him, otherwise he won't perform, and if he doesn't perform there's no poem. Because a poem is a reciprocal kind of action between the writer and the reader. No reader, no poem. It's like unperformed music, Bach scores lying in manuscript for hundreds of years. That's what...
...novel Augie March, which he had just read in manuscript: "very ambitious, totally unlike most modern novels. It threw me the feeling that if I appeared to go outside the ordinary sort of business, that would be all right." The absence of any clear poetic precedent forces the reader to make a major revision of his conventional expectations...
...state of mind. For a long time poetry in this country has been working with an arsenal of familiar tools--"effects," "devices" and "meanings"--all largely technical considerations. Such a situation has often led to the spectacle of hordes of young men writing very well about very little. The reader is only encouraged to read the work, and locate all the sources of his response there...
...perseverance can pay. From The Polite Americans' morass, the patient reader can pick out a few dry footpaths to a reasonable comprehension of the country's character. It would have been nice, though, and this would certainly have been a better book, if the author had required of the reader a little less perseverance and of himself a little more perspicacity...
Nathaniel Benchley novels all have a faintly spurious ring, like canned laughter or the new 25? piece. That is because Benchley's plots generally straddle the line of plausibility. Like most of his eight other novels, The Monument depends on readers who are willing to believe the unbelievable. Its story deals with a campaign to build a Korean War memorial in Hawley, a little inbred New England town on the Atlantic shore. Even before the selectmen vote on it, this modest proposal nourishes more intrigues than the Orient Express and incites more violence, including suicide and murder, than...