Poesi som hendelse i shared reading

Potensiell, kinetisk og realisert verdi i Cecilie Løveids Flyttesang

Abstract

Poetry as Event in Shared Reading: Potential, kinetic, and realized value in Cecilie Løveid’s poem Flyttesang

Shared Reading is a research-based literary intervention in which small groups of people come together around the sharing of spontaneous personal responses to stories and poems read aloud by a trained facilitator. This case study examines a Shared Reading session of a poem by contemporary Norwegian writer Cecilie Løveid, Flyttesang, for the purpose of exploring how poetic value may be conceptualized as traversing three different dimensions. First, the reading material has been carefully selected and prepared by the Reader Leader with a view to its potential value for the participants (as meaning-making tool and aesthetic experience). Subsequently, the poem acquires kinetic value as it comes alive in the group session when some of the formal and thematic aspects are actualized in the interaction. Finally, the poem’s value may be realized as event if it becomes an internalized part of a participant’s sense of self.

The theoretical points of departure for our investigation are the works of Herrnstein-Smith and Rosenblatt, who conceptualize literary value not as inherent in the work, but tied to situated embodied experience in a complex web of relations. Value transpires in the transaction between text and reader, through which the poem may become an event. A given work may contain many inherent qualities, but these must be actualized in encounters with specific readers. In this article we present empirical examples of the facilitator’s appraisal of potential value, different aspects of kinetic value as manifested and negotiated in the group interaction, and realized value as it transpired in the post-session account of a participant. This evaluation arc, which mirrors Ricoeur’s hermeneutic arc of explication, interpretation, and appropriation, may have relevance beyond Shared Reading for the understanding of different processes of literary evaluation in the praxis field.