“Bound by a Shared Affect”: Insights into Reading and Teaching Emotions in Recent Poetry

Abstract

<p> In this article, the author presents a theoretically oriented framework for teaching poetry that accounts for the role of affect. The author calls this framework <em>reading for affective uncertainty</em>, meaning an approach to affect and meaning that recognizes affects associated with the reading event as integral parts of the reading without expecting meaning to be inherent to texts and simply in need of interpretation, which is often a focus in teaching. Central to this framework are the notion of a poem as an object and Sara Ahmed's argument in <em>The Cultural Politics of Emotion</em> (2004), that objects do not cause emotions, but emotions are produced in circulation with objects. As concrete examples, the author discusses Evelyn Reilly's <em>Echolocation</em> (2018) and Wendy Trevino's <em>Cruel Fiction</em> (2018), two recent poetry books that consider relations between the human and the nonhuman and the notions of race and borders, respectively. These works generate uncertainty as to how to relate to others and thus serve as examples of the way in which reading for affective uncertainty works in acknowledging that poems can be viewed as ordinary objects that participate in generating emotion. <br></p>