This way of reading, Rubin concludes, is not so much a postmodern departure as a persistent return to how American readers have tended to approach poetry. Though the texts remained, the meaning for the reader might have changed - or, put another way, the reader might have given new meaning to a familiar text. Many of the poems readers submitted were works they had first encountered in a school setting, and they were texts to which the readers had returned throughout their lives. In the coda to her wonderful study, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Harvard, 2007) Joan Shelley Rubin considers what the responses to Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem Project” suggest about how poetry is (still) useful and meaningful for Americans today.
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