As considered in the ‘poetry and theory’ think pieces, poetry has traditionally had a strong relationship with speaking, expression and even performance. These material contexts are considered in the other ‘think pieces’ here on oral culture, but for generations now, at least in terms of study, we have been very likely to encounter it in written form. Poetry, then, is a key feature of print culture and, therefore, our attitudes towards it have been significantly shaped by the history of ‘the book’. By ‘book’, I mean any physical manifestation of text – from early versions in manuscript (often handwritten), through to appearances in newspapers and magazines, formally published editions, later editions worked on by teams of scholars, through to digital versions ranging from the ‘online book’, which replicates the print edition on screen, to ‘hypertext’ editions that capitalise on web 2.0 technology that allows for reader interaction, through to social media platforms such as Twitter. Poetry may be encountered in any or all of these versions – indeed, the same poem might appear across all of them. In which case, what effect does the medium have on how we derive poetic meaning? For a full introduction to the history of print development and cultures of reading, see the introductions to book history by David Finkelstein and Andrew McCleery listed in the references. ‘Bibliographic studies’ is the academic field that studies books as physical and cultural artefacts, and has sophisticated disciplinary methods of analysing and recording this kind of information. 

It becomes clear that the material formatting of the page has a significant effect – the layout might either highlight or obscure features such as rhyme, meter, or formal arrangement. The space on the page around the poem might be capacious, suggesting an isolated encounter, that the poem is self-evident; or it might be teaming with information, footnotes, headnotes, explanations. The typeface might be easy to read, or unfamiliar (or difficult to decipher, if it is handwritten). The quality of the paper has an effect – a poem printed on rough paper has a different kind of presence from one printed on a high-grade, bleached, smooth surface; it is different again to read it on a screen. Illustrations, and cover art and design, are key components that also shape a poem’s potential meanings. These are paratextual features – features of the page that are more than just the written text as such. Pioneeringly theorised by Gérard Genette in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), they are key to how we encounter a text, how its meanings are made. 

Beyond these features there is also the question of versions – different iterations of a poem’s life (in manuscript, in print, in reprint) might prompt authors to make changes, some slight, some significant (Wordsworth is known for revisiting his poems throughout his life, with variations occurring across several publications of the ‘same poem’). These changes might even be made by other hands – editors working on a manuscript have to make careful decisions when deciphering handwriting, for example, or they may choose one printed version over another. An editor might work creatively with the author themselves to make changes, moving closer to a collaborative work. An editor might choose to include an introductory essay of their own – and thereby direct readers to particular elements of a text and shape their interpretation powerfully. Poetry’s relationship with the marketplace is of vital importance here too, of course – special editions, often illustrated, or produced with rare materials for the cover and endpapers are a commercial as much as a literary product, as are ‘pocket editions’, or anthologies that address a particular audience (poems for children, poems for celebrations, poems for meditation, poems for grief). Each individual poem within such collections necessarily forms a relationship with its fellow poems between the covers – reading Wordsworth’s poem in an anthology of ‘nature poetry’ will have a different feel from reading it in an anthology of ‘Romantic poetry’. Within academic publishing, these decisions are scrutinised in great detail: the editorial judgements made about how to present a text on the page, which version(s) to use, if and how to present supplementary explanatory notes, and how to indicate editorial uncertainties, are crucial to how that edition will be received by the academic community and the uses to which it might be put. The variorum edition might be the most elaborate of these forms: an edition that brings together all available versions of a text side-by-side, so that a reader can assess a poem’s complex, changing development.

But the life of the book goes on beyond the moment of printing or production – it then becomes exchanged for money, it becomes owned. It might enter a private collection, or a library. It might be read collectively by students in a classroom, it might be a precious edition, rarely taken down from the shelf. If it is a first edition, and the owner suspects this author might become well known, it may remain pristine in order to increase in monetary value. Before pages were automatically trimmed during production, a reader might even have needed to individually cut open the pages of a sewn book with a knife, a process requiring care and patience (and deferring gratification). Books that have remained ‘uncut’ have a peculiar quality – the words remain within, untouched sometimes for decades, full of folded promise. Once owned, books might also be treated quite differently by different hands. Annotations, underlining, crossings out, dog-ears, book marks and marginalia in individual books, together with larger scale library records, publishers’ accounts, bestseller lists, and archives of ephemeral versions (leaflets, posters, chapbooks, magazines, newspapers) are marks of a vital reading history, and key evidence of how a poem might have gained and lost – and gain and lose and gain in ongoing ways – cultural significance across lengths of time. It is difficult to look past signs of previous readers when you read a second-hand or library copy of a poem; those traces ‘chip in’ to one’s reading experience too. Entire studies have been made of what has influenced a poet simply through reading the scribblings in their library of volumes (this is part of why libraries are interested in acquiring a prominent writers’ collection). 

The history of reading habits, especially as evidenced by material remains, is a growing, vibrant field, enabled by contemporary material advances in digital technology, which is facilitating both the archiving of this otherwise perishable history through photographic images and the increasing availability of it to a worldwide community of readers and scholars through online databases. Indeed, rather than necessarily dematerializing our reading experiences, the internet can host initiatives that take us back to the tactile, shaping feel of books (including poems), such as the brilliant ‘My Bookcase’ [https://mybookcase.org], founded by artist and architect Cristina Garriga.

Such projects alert us to the life of poems as material objects, and remind us that poetry is generically especially open to the possibilities of advances and developments in material culture, given its longstanding emphasis on word arrangement and visual presentation. This is considered under the ‘concrete poetry’ section of The Poetry Toolkit’s print copy, and in the think piece on ‘Public Poetry’, but is being advanced and disrupted by the practices of groups such as iam [http://www.informationasmaterial.org] and UbuWeb [http://www.ubu.com]. These initiatives foster poetic practices that specifically draw on material or print culture – ‘found poetry’, for example, makes poetry by taking phrases from various sources (public signposting, say) and reframing them so that they become ‘poems’. A poet might take individual lines from a range of already existing poems and then line them up together to form a new ‘cento’ (meaning ‘patchwork garment’) poem. ‘Cut up’ techniques separate a poem’s words out for rearrangement in different ways, obscure certain words, or use paper folding to generate different directions of reading. These creative practices ask questions about publication and authority as they select and restage existing materials in generative, unsettling ways, forcing audiences to recognise how material conditions shape and determine meaning. This can only advance with digital platforms for poetry, especially in so far as the internet allows readers to interact with the versions of poetry they read. Sarah Kersh’s edition of Sight and Song (1893), a collection by late-nineteenth century poets, Michael Field (The Poems of Michael Field [https://michaelfield.dickinson.edu]), for example, allows readers to choose whether or not to view editorial apparatus, and places the poems alongside reproductions of the paintings that originally ekphrastically inspired them. Robert P. Fletcher, meanwhile, uses the same Michael Field volume to meditate on the possibility of ‘augmented reality’ in the editorial production of literary texts, an advance that he is developing into an app that can generate significant supplementary material through user interaction. The social media apps Twitter and Instagram – with their character number restriction and visual platform respectively – are hosts to thriving communities of poets energetically responding to these new reading/viewing experiences. 

With equal energy and perception, writers such as Kevin Mount delve back into the history of the material constituents of the page – paper made from linen rags, ink ‘as an ancient, volatile petroleum’ (p. 13) – to feel for the extraordinary presences that pulse in the never-neutral medium of the page. Johanna Drucker’s innovative Graphesis (2014) advances our theoretical understanding of how we process these kinds of visual forms, which, as I’ve tried to suggest here, have always been (and will only be more so with time) a key critical aspect of reading poetry. To read a poem is to ‘read’ a material object and that materiality is crucial in a poem’s varied, ongoing meaning making. For these reasons, when we ‘read’ a poem, we are reading more than words: as Mandy Bloomfield writes, the physical aspects of texts must be noticed since they ‘function as ways of indicating possibility---the possibility of reading history ‘otherwise’---for contradictions, fractures, and silences that render alternative potentials tangible, although not articulate’ (p. 56). Especially if you are writing about a poem, the particular version you encounter will shape your reading; it always deserves to be acknowledged.