Learn to Read Wildly

“Wild reading…critiques the status quo because it disrupts schooled reading’s conventions, its socialization. One’s approach to reading…defines how one engages the larger social apparatus.”
—Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity

Writing and reading go hand-in-hand. The language writing movement hailed the deconstruction of syntax as a way of creating less authoritarian, and by default, less capitalist works. However, unlike the Russian Formalists, whose theories were in part meant to re-enchant the world around them, the focus of the language writers was largely on writing and, in effect, producing texts. It is ironic that a movement so critical of the commodification of conventional writing and the singular meanings it was intended to yield, should itself be focused almost entirely on the production of poetic products. The language writers didn’t do away with commodities. They complicated them. Although language writing provided a vast array of decentered and syntactically challenged texts, the movement on the whole came up short in providing radical ways of reading texts that didn’t already adhere to its polemic. With the exception of Bruce Andrews’ call for “wild reading,” very little had been presented in the way of novel reading techniques where a reader may approach even the most conventional texts in a radical and antiauthoritarian way.

This was and remains most unfortunate. To come to the conclusion that disjunctive texts, more so than linear ones, lend themselves to egalitarian and diverse interpretations is, I believe, not giving the reader enough credit. At the very least it is not taking into consideration the ways in which readers have been taught to approach writing, and how this approach affects the way they comprehend it. Nor is it offering solutions on how to reimagine this trend.

To wildly read any text is to make immediate the experience of meaning-making. It is to see every word with feral perception, each one pulsating with possibility. While many of us interact with even our most unmediated experiences as if scrolling through our Instagram feed, wild reading teaches us how to experience the world as if it was actually happening before our eyes.

To read wildly is to begin with the assumption that what you have in front of you, be it a piece of writing or a painting, is not a thing, per se, but an opportunity. It is a juncture, an interactive experience. The text is not only something to read, but a box to open, a plant to water, a prism to look through. It is a mirror, a hammer, a microscope. It is an opportunity to get weird. To read wildly might involve reading a text from back to front, or appreciating a painting only if turned on its side. To read wildly is to see life as poetically “terrorized,” to take a note from Hakim Bey’s now infamous work TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Wild reading requires a willingness from the participant to free the signs and symbols in front of them from interpretations handed down. To read wildly is to participate in the lineage of anarcho-mystics and crazy wisdom teachers who regularly challenged the dictums of those who came before them. By reading wildly, sacred texts become not only prophetic, but prophecy itself. 🌴