The Providential Reader

What we hold in our hands

Miraculously the right poem, book, film, creation, can seem to find us.

In these hyperlinks, I’ve previously recounted my own experience of unwrapping The Complete Works of William Blake one fateful Christmas morning as a young teen, an encounter that struck me with the force of a religious conversion.

And so it happens that I’ve been reading the excellent book, Ben Mazer and The New Romanticism by Thomas Graves, which looks at one of our greatest living American poets; during my reading, an old interview of Mazer by the poet Robert Archambeau flashed into my awareness, which I was happy to see could be found online.

In that interview Mazer recalls his first meeting, as a sixteen-year-old playing hooky, with the work of Arthur Rimbaud:

Among poets, Rimbaud was my first true hero. I thought that I possessed an immense secret about an entirely unknown figure. Through me, I felt, this person was living again. Ah, the providential reader!

…

I think that the core of the thing, when you get right down to it, is that, aside from writing sheerly for his or her self, a loved one, a poet friend, or truth or God (however fictional the poet's means), the poet is really writing for the providential reader, that strange young person of the far distant future, who, with immensely empathic consciousness, will stumble across the stuff and say to himself, "This person is me."

While there are one or two items I’d quibble with in the above, I think if you’re reading this there’s a fair chance you’ve had a similar experience and get it.

Now, if you would, ask yourself: have I ever had an experience like this while reading something on the internet?