CMM_Kaleido

How important is it that the reader understand the poet's meaning? Is there a degree of understanding that's more acceptable? I am wary of interpreting poems when I review because I don't want to offend if I am way off base. I personally find the appreciation of a poem can move beyond the original subject of the piece to an experience belonging only to the reader.

As I understand it poetry serves the purpose of describing and illuminating areas of the human condition that are difficult to access--by evoking emotion by triggering senses, such as sight, smell, taste, and hearing. As such the reader's experiences will play a large part in interpretation. Is any emotional/gut reaction on the part of the reader enough?

I would love to hear other opinions and points of view on this topic.

Ilasir Maroa

Meaning is very important. Most people would probably consider someone "getting" the poem more important than the feelings alone. But Mirror, for instance, has a lot of poems where I find it hard to express what I got out of the piece in words. Feelings are definitely a bonus, and there's nothing wrong with a reader getting the feeling of the poem as opposed to the meaning.

The best way to get at a tough meaning is just to ask questions. It'd be kind of hard to discuss the usefulness of the elements if you don't get the overall.

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PrisonerOfPrey

I think that if the reader gets the essence of your poem, no matter how they expand on it, the poem was a success. And some poetry is very to the point and it's only purpose is to stir emotions. I'd like to bring up Robert Frost for a moment here,
His poem, err...I should know this..."Two Paths in A Yellow Wood"? No...but i'm sure you know what i'm talking about. Every year for the last 4, at least one teacher has dragged that poem out and had us interpret it. I always thought it would be awesome if Frost had been inspired to write that after a nice walk in a park. If it wasn't his meaning whatsoever, the reader has come up with their own meaning. Who is to say it's wrong, who is to say his poem failed.

I know, that was a bit of a dramatic example. Ok...I think this has turned into a rant/tangent so I'll end it here.

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dannyboy

I liked how Kirsch puts it

there are poets who are courteous and those who are discourteous

so to a couteous poet the audience should get the mean, and they therefore, make decisons based on the audience understanding exactly what they mean - even if the audience has to do home work to get there.

a discourteous poet couldn't give a fig if the audiences gets 'the meaning' rather they hope the words/images etc cause a fluctuation (for want of a better word) in the audience's being.

CMM_Kaleido

Good point, Ilasir.


Thanks for the explanation of those terms, dannyboy.

So are discourteous poets frowned upon? The label holds less than favorable connotations. A discourteous poet sounds similar to an abstract painter. I would much rather be called abstract than discourteous. To me, discourteous implies that having a decipherable meaning is deemed the more worthy goal.

Pete_C

It was some bloke with a beard and a robe who worshipped dogs who once said: "We interpret nonsense as without sense, but it can also be beyond sense".

Meaning is important, BUT only if it is necessary. Take music. If I write piece of music inspired by a train journey, and you listen to it and imagine a midget dancing, does it make it a bad piece of music? If I paint an abstract vision of anger, and you get sex (no, not literally - but if you do get sex you should pay me twice as much for the picture), does that make it a bad picture?

Now, if I paint a horse, and you see a cow, that means I am not good at painting horses. If I play a waltz and you think it's Heavy Metal, I can't play a waltz.

Meaning, if necessary, MUST be conveyed accurately. If it is not necessary, then who cares? It's not necessary!

Just because the written word is predominantly used to convey meaning, it doesn't always have to do it. In fact, meaning is sometimes the great taboo. People look at modern art, or listen to experimental music, or see aural writing, and ask: "What does it mean?"

However, if a poem is meant to have meaning and the meaning is not accurately translated to the reader, then I BELIEVE* that the poet has failed.

*I have stated this before, and will happily argue the point, but if turns to bitching I shan't bother.

RonPrice

Anyone who has actually read my poetry deserves a prize for having come as far as casting their eyes upon my work. If it is any comfort, you persistent few have got through more than half of the conceptual space where my identity and meaning meet around three themes: my life, my society and my religion. If you have read many of my poems, I hope you have have gained some pleasure in the read and I am happy for you if you have. Indeed, my very raison d’etre for this autobiography can be found in the pleasure and the understandings you have found thusfar.

De te fabula narratur -this is your/my story--at least in part and an important part, or so I like to think. I like to think that those entering into the world of my memoirs or autobiography, my poetry or prose can see here some images of a literary life that has meaning for them. The images I have offered, though, were not planned in a sequence, a tidy narrative line from cradle to grave, so to speak; but on the best of anarchist principles—that is with no planning, somewhat like the way Michael Ondaatje writes his novels-with no sense of what is going to happen next. It just growed!-Ron Price
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I’m not sure how much of a psychological necessity it was for me to seek relief by setting down my story in prose-poetry. This work was no opiate, as Alexander Herzon’s autobiography was to him, “against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers.” I was far from lonely and was surrounded by students and Baha’is who were far from “uninterested strangers.” Like this greatest of Russian autobiographers, though, much time was needed for the events in my life to settle into “a perspicuous thought,” a thought I could convey in both a meaningful and written form. Like Herzen, too, some of my thoughts were uncomfortable and melancholy, but in writing I was able to reconcile them, after several unsatisfactory attempts, with my rational faculty. Art--and for me the art of writing--is an outward integration inspired by a degree of inner disintegration. It is more than a little coincidental that my first published articles in the press and my first collected poems in my own files and occasionally in magazines came in the first years after lithium had stabilized by bipolar life; and an even greater literary enthusiasm and success came when luvox, sodium valproate and venlafaxine were in my bloodstream.

After years of trying to find the language to write and talk about the serious, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the ability came with increasing degrees of effectiveness and with more and more pleasure. Some seem to have this ability virtually at birth; with me it was a slowly acquired art and, partly for that reason, a much appreciated one. There were times when I felt this ability dried up and deserted me. This was especially the case in the nearly twenty years when this autobiography was in its first edition(1984-2003); in some of the courses I took by external studies my capacity to write what a supervisor wanted simply seemed beyond my ability(1978 to 198; when yet another magazine declined to accept a poem or an article I had spent what seemed a lifetime composing(1979 to 1999); when I tried to write a novel, a sci-fi fantasy or a long quasi-historical-philosophical piece(1983-2005). But by the time I had completely left the world of full-time, part-time and volunteer/casual work—by degrees in the years 1999 to 2005—I knew where my abilities could be found and tapped and there I would stay, as far as the eye could see. At the age of sixty, in the earliest year of my late adulthood(60-61), I had finally found and was able to distinguish between the places of literary fertility and the places where only dry dog-biscuits existed.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography, an autobiography with several formal principles underpinning it, one principle of which is the necessity for digressions, parentheses, with wanderings from the point. To this multidisciplinary work I have added a medley of variegated products from a poetic inclination, an inclination that has led to a certain prolixity. Some may see this work as just another word for creative disorder.

Readers will find in my work and here in this epilogue some thoughts on letter writing, on history, poetry and essays--some of the genres I have used in this work. What I want to find here, and what I pray for daily, are evidences of “spirits possessed of such power” that they can can act as a leavening force on the arts and sciences as expressed in my life and specifically my writing. “All the worlds which the Almighty hath created can benefit through them,” Baha’u’llah says. Herzen said that he could hear spirits knocking beneath his lines, not literally of course, but metaphorically.

These spirits inspired Herzen’s autobiography and so too did his view that, as he put it, “every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating ... he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification ...”

This leavening spirit that Baha’u’llah refers to, then, I like to think has helped me replace the endless flow of people through my life, people and employment tasks, community engagements and family responsibilities with literary opportunities. Formerly the motivating, leavening forces turned my life toward other activities demanding most of my time. In the process the fiery tests which, in retrospect, I now see as phases in a life process, a life process that I am now, it seems, only beginning to understand. My life I now see as resolving itself into a series of crises of varying intensity and severity. Although devastating at the time, they released a divine power quite mysteriously; further calamities were engendered along the way with liberal effusions of grace enabling me to win even greater victories in the service of this Cause. I have been carried in this age of transition through my own transition further and further on a path of service and that service is now found primarily in my writing.....enough for now....Posted for Writers Forum this 13th day of April 2008.-Ron Price

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I am a Canadian who has been living in Australia for 36 years. I am married to a Tasmanian and have been for 33 years after 8 years in a first marriage. We have three children aged 40, 35 and 28(in 2006). I am retired and at 64 spend most of my time writing. I have been a Baha'i for 50 years.

ShabookiSkittles

Meaning, while important, certainly isn't essential. If you can write a good looking piece of obscure poetry with no meaning, people will probably find one anyways. The reason meaning can really, really give you something great is when you have an inspiration for your poem, you are now feeling the very emotions you want to evoke which makes it easier for you to reproduce those feelings on paper. (or laptop?) Happy literaturication! (Post time 4:20 PM Kaliedo?) Found hidden meaning, lol

lin

Not much. The degree of its importance comes at the expense of the poetics.

Note the famous quote from Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica"... a poem should not mean, but be." (Of course that final little telegram fights against his treatise)

The current trend is toward meaning without poetry...essentially just essays and rants with the lines broken up.

Poetry does not work on ordinary language, but on metaphor and image.

You can see the universe in a cup of water, fine... but does that really mean anything?

The hilarious thing is that poems by young people (who by definition don't know shit about deeper meanings of the world) tend to be fraught with meaning and philosophy and How Things Are, while mature poets (who might have gotten a glimpse of the meaning of things in their longer lives) often create genuine poetics without "messages".

Another way to get at this might be to try to imagine a passage of words without meaning. (The lyrics of songs by America or Culture Club is a good start: if you can find any meaning in "Horse With No Name" or "Karma Chameleon" or "Ventura Highway" check yourself in)

Now imagine a poem that means something but has no metaphor, no language, not imagry, no sound, no beauty.

It's pretty obvious which is more important. "Meaningfulness" is the cheap easy route...and ironically seldom leads to anything meaningful.

Flaky Floont: What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?
Mr. Natural: Don't mean shit.

World Scientists: What is the meaning of live, the universe and everything?
Supreme Computer: 42

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