The Poem is Not the Poet (1 Viewer)

If you read a poem by John Ashbery, does it tell you anything about the poet? Maybe a little, but very little. If you read 50 poems by John Ashbery, do you know any more about the poet? A little more, but only a little. If you read all of John Ashbery’s poems you might begin to form a picture of the man, but you would hardly know him. If you spent a day talking to John Ashbery in person, would it help you understand his poetry any better? Probably not. But if you read a hundred of his poems, you would probably grasp the poems better than if you talked to the poet for weeks.

On the other hand, no one but John Ashbery could write these poems. They are his voice, his poems, but they are not him and he is not them. The poems exits outside him and he outside them.

As much as a poem is an expression of the poet’s inner world, creative mind, experiences and prejudices, it is also an exploration of the outer world; part projection and part inquiry. As soon as the poem is read or heard by another person, it becomes his or her as well, on some level. The act of art does not happen until the expression is received or observed. And in this way the poem-as-object becomes the agent of shared experience, and thus, it belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. One could argue that a poem has more in common with an ocean or with light than it does with the individual who wrote it, even though it is a product of that individual’s voice. The poem simply IS.

How do we know that we know things? It seems fairly straight forward if we consider “empirical facts” and “productive thought.” But the more we break these concepts down and look at their various interactions, the more fuzzy it gets and the less solid the idea of knowledge is, until it finally becomes clear that we don’t really know anything, we just make a bunch of assumptions based on association. If we apply this revelation to art and poetry then it seems that poets are really conduits who channel ideas, impressions, archetypes rather than produce them. These stimuli (for lack of a better word) do not come from within us, rather they are OUT THERE somewhere, floating around in some kind of common consciousness. We grab them and shape them somehow. None of it is even ours to begin with and it’s hardly WHO WE ARE.

 

Absolutely.

One of my favourite poets is AE Housman, whose Shropshire Lad and Last Poems I have read through and dipped into a thousand times, so I now have a feel of Shropshire, the melancholy of young love, the celebration of Queen Victoria - and that ‘feel’ is most likely different from what Housman was feeling when he wrote the poems. I know nothing of Housman’s actual personality or career as one of the foremost classical scholars of his time. And that knowledge, interesting as it might be, is completely irrelevant to my appreciation of the imagined persona that Housman projects in his poems.

 

I too, love Housman.

 

Honestly as a reader, I am interested in the piece itself, not the person from whence it came. Is an author's insight interesting? Definitely, but like reading first person perspective fiction, the focus on the author or their motivations can be one of the fastest ways I lose interest. I love to read, but people, their motives...sadly hold little interest for me.

Art for the sake of art. Akin to things like belief can soon lose its allure if we pick it apart piece by piece.

We know how and why fireflies are able to glow. What is also known is that different species of fireflies will mimic the courting patterns of other species in order to lure them in to devour them. Fireflies cannibalize other fireflies. Great way to really defuse the nostalgia and mystique of something.

In any creative discipline there is a certain amount of theatre (presentation, atmosphere) that is imbued in the work. Poetry it can be imagery, cadence, or word play...what have you. And that sense of theatre comes from the hands of the piece's creator.

As readers we get the merest glimpse into a writer's mind, but the process is not ours to dissect, nor should it be. A work stands or falls on its own merit. The fourth wall holds. This is what many people forget.

An author does or says something that offends someone, that someone then jumps on social media and says, boycott this author because they said this...Thusly, their work is all about this. It is its own form of censorship because an individual was offended by the author, not anything they had written. It is on par with trying to ban a book because you don't agree with its message.

The poem is not the poet and the poet is not the poem. The art will always carry the fingerprints of its origins, but neither is defined by the other.

 

Interesting. I recently referenced John Ashbery on here.

 

If you read a poem by John Ashbery, does it tell you anything about the poet? Maybe a little, but very little. If you read 50 poems by John Ashbery, do you know any more about the poet? A little more, but only a little. If you read all of John Ashbery’s poems you might begin to form a picture of the man, but you would hardly know him. If you spent a day talking to John Ashbery in person, would it help you understand his poetry any better? Probably not. But if you read a hundred of his poems, you would probably grasp the poems better than if you talked to the poet for weeks.

On the other hand, no one but John Ashbery could write these poems. They are his voice, his poems, but they are not him and he is not them. The poems exits outside him and he outside them.

As much as a poem is an expression of the poet’s inner world, creative mind, experiences and prejudices, it is also an exploration of the outer world; part projection and part inquiry. As soon as the poem is read or heard by another person, it becomes his or her as well, on some level. The act of art does not happen until the expression is received or observed. And in this way the poem-as-object becomes the agent of shared experience, and thus, it belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. One could argue that a poem has more in common with an ocean or with light than it does with the individual who wrote it, even though it is a product of that individual’s voice. The poem simply IS.

How do we know that we know things? It seems fairly straight forward if we consider “empirical facts” and “productive thought.” But the more we break these concepts down and look at their various interactions, the more fuzzy it gets and the less solid the idea of knowledge is, until it finally becomes clear that we don’t really know anything, we just make a bunch of assumptions based on association. If we apply this revelation to art and poetry then it seems that poets are really conduits who channel ideas, impressions, archetypes rather than produce them. These stimuli (for lack of a better word) do not come from within us, rather they are OUT THERE somewhere, floating around in some kind of common consciousness. We grab them and shape them somehow. None of it is even ours to begin with and it’s hardly WHO WE ARE.

We are all different, right? To some people cilantro tastes like soap. My enjoyment of poetry comes from trying to understand the poet and seeing if I bond with them or disagree, feeling less alone because of the ones I bond with and grateful because of them. I’m trying to see what they see— precisely because I know there is a real person behind the poem. Even if what they are writing is a flight of fancy, I want to see if I “come along” with them and if there is a connection between us.

I get no joy from thinking the poem is now mine, interpreted by me. I hear other people say that’s neat to them, feeling like it’s their own now, I can’t really believe that or it’s not what I’m interested in. I don’t think how I relate to poems and poets could be called unhealthy projecting— this is how my mirror neurons work in sympathy. I didn’t write it and I’m glad an individual did. I experience joy when trying to understand the other and seeing if I think we jive or not in real life and in poetry. Since neuroscience shows us how different we all are… heck half of people have language in their brain going on all the time and half not. We are all different and that is actually the fascinating part. That’s the part that I love…discovering how else someone might see things. There is no need to convert or be converted here. There is no way I could teach someone whose genetics say cilantro tastes like soap that it is yummy. We can all enjoy and understand poetry exactly the way we each do.

 

Absolutely.

One of my favourite poets is AE Housman, whose Shropshire Lad and Last Poems I have read through and dipped into a thousand times, so I now have a feel of Shropshire, the melancholy of young love, the celebration of Queen Victoria - and that ‘feel’ is most likely different from what Housman was feeling when he wrote the poems. I know nothing of Housman’s actual personality or career as one of the foremost classical scholars of his time. And that knowledge, interesting as it might be, is completely irrelevant to my appreciation of the imagined persona that Housman projects in his poems.

I like Houseman because my parents did and they took turns reading his poems aloud to us. If I remember correctly he rhymed….and I don’t necessarily like rhyme but he did it well and I get nostalgic recalling those days when my mother played the organ softly….I hated it then, while my dad read Houseman poems. When my parents were up in years I told him how I remembered those days and he thought for a moment and asked mother if she would play something. It was then he introduced me to one of my favorite poems to this day….it was “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence. I encourage you all to read it ….it’s one of the best free verse poems ever written IMO.

 

Speaking of poets not being the poems and vice versa, I had a strong feeling I knew DH Lawrence after that and have read all his books. That poem which is in quatrains takes me inward and outward through the universe, to the moon and stars and back home again when I sat at my parents feet while they both read poetry and often my mother played that old organ which I hated back then.

 

If you read a poem by John Ashbery, does it tell you anything about the poet? Maybe a little, but very little. If you read 50 poems by John Ashbery, do you know any more about the poet? A little more, but only a little. If you read all of John Ashbery’s poems you might begin to form a picture of the man, but you would hardly know him. If you spent a day talking to John Ashbery in person, would it help you understand his poetry any better? Probably not. But if you read a hundred of his poems, you would probably grasp the poems better than if you talked to the poet for weeks.

On the other hand, no one but John Ashbery could write these poems. They are his voice, his poems, but they are not him and he is not them. The poems exits outside him and he outside them.

As much as a poem is an expression of the poet’s inner world, creative mind, experiences and prejudices, it is also an exploration of the outer world; part projection and part inquiry. As soon as the poem is read or heard by another person, it becomes his or her as well, on some level. The act of art does not happen until the expression is received or observed. And in this way the poem-as-object becomes the agent of shared experience, and thus, it belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. One could argue that a poem has more in common with an ocean or with light than it does with the individual who wrote it, even though it is a product of that individual’s voice. The poem simply IS.

How do we know that we know things? It seems fairly straight forward if we consider “empirical facts” and “productive thought.” But the more we break these concepts down and look at their various interactions, the more fuzzy it gets and the less solid the idea of knowledge is, until it finally becomes clear that we don’t really know anything, we just make a bunch of assumptions based on association. If we apply this revelation to art and poetry then it seems that poets are really conduits who channel ideas, impressions, archetypes rather than produce them. These stimuli (for lack of a better word) do not come from within us, rather they are OUT THERE somewhere, floating around in some kind of common consciousness. We grab them and shape them somehow. None of it is even ours to begin with and it’s hardly WHO WE ARE.

Tim I like Ashbury too. Probably my favorite of his is “Grand Gallop”. And because he said
“The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.” Maybe I better check that out but I am fairly certain he was the one or at least one of ones who said that…..He, Tim Murphy and many others I’m sure.

 

I'll look that one up.

 

The extra L in the title is due to auto correct but I didn’t change it because I didn’t remember for sure. I just checked.

 

one thinks of Sylvia Plath and without reading about the poet her work is whatever you want it to be.....

 

good point.

 

For me, poetry ought to be the word of gods (not God); poetry should speak to us in ineffable terms, creating mood, elation, rapture, whispers and tears, if that's what it is.

Hence, I liked only a handful of poems in my life really and truly; one is Richard Tillinghast's "Table", the other is a Hungarian poem, "Valse Triste" by Sandor Weores. The third is "To Hope", by vitez Mihaly Csokonay, and of course the extremely complex "Ode to the Magyar Language" by the genius of Gyorgy Faludi. One poet whose works I always enjoy is Keats, and another is our own Louanne Learning whose poetry I love... she is delightful, she is born for it, she has the knack, the talent to pursue this artform, not like me, who struggles with it.

And I side with those here, who consider the poem more important that the writer of it for purely our sake of interest. True, you can't learn the one from the other (poet and poetry), but then again, to me it's not important to do that.

 

When reading Houseman are you aware that he was a homosexual, do you care, does it alter your take on his poetry? How many people reading the Georges Eliot and Sand knew that they were women? Having now discovered that Larkin was a right wing racist and serial philanderer have you thrown away his poetry in disgust; some will have, others will forgive his personal failings in the light of the quality of his poetry. Was "Leni" Riefenstahl a brilliant cinamatographer producing incredible films of the times, or a rabid Nazi; she said one thing, others another - As films they have a terrible beauty, but can we judge her for that alone? My tutor at Birkbeck was of the opinion that sometimes you could psychoanalyse a poet by reading their poetry.

I was questioned about my visits to Tuscany after reading a couple of the poems I wrote about that particular region of Italy - The nearest I had been to that picturesque area was flying from Malta to Cyprus in 1954 when I was 9 years old. Sometimes a poems is just the result of the poet's imagination and bears no psychological/social interpretation...

 

I think it is best not to psychoanalyze the poet. It just puts them into standardized categories that someone has made up in order to assert their own view of the world. In the same sense, it's also best not to analyze the poems, for it does the same thing -- putting them into somewhat arbitrary categories' because we are obsessed with the content or the meaning. But the form of the poem is just as relevant and maybe more so.