Hi, everybody--
A colleague of mine who teaches contemporary poetry has shared with me a few interesting questions that he asks his students to respond to at the end of every semester. I thought I'd post one of them here, because it raises some interesting issues:

"Below are two opposing statements about poetry that reflect views commonly held by readers, critics and practicing poets. Where do you stand on this issue? Choose one statement (no compromising!) and write a few sentences defending it."

a. A poem means whatever a reader perceives it to mean. All readers' interpetations are equally valid.

b. A poem means what its author intended it to mean. The best interpretations come closest to that.

Any thoughts on how you might respond to this? (I have a few myself, but I'll save 'em for later.)

Marilyn

I choose c.

A is unacceptable, because of "whatever" in the first sentence and because not all interpretations are equally persuasive.

B is unacceptable because, even assuming we could ever know what an author meant to say, authors are quite often idiots about their own works. Not to say that authorial intention is irrelevant, IMHO, but it should not constitute a straitjacket either.

C runs something like: the meaning of a poem is constructed anew with each new reading -- the efficacy of any one interpretation of a poem is a product of its power to convince other readers that the interpretation does justice to the text.

epigone

[This message has been edited by epigone (edited April 10, 2006).]

I think this is one of those what is the meaning of life (or poetry) questions that have no real answer, but if I had to choose under penalty of death I would go with (b), with a few caveats. Ditch the second sentence. I don't agree with that. And I wonder whether a case could be made that the very best poetry often has multiple meanings on multiple levels - but they have been carefully and intelligently placed there by the writer.

(a) is not always invalid - I am sure some responders will cite some marvelous poetry which fits into that category - but, unfortunately, it is all too often the refuge of poor and lazy poets, the justification of choice for hacks and beginners, the excuse for instant poetry, the reason cited for not working at our craft. I think it is a particularly dangerous mind set for students, because it serves (and we have sometimes seen this on the Sphere) as the Universal Rationale for all of the above.

Michael

Marilyn, what a great topic!

I think the question is framed as it is so that students can construct a brief essay in a reasonable time, not because A or B is correct. But it's more dangerous to say "only the author is right" than to say "the reader is always right." Here's why I think so.

Time and change affect words. An ancient law of Bologna that forbids the spilling of blood in the streets may have been talking about duels but ends up potentially applying to emergency surgery.

Poetry is not exempt from this sort of change. Take "Golden lads and girls all must/As chimney sweepers, come to dust." For modern people, "golden" may well evoke suntanning. The fact that the author would have thought tan skin ugly does not alter the reaction of modern readers. We could tell them they're all wrong in disagreeing with the author. But why do so, when they're making the reading richer?

I'd better stop here. I could run on dangerously!

Maryann

I also go with "none of the above."

For those of you who are tempted to disagree with me and go with "b", remember that I intended my answer to be correct, so it must be.

42.

I get a. from my students all the time. They often use it to justify not bothering to look up the meanings of the words or think about what meanings might have been different when the poem was written, or even to consider that their interpretation includes contradictions that don't make sense. With b. you at least have a partly correct answer--the author was probably aware of one or more intended meaning when he or she wrote the poem. We can't read the author's mind, but there are often clues in the poem that thoughtful people can follow to make reasonable guesses about what those meanings were. However, I think that poets use their unconscious minds when writing poems, too, so there are more meanings in poems than the poets themselves may be aware of.

Susan

I think also neither.

The poem has to stand on its own, regardless of what the author intended. All the intention in the world means nothing (except to a certain degree at formative stages, as in during critique/workshop) without execution.

The first choice is indeed the refuge of beginning readers and of poets who have been taught to be suspicious of craft. It's the old raw-versus-cooked thing. I do think that many good poets working in free verse simply don't have extensive craft training; they're sort of schooled to follow their instincts without the benefit of any systematic, detailed study beyond the image, metaphor, simile, and osmosis by reading. I've found this to be the case within MFA programs, community writing groups, and just the larger free verse/surrealist/slam cliques of poets-at-large.

In each of these places, much misinformation and many old prejudices based on shallow reading and hearsay is handed down as gospel truth. Now, this is completely different than saying "all free verse is bad," which simply is not the case. However, the myth that a received form is a strait jacket lives, and with a militancy that belies a certain insecurity on the part of poets who preach it.

The disagreement seems to be not over what makes a poem "good," which is a pretty elusive and somewhat (though not entirely) relative aesthetic question. It seems to be over the means by which people of two different aesthetics can come to some agreement about *how* to evaluate any given poem.

Robin




[This message has been edited by Robin-Kemp (edited April 10, 2006).]

a. A poem means whatever a reader perceives it to mean. All readers' interpetations are equally valid.

Define "valid." I've found some interpretations to my works that I feel are crack-based, but so long as readers and editors enjoy my work enough to buy it, I don't much care how they decide to interpret it.

There are some things you can write for people to read in to anyway. In those cases, all interpretations are valid because what you're selling is a pretty ink blot.

b. A poem means what its author intended it to mean. The best interpretations come closest to that.

Well, if you're an extremely uptight high school English teacher, this is very true, but it's generally only any good for the surface interpretation, not any symbolic interpretations, many of which the author may have meant as well but you're not going to be able to divine all of them unless you take a chance on being wrong.

You're also skipping over the possibility that the author put in some interesting subtext without even realizing it, or even a literary allusion. In one of my published short stories, the witch's cat is named Mehitabel. Savvy readers complimented me on the allusion to Don Marquis's "Archie and Mehitabel" and I said, "Thank you" and then went and looked it up, getting a copy, and finally talking to my father who had read the book and had likely made some comment about "Mehitabel the cat" when I was very young and this name lodged in the back of my mind until such time as I wanted an entertaining name for a witch's familiar that wasn't "Pyewacket" or "Grimalkin."

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited April 11, 2006).]

Thanks, Kevin! I had just got to the end where I was going to say that many times even the poet doesn't know all of what's in a poem, when I got to your post.

The whole point about writing poetry - well, okay, part of it - is that you're channeling your unconscious. I think, really, time and again in these kinds of discussions, the external terms of reference just seem at odds with the creative process. You an't notice every effect you use in a really good poem. Some of it just has to happen.

More generally, I think a poem, a good, successful one, is like a piece of fabric. It's a made thing. It has its own shape, it has become an object in its own right. You can fold it, bend it, see through it if you hold it up to the light, but it is still what it is. What this means for interpretation of poems is that you can see what the author intended - it's 3' square, it has red and purple flowers - but you can still identify other things with it - your umbrella when you were a kid had similar flowers, or you know this kind of pattern was popular in the sixties, or you're familiar with the designer's other products, or whatever. One person will be sensitive to the three shades of green in the foliage, another will notice the contrast with the brown background. One will think red & purple clash, another won't, a third will say it clashes ironically. One will love its translucence, another will think it looks cheap. Of course fabric doesn't usually have subtext, but you get my drift. I think a well-made poem will still be in its own shape once a reader's done with it. Part of education is learning what to do with it & what will shrink it.

KEB

YES, yes yes yes yes! That's the missing point--that there is a plowing of the unconscious (or sometimes just a scratching of its surface). I do come down on the side of learning craft so that it can be absorbed into the subconscious, much the way that compost is absorbed into a good garden-bed, rather than continually drawing from the same tired soil. Whether cultivated roses or wild self-seeding perennials pop up is the gardener's purview. But guests (readers) generally don't come in and rip out the plant at the roots without permission (workshop). People can look, touch, smell all they like (read) and talk about whether they do or don't like what they find (review).

So whatever side that forces me to choose, fine...

Robin, subconsciously gardening in April

[This message has been edited by Robin-Kemp (edited April 11, 2006).]

I look at the question from a historical perspective. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the word "unconscious," denoting an absence of free will, was not common prior to the late 19th century when Freudian psychology made its claim to be a legitimate scientific discipline. If that is the case, isn't Marilyn's original question similar to the question about the sound of the tree falling in the forest? If the idea of an unconscious did not exist, doesn't that indicate that few readers considered that there might be an meaning the author did not intend? Can we say that such a meaning existed if there was no one there to encode it?

Lance Levens

Lance, they called it the Muse.

KEB

While Lance is using historical perspective to support the view that the author's conscious purpose should control, I would argue that it can also be used in the other direction, at least in some periods of history. My argument is from D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer.

For educated medieval readers the prevailing model of interpretation was interpretation of Scripture, a complicated matter with many levels, and one that certainly did not limit itself to the literal or "original" meaning of a text.

For example, a medieval interpreter would have no trouble looking at a verse of the Song of Songs--"Thy teeth are as sheep coming up from the washing"--and declaring that the teeth represent the doctors of the church, whose teachings tear away error. The idea of sticking to the intentions of a single human author was just not big in medieval people's thinking.

Now, the students who usually answer the original question probably wouldn't know that argument, but I think we're allowed to take it into account.

In short, the idea of what a text means can and does change, even if authors do not like that fact.

Maryann

C. A poem means whatever *I* think it means.

The question really hinges on the definitions of two tricky terms here: "means" and "a poem" By the common sense definitions of these words, it's B.

"Means" implies an intent. We do not (except idly) ask what the wind or water means, because we do not expect their motions to have intent (except perhaps in a religious sense). The question then becomes who drives that intent: the writer or the reader?

The common sense definition of a poem is that it's text or words or whatever. Under this definition, a poem can exist without a reader, but it cannot exist without a writer. Therefore the intent of the poem must be the writer's, not the reader's.

If you change that verb to any relatively synonymous word -- expresses, conveys, suggests, denotes, signifies, represents -- then the answer might change. At the least, "signifies" and "represents" more easily lend themselves to A than "means" does. In reality, of course, a poem does all these things: it means, expresses, conveys, suggests, denotes, signifies, represents, implies, stands for, transmits, communicates etc, and each of those modes of being takes place in a subtly different register.

42 is also an excellent answer.
-Dan

[This message has been edited by Daniel Pereira (edited April 12, 2006).]

Reply to Maryann and Katy

Ladies, I'm not very good at this type of writing, but I think this is an important question, even though our even raising the issue's moot. In the academy, if I may be so presumptuous as to paraphrase: anything's a text; a text means anything.

The world view that fuels the open ended attitude implied by the statement above has affected every other humanistic discipline so the dispute over what does a poem mean echoes the dispute over what does The Book of Genesis mean and what does the Constitution mean. Please don't misconstrue what I'm saying. Humpty Dumpty has had his great fall and the shattered pieces of a core set of values lie all around us. We can't put Humpty back together again; but any attempt to figure a poem out that answers Marilyn's part A will have to grapple with all that rotting egg.


Best

Lance

[This message has been edited by Lance Levens (edited April 13, 2006).]

Dan writes: Thank you, Dan! I was hoping someone would notice.

KEB

I've always thought a good poem allows the reader leeway to interpret meaning according to his or her experience - allowing them to 'read between the lines'.

I've always enjoyed a critter putting meaning to what I've written, even when it doesn't match what I had in mind when I wrote it. If it made them think, or made them feel, I accomplished what I intended.

Sometimes, if experiences are similar enough, they get my intent - and that's grand, also.

IMO, if we direct the reader's thought too narrowly, explain everything, we're invading the realm of prose.

Just my opinion...

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited April 14, 2006).]

Choosing either A or B would raise a question: if that is the case, what do we need critics for?

In a fine poem, "meaning" is a nebulous thing. One could always take John Ciardi's tack and ask a more fruitful question: How does a poem mean? Then the emphasis becomes one of appreciation -- for the craft of the work, the form, imagery, the economy, the flow, the diction, the tone, the word choices, etc.

The fact that poems don't easily convey clear-cut meaning is the reason why newcomers to poetry often find it bewildering. "But what does it mean, what does it mean" the student begs to know. A nice way to get them thinking differently is to have them compare a poem such as "If" which states its meaning outright -- these are the things that make you a man, my son! -- and something more subtle like "The Road Less Travelled."

However, let me look at the opposing statements again.

A poem means whatever a reader perceives it to mean. All readers' interpetations are equally valid." Well, "interpretation" is a nice word and not necessarily hinged to clear-cut meaning. I daresay that The Road Less Travelled [Late edit: I meant Stopping by Woods, of course, as noted by Golias, below; brain death imminent!]invites different interpretations, some that would concentrate on the speaker's worldly obligations, others that would read more of a "world weariness" into the phrase "miles to go." The woods could be interpreted as a temptation to shun one set of responsibilites for another, or as the unconscious, or as death. Many interpretations are valid but not all. No doubt the teachers among us have listened to many a harebrained interpretation.

A poem means what its author intended it to mean. The best interpretations come closest to that. That's probably true, isn't it? A fine chef selects prime ingredients, prepares them artfully, blends flavors surprisingly and invents a savory new dish. If it's a complex cassoulet then it's not a cheesecake. We access the bubbling unconscious as we write but we also make choices as we write (and rewrite and rewrite). We know what we've wrought and if we've done our job well, careful readers will get the idea. Still, "meaning" in this context is still a nebulous thing! Or elastic, anyway.

I'm a firm believer that subliminal messages are common in poetry. An example from my own experience is a study I did of Douglas Dunn's work, where I had the advantage of being able to contact the author himself. In reply to my observations about his work, Douglas Dunn replied:

'Perhaps I'll have to think it possible that as I wrote the poems I was programmed unconsciously to replicate the numerological patterns you've revealed. There are too many of them not to.'

And later:

'I find this whole business disturbingly eerie. It means that either I was 'inspired' in a way I find it hard to believe, or, even harder to believe accursed. By inspired I mean Valéry's definition: "There was and remains the mystery of inspiration, which is the name given to the spontaneous way speech or ideas are formed in a man and appear to him to be marvels that, of and by himself, he feels incapable of forming. He has, then, been aided." Paul Valéry: An Anthology, ed. J.R. Lawler (London, 1977), p. 166'

Thus my answer (in defiance of the strictures) is a combination of a.& b.:

A poem means whatever a reader perceives it to mean AS LONG AS its author can be persuaded to concur with this interpretation.

In the case of dead poets then of course the author will have to have a stand-in. Likewise with reticent/absent living authors. So a more practical defintion would be:

A poem means whatever a reader perceives it to mean AS LONG AS its author is likely to be persuaded to concur with this interpretation.

Duncan

[This message has been edited by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin (edited April 18, 2006).]

Okay, so I didn't read all of the replies, but I read enough to see that most people commented that they believed A was invalid to prevent students from just whatevering it. Whatever. I think that's wrong.

Last year, I had to interpret a poem without the use of resources (besides dictionary). It was a Billy Collins poem about clouds. I thought the moving clouds represented the passing of childhood. I spent a lot of time deciphering the poem to come to this conclusion. Anyway, I presented the poem - it making perfect sense to me - and my teacher said, "couldn't it be about reading? scanning the countryside/words, the clouds represent eyes." I thought he was wrong and I still think he is wrong. He might have just said that to test my confidence, but my question is, would it even matter what it represented? I liked the poem in the way that I interpretted it.

I understand why teachers don't want students to interpret a poem anywhichway, but at the same time, I feel like my childhood interpretation was just as valid as the reading one. If a reader really likes a certain interpretation, why diminish the enjoyment by changing the poem's meaning? I think I understood the poem more than my teacher, but regardless, A is perfectly acceptable.

Feel free to tell me how ignorant I am. My thinking could be just, you know, whatever.

Those who speak up on this board are much more likely to be teachers (or former teachers, or teacher wannabes) than traditional students, so Orwn's perspective can be a useful kick in the pants.

In cases of teacher-student duels over interpretation, the student is always at a disadvantage, and that never feels good. The teacher has power, has more knowledge of the other literature that might be speaking to the poem at hand, and has more practice in talking and thinking about literature right off the top of the head. To get past that, and to come out even in a debate like this, the student *really* has to have all his ducks in a row.

Another thing about such a discussion is that it's the teacher's job to get the student to explore additional possibilities. Since it can be tough, and take time, to twist your head around to an alternate view of a poem, the student who has just had a new view dumped on him can feel very off balance.

Does this directly answer the question on this thread? Well, no. But since so many of us have refused to answer it exactly as asked, I think we're agreeing that the question is rigged.

An alternate question might be: Can an interpretation be absolutely wrong, indefensible? What makes it so?

Hello, everybody--

I find this discussion of my colleague's question absolutely fascinating, and very insightful. I'll just take the liberty of reminding you that its first manifestation was as a final exam question for his students (before I stole it from him for posting this forum)-- and I'm sure he was more concerned with eliciting a thoughtful response than a "right" answer.

Even so, I was ready to lean in the direction of "author intent"-- until I remembered that a published poem of mine once elicited a few responses having to do with its "military imagery"-- which I hadn't intended at all, and hadn't a clue was in there. But were these readers wrong? I guess not. And I also recall reading a Freudian interpretation of Kinnell's "First Song"-- a poem I'd always thought was about young farm boys playing cornstalk violins. Hah. According to that critic, I had missed the point by a country mile.

I guess all I can say is that I agree-- this seems to be one of those questions to which there is no right answer. Annoying, but unavoidable, I guess.

Marilyn

Orwn's case is an interesting one. If Orwn's understanding of Marilyn's "choice a" is "A poem means to a particular reader whatever that reader perceives it to mean," it is hard to disagree. Orwn came up with a reading that satisfied her (him -- sorry, I don't know which you are) and did not find the teacher's interpretation compelling. The poem does not mean for Orwn what it meant to the teacher -- and we can't know which meaning Billy Collins would prefer. We could ask him, but he is a puckish fellow. I would not expect him to give a straight answer, and the answer would also be subject to interpreation.

But notice that Orwn is not endorsing a general rule that we have to accept all interpretations as equally valid: of the teacher's interpretation, Orwn says,

I thought he was wrong and I still think he is wrong.

I would be intersted to hear what others in the class thought. In law, we have a rule that a document should be interpreted so as to give effect to each provision and so as to render no provision superfluous (or as lawyer's like to say -- and mispronounce -- "mere surplusage"). The same principle should apply to the intpretation of poetry. If the poet is skillful, there ought to be no words that are there without a purpose and no words that add nothing new to the poem. When faced with a competing interpretation, one is forced to push one's own. Does it really account for the entire poem, or only certain images?

A thematic interpretation ("it's about childhood," e.g.) need not account for the entire poem, of course, as poems are often (and should be) about more than one thing. But one should be able to relate that theme to the rest of the poem so as to at least have an account of how the poem is supposed to work as a whole.

epigone

To be honest, I'm not sure if Orwn is a boy or girl's name, but I am a boy and Orwn Acra is my real last name jumbled up.

Anyway, I am not one to usually disagree with my teachers, as most of them know more than me. Unfortunatly, not every teacher comes of as intelligent and this was the case.

Epigone, you asked what my classmates thought of the same poem. I don't know because each person was assigned a different poem. An interesting note: my teacher actually apologized to me after class for challenging my interpretation, which I thought was kind of odd. Maybe he brought up the whole other interpretation to test my confidence. I don't know.

For me, poetry is more about the sound than the meaning.

Robert Meyer

Oh, B!

b. A poem means what its author intended it to mean. The best interpretations come closest to that.

That is a true statement, assuming a competent writer and a poem that says what the writer intended it to say. Whether the poem actually says what it attempts to say is another story. If a writer can't handle the language in which he's writing, his poem's literal meaning may be the very last thing he intended. But that doesn't make an incoherent poet a genius in disguise, or his poem a gift that came to him in unknown tongues.

Sure, a poet puts in all kinds of things he doesn't know he's putting in because he isn't aware of the personal associations his readers will bring to the table. And if he's not very introspective, his subconscious mind may be trying to trick him into revealing something he hasn't faced up to yet. Often we don't realize how a poem is going to end when we begin it. But we know when we get there, or we ought to, and if we keep it, then it's what we intend.

When people interpret a poem in a way that's independent of the intended meaning, assuming the writer is capable of putting his meaning across, they are rewriting the poem in their own heads. They should write their own.

Carol

Did Sophocles intend for his play, "Oedipus the King," to mean what we think it means? Did he intend to enact what Freud called the "Oedipal desire" to kill the father and sleep with the mother so that the audience could experience catharsis by witnessing the realization of an unconscious shared deisre and then work through the attendant feelings of guilt in a therapeutic way?

We cannot know and therefore probably should not care (about Sophocles' or any other author's intentions, I would argue). However, I suspect that, since the Greeks were not privy to Freud's theory of the unconscious, Sophocles did not intend for the play to have that meaning and would be outraged if he heard it espoused.

Does that mean that the Freudian reading of Oedipus is wrong?

epigone

[This message has been edited by epigone (edited April 22, 2006).]

This debate is not limited to the realm of poetry. Constitutional scholars debate this all the time.

Sorry, my browser magically posted for me before I'm ready.

Marcia

[This message has been edited by Marcia Karp (edited April 25, 2006).]

Kate wrote:
__________________________________________________ ___
The Road Less Travelled invites different interpretations, some that would concentrate on the speaker's worldly obligations, others that would read more of a "world weariness" into the phrase "miles to go." The woods could be interpreted as a temptation to shun one set of responsibilites for another, or as the unconscious, or as death.
__________________________________________________ __

How's that again? Stopping by Woods on The Road Not Taken on a Snowy Evening?

G.

[This message has been edited by Golias (edited April 25, 2006).]

I agree with Carol. It’s more than meaning — you hope to work an effect — but meaning is surely part of it.

If you really think the author’s intentions are irrelevant, why would you post work on these boards for feedback? If it isn’t to find out how far you’re succeeding in your intentions, why do it?

And why would you comment on the poems of others, in terms of this or that “coming across” or whether the semicolons are in the right places, if communication of what’s in the author’s mind is so off the point?

Marilyn,
I reject (a.) absolutely. I have often heard it and have always thought "baloney" or words to that effect.

(b.) is also fallible. I am not one who thinks that a poem means what it says. That's where the unconscious enters the process. Writing depends as much on the unconscious as on the conscious. Each individual has different life-shaping experiences and we can't know whether we mean the same thing when we use words. The clues are more in the shape of the poem.
As a trained musician it was always my earnest endeavour to enter the mind of a composer but I knew it was ultimately impossible. I would have considered it cheap and unworthy of any interpreter not to attempt to be faithful to the composer's intentions. Every performance is different but they all start at that point. The same goes for poetry. For me the greatest joy is to feel an affinity with a poet from another era and location. To sense that we shared some timeless experience. Of course the differences will be enormous but I believe the loss is the reader's if no attempt is made to bridge the gulf.

Contemporay poetry is no less difficult. The reward is an occasional meeting of minds. And even more remarkable in poetry from any era, the gift of a new experience.
Janet

Can't we reject "B" without going so far as to say that the author's intentions are irrelevant? How about something like, the author's intentions (insofar as we can discern them) are important but not controlling. As Daniel Haar has already suggested, this is how most legal scholars treat constitutional interpretation.

Imagine that someone created a computer program that could generate sonnets. The programmer made it so that the computer understood iambic pentameter and permissible substitutions and also understood how to construct English sentences. The computer then generated millions of sonnets, most of which were not very interesting, but one of which was a word-for-word reproduction of one of Shakespeare's. Would you interpret the computer's sonnet differently from the Shakespeare sonnet or would you treat them as identical? Would the question of the computer's intentions enter into the matter at all?

epigone

As I was reading Michael Cantor's response I was nodding, thinking of all the times I've heard people defend their work in workshops by placing all the responsibility for a poem's worth in the hands of readers. I swear there are people who would post the ingredients list from the side of a box of cake mix and spit on anyone who didn't appreciate its brilliance.

BUT...I agree with Orwn. An argument that's mostly right can be twisted around and used for any purpose, just like Scripture. So just because some people would use the "everyone's entitled to his own interpretion" view to rationalize laziness, that doesn't mean it's not essentially true. I've seen poets in TDE behave as if we were all playing a guessing game and whoever came closest to the author's intent was "correct." Pshaw! The poem is everything you put in it, not just what you meant to.

BUT...everyone's interpretation equally valid? Er, that's kind of like saying there are no dumb questions. Everyone says it, but then when you ask a dumb question they still sigh. I think everyONE is equally entitled to his own interpretation, but not every interpretation is itself equally valid. It's possible for an interpretation to be just...well, dumb.

Arrgh, last again. Will somebody please post something? I hate having my name in the index.

Otay. So--what was the answer?

R.

Well, Robin, after some very thoughtful and insightful discussion, I think Rose's last response pretty well sums up the conclusions most of us have come to (or have held to begin with) on this topic, i.e. that ". . .everyone is entitled to his/her own interpretation, but not every interpretation is itself equally valid. It's possible for an interpretation to be just, well, dumb."

I'm pretty satisfied with this summing-up. Not everyone will be, though, because that's the nature of the beast-- I mean, the FORUM. Which is as it should be, yes? Unanimity is not what we're seeking, after all . . .

Marilyn