[Marilyn Taylor]

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

[epigone]

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).]

[Michael Cantor]

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

[Maryann Corbett]

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

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

42.

[Susan McLean]

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

[Robin-Kemp]

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).]

[Clay Stockton]

Choose one statement (no compromising!)

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

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).]