[a spin-off from Metrical Poetry:My Secret Kept Alive]
Carol Taylor - "In my opinion, if practiced readers can't find the meaning in a poem, (and by the meaning I mean the one the writer is trying to put across)" ... then the writer is writing for himself ...
bear_music - is it required that every poem make clear what it is "about"? In the particular instance, I specifically did not want to do that.
Porridgeface - I think you should announce it to the reader with some sort of preface that: "This poem has no specific meaning."
Call me old-fashioned, but I always have problems with the idea that the poet's intentions should be a factor in the reader's appreciation of a piece. Who knows what a person really intended? And if a poet writes what they think is a sad poem but everyone else thinks is a superbly funny one, then the poem (but perhaps not the poet) is a success.
I think poetry can embody many types of "meaning" (from
the type of meaning an essay has to the type of "meaning" a melody has) and not all the types sit well with the idea of intention.
The idea of a poem needing a central meaning troubles me too. Maybe "Voice" or Word's Outliner are to blame. I often like pieces without a centre ("The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" - Glyn Pursglove)
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