"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Monday, September 1, 2008

Poem Reading

A poem is a made object, an artifact, a thing that waits in stasis until a perceiver comes upon it and favors it with an attention of one depth or another. No two persons interpret a particular poem the same way unless they have persuaded each other that a specific view is the correct one. No/ one person interprets a particular poem in quite the same way each time that poem is encountered by that person. A person is constantly changing. A poem, unless an event has altered it, exists/ as it/ last was. One could argue for an entire lifetime about how best to read a given poem, and then/ just before dying see something new in that poem. And as to whether a poem is worthy of one's interest is also up to each perceiver. o o Writers often write about reading, and not dogmatically about it either. After all, every act of writing is exploratory. After all, every act of reading is exploratory. Whatever language is / or languages are / being explored, the serious writer is always on a learning curve as well as on a teaching curve. Three recent examples: On Alvin Feinman's "True Night" at Reginald Shepherd's Blog; When Four Tribes Go to War at Cahiers de Corey; William Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI at Lime Tree. o o I, as you should know, do not have a staunch aesthetic; and, therefore, I usually do not like to argue with someone else's aesthetic, even if I disagree with aspects of it. At times I will support a view which differs from mine. When I do, it is because I think I understand it well enough to see why it works for the person who holds it. Just because it varies from core leanings in my universe is no reason to argue against it. I'm not trying to make others into a shadow copy of me. What for? How many schools of poetic thought have there been since humans invented structured lingual sounds, sounds that codified meaning? Still, words are malleable. How words are manipulated is. One thing about new that always is true: it is different. o o So I am not going list any rules. - If you come across something that doesn't make sense, that makes you afraid it might invade, that moves you to want to change your font, then--at least for/ inspection and safety--put up a fence. - After a while, if all seems okay, you can roll up the fence, and ________________. kh00006

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