'Does a poem need a point?' rehashed yet again

[Harry R]

A fairly common reaction to poems posted here is 'well, yes, that's nice enough, and well enough written - but what's the point?'

The implication being that a poem needs to have a 'point' - some specific message. People whose poems attract this comment naturally tend to react against it. I don't think that's just wounded pride; the idea that any poem ought to be expressible as a soundbite rightly makes us uneasy.

One exercise that, I think, brings this home: try to identify what 'the point' is in a selection of famous poems.
'Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening'
'To His Coy Mistress'
'My Papa's Waltz'
'The Snowman'
'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'
'Home Thoughts from Abroad'.
There are any number of interesting things you can say about these poems, but the question 'What is the point of (insert poem title here)?' is just a ludicrous one.

Nonetheless, the original reaction (what's the point?) is one we all recognise. You read a poem, and at the end you're left unsatisfied. The poem just doesn't seem to be doing enough to justify its existence.

Here's a passage from a Charles Simic essay about Billy Collins and James Tate. The specifics of his judgement on Collins are not particularly important, but I'll quote the whole paragraph to give context to the relevant bit (in bold) -

"I want to start in a very familiar place and end up in a strange place," Collins says in that same Paris Review interview. My complaint is that he doesn't do this often enough in his selected poems. Despite all the funny and clever turns along the way, too many poems have predictable conclusions. One drawback of satire is that it has an agenda. It knows where it is going. Collins is so much in control that by the end of a poem I'm left with the feeling that I've been told everything that there is to know. Such clarity in a poet is admirable, but as Collins himself realizes, there has to be a countercurrent, a touch of ambiguity and uncertainty, as it were. Not the kind that leads nowhere and makes the reader give up on the poem in no time, but the kind that draws us back into it. What one needs is some unexpected image or twist in the point of view that makes us realize that there's more here than meets the eye. When that occurs, as in the following poem, when he seems to be surprising himself as much as he is surprising us, Collins is by any measure a very fine poet.

The lack of ‘some unexpected image or twist in the point of view’ which Simic finds in Billy Collins is, I think, the usual reason why we read a poem and are left feeling ‘what’s the point?’. We want to feel there’s more than meets the eye. If a poem is all surface, it will naturally read as superficial.

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this recently is that I’ve been thinking and reading about haiku. Something that people often say about haiku is that they are poems which try to produce a lucid snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes, often in response to the more overwrought rubbish talked about haiku and Eastern philosophy, they will say haiku are just snapshots of a moment in time. In other words, all surface. And you might think that with only seventeen syllables, there is no need to surprise the reader, or produce a twist in the point of view. But in fact, haiku use a wide variety of techniques to try and produce some kind of tension within the poem. Some are jokey; some have an implied moral; many have some kind of duality produced by contrasting images (transience/permanence, past/present, serious/earthy, foreground/distant); some suggest something about the personality or emotions of the writer; some respond to earlier haiku by other poets.

I think that what’s true of haiku – that the best ones use their apparent simplicity to suggest something broader and more complex - is true of poetry generally. It's not that the poem needs 'a point', it's that it needs some kind of complexity, suggestiveness, ambiguity, conflict or open-endedness. Some kind of unobviousness. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'deep' in the sense of a profound insight into the human condition, but it does help if it's not all surface.

***

Well, that's my thought for the day. What do you think? Am I talking out of my arse? Just stating the bleeding obvious?

Harry

[sarahkelley]

Harry,

Your thoughts for the day are longer than mine.
I don't think you're stating the obvious. It's an interesting point of view.
I've made that statment on this board. It took me awhile, and some reading, to come up with what I meant. I want a poem to make me react, even if I cringe.
If it's a horrible poem I just dismiss it as a horrible poem. I find myself asking 'what's the point' about decent poems that leave me feeling less emotion than the care label on a tee-shirt.
Then I wonder why was this written? What did the author want to share? What emotion did he hope to elicit? What's the point?
But, it's probably not the most constructive crit to be offered.

Sarah
who gets her own point
generally

[Rachel Lindley]

It may seem obvious when stated as such, but in practice it's amazing how rarely it seems to be accomplished.

I think that, particularly for neophyte writers but also for those writers who've been at it a while, even the overt layer of meaning is often lost in needless description, rendering a poem truly pointless. Not only does it not have an underlying subtext, it doesn't even have a text. Certainly the first step we often teach to beginning writers is "imagery, imagery, imagery". Be concrete. Don't talk in endless abstractions. Unfortunately, this does not help imbue a poem with a point. Every word chosen should in some way contribute to the intent of the poem. If it doesn't, it has no point being there. Remove it.

Perhaps this has something to do with some writers not making the connection as to why the use of imagery is so crucial to poetry. In order to get that underlying subtext, the double meaning or triple or quadruple, imagery allows us to say more than one thing with one word. In Robert Frost's Birches, a birch is not only a birch, it represents something else. Describing something for the sake of letting us know what it looks/smells/tastes/feels/sounds like is pointless if there's nothing else to it. The same applies to the poem as a whole, and not just the individual imagery within it. To be cliché about it, the whole needs to be greater than the sum of its parts. Not only do these individual images need to communicate more to the reader than their overt description, when amalgamated together they must all fit into some greater intent. Each one builds on the next, and each building block adds new dimension, which hopefully in the end creates a whole that, even if a reader can't verbalise what it is that they experience at the end, they recognize its existence.

Rachel

[Debisa]

A true star is depicted as having several points and usually the more points the brighter it shines.

Perhaps that is where it's said that poetry is the readers experience. The reader swings from their own point.

A successful poem provides a reader with a choice of points depending on their own wishes.

Content, meaning, imagery, form, rhythm or even just the point that the writer had a thought that he/she felt needed to be put down on paper.

That writer has produced a poem and the more points that he/she can make shine is what makes it "poetry"

Deb

[arthur_henry]

Originally posted by Debisa
A successful poem provides a reader with a choice of points depending on their own wishes.
...
That writer has produced a poem and the more points that he/she can make shine is what makes it "poetry"

Deb

I don't think that's necessarily true. There are, to be sure, succesful poems whose interpretation is ambiguous, but not all. In fact, I'd say the majority not. In most cases, I think, the writer is trying to make a point, and using poetic devices to best serve that end. Poetry is, after all, a means of communication. Take Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est". I don't think the meaning in the poem is ambiguous. Not at all. Yet I think most people would consider it a success.

Oh, and "true stars" are spherical. They generally tend not to have points, except in a kindergartner's crayon sketch of them.

[Debisa]

A true star is depicted as having several points and usually the more points the brighter it shines.

A successful poem provides a reader with a choice of points depending on their own wishes.

Content, meaning, imagery, form, rhythm or even just the point that the writer had a thought that he/she felt needed to be put down on paper.


The message is only one point and if the others are not there it will not shine.

Deb

[Rachel Lindley]

Originally posted by Debisa
That writer has produced a poem and the more points that he/she can make shine is what makes it "poetry" No, that's what makes it an unfocused mess.

Rarely does a lyrical poem work well when the writer wants to say too many things at once with it. By having the desire to communicate numerous points with one poem, a writer often ends up muddying all of them. Oh sure, there are often a variety of facets to an underlying intent, but they're all part of one whole. They connect together. If they don't, the poem is usually a disaster.

What's being discussed here, at least as I see it, is the overt meaning and the underlying subtext. One can simply take the words describing the imagery/narrative at face value and assume "that's it", or a reader can discover the drive behind that imagery, the reason the narrative is told as it is, and so on. The reader may well find a different point to the poem than the writer intended. However, if the writer can't make up their mind, or has no real point other than putting pretty words onto paper, a reader usually can't find much of anything at all, because there's nothing to find. Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place.

Rachel

[Harry R]

Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place.

I know what you mean, although I'm reluctant to say that the writer needs a 'conclusion' exactly (though it might help) - just that whatever subject the poem deals with is treated in a nuanced and complex way.

Harry

[Adam Pittman]

Good topic, Harry.

I'm inclined to think that a poem is a bit of the intellect wrapped in sensuality. A poem may have overt meaning and/or deeper meaning, but regardless of which of these it has, a successful poem always seems to create a place for the reader to go to. This place is suffused with meaning; it is hyper-meaningful and is composed entirely of concrete abstractions. If the poet (speaker) expresses a conclusion, then the poem appears to have overt meaning, a message which rises forth from all of these concrete abstractions; if the poet does not, we still may enjoy the poem greatly (in some cases, even more so), because in this case the circumstance of all of these concrete abstractions and thoughts has given to us some muted meaning, or a reason to think. We absorb that world. Frost's "Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening" is a great example of this.

Regardless of whether the poem has overt meaning or not, the author's deliberate bringing-together of images, thoughts, and sensations is what makes the poem. It's the "between Heaven and Earth" part of the mind, I guess. Sometimes I think (and I'm becoming more and more convinced of this) that technique is really only a small fraction of the decision whether or not a poem is worthwhile--I think there's a certain judgment of the author's maturity involved when we rate a poem. If we think that the author is wiser than us--or just as wise--we may well appreciate most poetry that he or she writes. He can adhere to form or veer away from it as much as he pleases--we just love the life of his mind. Think Seamus Heaney (for a contemporary), or any author that is generally considered to be great. When we sense this maturity in an author, we forgive instances of reportage in his poetry because we believe him. The author has more to do with how we judge a poem than we're willing to admit because there really isn't a meter stick by which to rate all poetry. But I think it is healthful to admit that I wouldn't like some of, say, Robert Frost's poems if I didn't know they were written by Robert Frost, and so on.

I think I just stated the obvious, too. I'm out!

Adam

[Kim]

Originally posted by Adam Pittman
I'm inclined to think that a poem is a bit of the intellect wrapped in sensuality.

Very, very, very well said, Adam.

Kim
[size=1]Can we get that intellect part put in bold,
frame it, and hang it over the door to General?[/size]

[Rachel Lindley]

I think I should state that by "conclusion" I meant "judgment", not "an end". This is tricky, as I realise many people think of a judgment made about the world around us as something oral, verbal, easily communicated to others. I disagree. I think that a great deal of how we perceive the world around us and the patterns each of us builds within our minds are quite non-verbal. In fact, that's why poetry is a great tool to communicate these things. It uses that very imagery in an attempt to communicate that which we may not easily be able to put into words. I can understand why Harry and Adam are leery about the word "conclusion" if it is seen as something more overt, more conscious and more verbal, but being a person with a bit of a mental quirk that makes it easier for me to think, not in long stretches of words, but rather in a series of sensory tidbits, I had no intention of using the word with that limited a meaning. We make judgments about everything we experience, whether we're conscious of it or not. I agree with Adam that it is the mental maturity of a writer that often drives the depth of their poetry, because they have a more complex pool from which to make those patterns. When we create a pattern from those experiences and sense a connection between them, whether or not it can be summarized in a neat little verbal synopsis doesn't change that we have made a judgment, the kind the drives poetry. Without that, a poem will often seem somewhat empty to a reader.

Rachel

[Dunc]

Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening
Moves by story-telling to a moral expressed as a capping-line.

To His Coy Mistress
Moves by story-telling around a seduction theme. Ends with a punchy line.

My Papa's Waltz
By storytelling makes a point about love of a parent. An unstrained close.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Moves by fragmented storytelling around (and reflecting) a central alienation. Has a weak ending, a sort of indecision of the poet rather than of the poem.

Home Thoughts from Abroad
The emotions of spring expressed as little scenes and rolling sonics. It’s the most static of these poems, and S2 is structurally weaker than S1 as linked-scene painting goes. S2 works more by devices - sonics still, but also personification (“my ... peartree .. leans”, “the wise thrush”), flashes (“The first fine careless rapture”) and a before-and-after contrast ending. This has easily the weakest ending of the poems in this list.

(Sorry, don’t know The Snowman.)

Just thinking out loud about structure, plot, movement and endings. Regards / Dunc

[Harry R]

Sorry, Dunc, that should have been The Snow Man - quite an important change, really - by Wallace Stevens.

[Kaltica]

One of my favourite scenes is Kurt Vonnegut's portrayal of God looking down on humankind. An archangel happens by, watches for a while and then asks:

"What's the point?"

God does a doubletake before responding:

"There has to be a point?

Insofar as writing is concerned, though, I agree with Rachel.

Great writers strive to make themselves incidental to their writing. Hence, it may be necessary to specify that the work should have a point for the reader. "Hamlet" is a great work whether it was created by Shakespeare or 100 chimpanzees. Thus, not only is it unimportant that the writer's and reader's understanding be identical, it is unimportant whether or not the writer had in mind any point whatsoever. The work stands on its merits. Yes, I want a point to be there; it just isn't important to me that the writer put it there.

This leads us to an unavoidable question: "How can one expect writers to convey a point to readers without intending one? By relying on chance?"

To this, the short answer is: "Ever read a haiku?"

It is possible that a writer can observe seemingly related noumena or phenomenon (i.e. Aristotle's "eye for semblance" applied to details rather than metaphor), record them in a poem and leave it up to the reader to sort the damned thing out. Much like life itself. This approach can work if the readers find sufficient "evidence" in the poem to support whatever conclusion they draw or, less commonly, if readers are able to tap into the writer's own sense of bewilderment. Aside from the usual aspects of technique, the skill here is largely in the writer's selection of observations--or in finding readers who are brighter than the writer. :)

All of that said, as a writer, I, personally, always have a point in mind and work to find a way to make it without stating it. Supporting incidental interpretations (i.e. ambiguity) is, for me, a secondary concern. Notwithstanding the charming successes of the hit-or-miss (e.g. haiku) approach, the easiest and most reliable way to make a point is to have one.

As a reader, though, I am moving more and more towards Adam's perspective. Poems that do not inspire wonder at a point have to provide a place. If you ain't gonna give me history, at least give me good geography.

We've all read "So what?" poems: "still life" or "photographic" pieces with titles like "Reflections on a Barnacle" or "Ode to a Carbuncle". These merely describe a setting, object or relationship from--we hope--an interesting and unique perspective. The reader's place is beside the poet, marvelling at the scene before them. If such efforts fail, readers storm off saying "It's a barnacle, ferchrissakes! Get over it!"

But--and this one may be bigger than Meatloaf's--if the poem succeeds readers will never view a barnacle the same way again.

The best example of a this genre that I have seen recently was Charles Cornners' "Staring"--literally, a poem about an old photograph. Just as we hold free verse to a higher standard than prosody (e.g. with varying degrees of tolerance for extraneous monosyllabic words, etc.), I tend to demand much better technique in such "still life" efforts. If it doesn't have lines like "before smiles were compulsory" and "sleeves roll back from his hands like geese from winter", as "Staring" did, I become Vonnegut's archangel.

In the hands of a master poet, the journey truly is the destination.

As critics, of course, we put such personal preferences aside and take what the poet throws at us: knucklers, curveballs, spitters, whatever.

"Batter up!":)

[David Mascellani]

Originally posted by Kaltica
This leads us to an unavoidable question: "How can one expect writers to convey a point to readers without intending one? By relying on chance?"

To this, the short answer is: "Ever read a haiku?"



Yes, I have. I quiet like Matsuo Munefusa's (Basho's)
haikus. I like their "simplicity" and their "fuga-no-michi"
("way of elegance") And I enjoy their mystical,
contemplative"zen" qualities. How they convey
universal themes via the use of simple natural
imagery.

I also like the fact they were written by someone
who believed that poetry can be a way life, a way
to achieve enlightement,and to "seek the authentic
vison that the masters sought."

And I like to see how they influenced the poetry
of poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
Wallace Stevens, ee cummings, Robert Frost and others.


David



scent of plum blossoms
on the misty mountain path
a big rising sun

-- Matsuo Basho



In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
-- Ezra Pound

[Rik Roots]

Thank you, Harry, for asking such a complex question!

Does a poem need a point?

Immediately, I want to ask questions:

why has this poem been written?
what is this poem trying to communicate to me?
is this poem entertaining me?

Two of these questions are focussed entirely on me, the reader. The first is a question for the writer to answer. Yet it is this first question that is (in my view) the most important, because if the writer has no purpose for the poem as it is being written then the other two questions are meaningless.

Harry R: The lack of ‘some unexpected image or twist in the point of view’ which Simic finds in Billy Collins is, I think, the usual reason why we read a poem and are left feeling ‘what’s the point?’. We want to feel there’s more than meets the eye. If a poem is all surface, it will naturally read as superficial.

[ . . . ]

I think that what’s true of haiku – that the best ones use their apparent simplicity to suggest something broader and more complex - is true of poetry generally. It's not that the poem needs 'a point', it's that it needs some kind of complexity, suggestiveness, ambiguity, conflict or open-endedness. Some kind of unobviousness. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'deep' in the sense of a profound insight into the human condition, but it does help if it's not all surface.

Using my questions on these two examples, I would have to say that for BC, the answers are clearly

[list=1] the poem has been written specifically to entertain me;
it's telling me a story; and
more often than not, yes - it entertains me.[/list]

For the haiku, the answers are very different:

[list=1] I mostly have no idea why the piece has been written, and the writer often doesn't bother to clue me in - the English language haiku form has moved far beyond the philosophies underpinning the Japanese original that I, as a reader, have no clear basis or guidance to help me approach or appreciate the haiku;
not applicable, given the answer to the previous question; and
I am rarely entertained by a haiku poem, and in fact have developed a pronounced aversion to the form.[/list]

Rachel Lindley: I think that, particularly for neophyte writers but also for those writers who've been at it a while, even the overt layer of meaning is often lost in needless description, rendering a poem truly pointless. Not only does it not have an underlying subtext, it doesn't even have a text.

I've started to classify modern poetry into three broad groups:

[list=A] poetry written entirely for the consumption of the person who writes it
exercise poetry, written to meet the requirements set by the writer, the tutor or the peer group (or even the editor)
purpose-full poetry, written to communicate an idea or point of view to an audience.[/list]

Plucking figures out of my head, I'd say over 90% of poetry posted on the internet falls in group A, with the other 9.9% sits comfortably in group B. Of all the poems I have read on the internet, perhaps 1 in 1,000 falls into group C, yet it is the group C poems I (selfishly) want to read.

arthur_henry: There are, to be sure, succesful poems whose interpretation is ambiguous, but not all. In fact, I'd say the majority not. In most cases, I think, the writer is trying to make a point, and using poetic devices to best serve that end. Poetry is, after all, a means of communication.

I agree that this should indeed be the purpose of poetry. But the craft seems to have been hijacked for other purposes sometime during the 20th century.

Rachel Lindley: The reader may well find a different point to the poem than the writer intended. However, if the writer can't make up their mind, or has no real point other than putting pretty words onto paper, a reader usually can't find much of anything at all, because there's nothing to find. Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place.

My feelings exactly!

Adam Pitman: Regardless of whether the poem has overt meaning or not, the author's deliberate bringing-together of images, thoughts, and sensations is what makes the poem. It's the "between Heaven and Earth" part of the mind, I guess.

I agree with this in part, though it seems to me that when the writer does deliberately bring together the parts to make the whole, most often that is done in order to meet the requirements of a group B poem rather than a group C poem.

Rachel Lindley: I think I should state that by "conclusion" I meant "judgment", not "an end". This is tricky, as I realise many people think of a judgment made about the world around us as something oral, verbal, easily communicated to others. I disagree. I think that a great deal of how we perceive the world around us and the patterns each of us builds within our minds are quite non-verbal. In fact, that's why poetry is a great tool to communicate these things. It uses that very imagery in an attempt to communicate that which we may not easily be able to put into words.

I agree with this, though I think it is tangential to the original question (as it deals with the process of poetrycraft rather than the purpose of the poem and the author's intent for the piece).

Kaltica: Great writers strive to make themselves incidental to their writing. Hence, it may be necessary to specify that the work should have a point for the reader. "Hamlet" is a great work whether it was created by Shakespeare or 100 chimpanzees. Thus, not only is it unimportant that the writer's and reader's understanding be identical, it is unimportant whether or not the writer had in mind any point whatsoever. The work stands on its merits. Yes, I want a point to be there; it just isn't important to me that the writer put it there.

I have to say that I completely disagree with this statement - I hope the points I've made above will help explain why.

One thing keeps on nagging at me: why do we keep on finding ourselves having to address these BIG questions? What is a poem? What place does poetry have in society? What is the point of poetry? Why is my poem not poetry? etc, etc ad-nauseum.

These are questions which were not central to poetry through much of the course of recorded history. Everyone knew the purpose of poetry, its place in society, why poets wrote poetry and what listeners/readers were supposed to get from a poem.

But this structure has disappeared. We live in a post-modern world where "everything is relative" and individuals often negotiate their own relationship with the society in which they live. I often feel like the Old Order has disintegrated, but nothing satisfactory has been developed to replace those certainties: God is personal, science is personal, rights are personal and responsibilities are someone else's problem (it's all your fault!). And art - where is art?

Ancient Greeks (I think) went through a similar phase following the rise of writing and the displacement of oral history by written history. As the old pantheon of gods became less central to people's lives, new philosophies - new ways at looking at the world - began to develop: stoicism, epicureanism, etc, etc. So it's not a new phenomenon. I'm not sure the Ancients ever came to a reasonable answer, and once monotheism spread across the globe art soon found a central niche in the new world order.

But it does lead to the question:

what are the philosophies underlying your art?
What are you trying to communicate through your poetry?
What is the point of your poems?

(Apologies if the above seems a bit cranky - I'm 3 days without a cigarette and the sodding nicotine patch keeps falling off).

[Rachel Lindley]

Originally posted by Rik Roots
I agree with this, though I think it is tangential to the original question (as it deals with the process of poetrycraft rather than the purpose of the poem and the author's intent for the piece).
Yep, it was. Unfortunately, my original choice of words precipitated it. I probably should have used "intent".

Rachel

[Kaltica]

[color=red]Rik Roots said:[/color]

I've started to classify modern poetry into three broad groups:

A. poetry written entirely for the consumption of the person who writes it

B. exercise poetry, written to meet the requirements set by the writer, the tutor or the peer group (or even the editor)

C. purpose-full poetry, written to communicate an idea or point of view to an audience.
By generalizing the audience, I think categories "B" and "C" might be combined into one: poetry being an exercise, written to meet the requirements set by the reader (be it a tutor, peer group, editor or casual reader). If it's a great work, who cares if it was a homework assignment?

As for Category A (i.e. "diary entries"), I don't consider it poetry and, after factoring in the vanity and quasi-critical sites, would, regretfully, consider the estimate of 90% to be on the low side.

I think that there may be an interesting parallel here, though:

I said:
Yes, I want a point to be there; it just isn't important to me that the writer put it there.
Rik said:
I have to say that I completely disagree with this statement - I hope the points I've made above will help explain why.
...and yet, there is agreement (by both Rik and me) with what Rachel said:

Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place.
In cases where the writer's and readers' intentions/interpretations do not coincide, my statement and Rachel's may amount to one and the same. We must also bear in mind that the reader rarely has the luxury of knowing whether or not such coincidence occurs.

Poetry may be the state of the writer but it is the province of the reader. If a writer intended Point A but wrote with sufficient ambiguity that a reader walks away with Point B, that second point was, by definition, not put there by the writer. Does it matter to the reader that there was a Point A which the reader missed? I should think not. It becomes the tree falling in the forest. What would matter, IMHO, would be if the reader were to walk away missing Point A and Point B--along with any other point. Thus we see the superiority of the "ambiguous" (i.e. multiple meanings, at least some of which might be unintended) over the vague (i.e. no clear meaning).

I'd like to thank David Mascellani for expanding on my point about haiku. Such forms are unique in that the writer--especially such a master as Matsuo Basho--is not saying "this is what the relationship between these observations is" but, rather, "I think that there may be a relationship here for us to discover".

[Rik Roots]

By generalizing the audience, I think categories "B" and "C" might be combined into one: poetry being an exercise, written to meet the requirements set by the reader (be it a tutor, peer group, editor or casual reader). If it's a great work, who cares if it was a homework assignment?

As for Category A (i.e. "diary entries"), I don't consider it poetry and, after factoring in the vanity and quasi-critical sites, would, regretfully, consider the estimate of 90% to be on the low side.

You miss the (possibly incoherent) point I was trying to make: an assignment is an assignment. My on-the-spot-made-up category C poem would not be written as an assignment.

In cases where the writer's and readers' intentions/interpretations do not coincide, my statement and Rachel's may amount to one and the same. We must also bear in mind that the reader rarely has the luxury of knowing whether or not such coincidence occurs.

Kaltica wrote: Yes, I want a point to be there; it just isn't important to me that the writer put it there.

Rachel wrote: Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place

Can someone check my reading comprehension, please? The above two statements seem to be saying completely opposite things to me.

Poetry may be the state of the writer but it is the province of the reader. If a writer intended Point A but wrote with sufficient ambiguity that a reader walks away with Point B, that second point was, by definition, not put there by the writer. Does it matter to the reader that there was a Point A which the reader missed? I should think not. It becomes the tree falling in the forest.

I would argue that it matters very much to the writer that the reader is missing point A. If 10% of readers miss point A but the rest get it, then that is tolerable. If 70% of readers are missing point A, then the poem has failed in its mission and the writer needs to reconsider the piece.

What would matter, IMHO, would be if the reader were to walk away missing Point A and Point B--along with any other point. Thus we see the superiority of the "ambiguous" (i.e. multiple meanings, at least some of which might be unintended) over the vague (i.e. no clear meaning).

When a person reads a poem, they do not read the words in a vacuous state of mind. The reader will bring a whole wagonfull of preconceptions, assumptions, prior knowledge and chemically induced emotions to the reading, and filter the poem through them. That is the reason why people react differently to the same words on the page (or screen). It is what makes us human.

See, anyone can write a computer program and get the monitor to light up with a cheerful "Hello World!" message. Programming computers to react in this way is a simple case of getting the words and symbols in the right order. Fortunately (in my view) humans cannot be so easily programmed. And yet it is the writer's job to program humans: to take the vast majority of their readers from an ocean of varying initial states towards a particular insight, emotion, political view - towards a similar conclusion. It is (to forgive my French) a fucking difficult thing to do!

A poem without a point is incapable of even starting its readers on that journey, because there is no journey to undertake. A poem with a point will at least attempt that journey, and thus be worth 20 minutes of my valuable time.

(Apologies, but you've caught me on a difficult day)

[bushleaguer]

In regards to Billy Collins -

I read an interview he did (I'll try to find it on the web if I can) and in it he commented on how he saw the subject matter of his poetry as haiku in nature. I don't remember exactly what he said, but the gist was that he often likes to write about the immediate moment and (hopefully) at the end of the poem a small nugget of insight emerges.

I didn't care much for his last collection "Nine Horses." I thought The Art of Drowning and Picnic, Lightning were far more accomplished. Nine Horses, for me, was a bit too accessible.

[david rutkowski]

I have a couple of thoughts on the topic.

It's difficult to imagine anybody writing "nonsense". Try it. Try to string words together in a completely random fashion. It's very difficult, if not impossible. Word association tests do indeed reveal mood, world views, etc.

Poetry can be a pure art form, as opposed to crafts and commercial art. "Pretty sounds" can be likened to music. What do sounds mean? What does a Chopin etude mean? There is no requirement for meaning in other pure art forms. Rather, the interplay of elements creates a realm which defines its own meaning. To imagine that poetry is essay of a more artistic sort is a wonderful idea, but certainly not the only idea.

Most, if not all, good poetry leaves room for the reader. If a poem has only one interpretation, it'd better be rich in imagery and sonics to get my vote. To take a reader to a point, then say, "now you are on your own", that seems to be what poetry can do which is its
a) bane
b) toolset.
c) all of the above and then some

[Kaltica]

[color=red]Rik wrote:[/color]
Kaltica wrote: Yes, I want a point to be there; it just isn't important to me that the writer put it there.

Rachel wrote: Whether or not a reader reaches the same conclusion as a writer is far less important than whether a writer had a conclusion in the first place

Can someone check my reading comprehension, please? The above two statements seem to be saying completely opposite things to me.

Okay, let me try a different tack.

Who decides that a poem has a point/conclusion?

Certainly we have all seen novice poet-philosophers offer up cryptic poems in which they think that they have spelled out the meaning of life and the universe. Invariably, what they offer is abstract, clichéd and utterly pointless.

Why "utterly pointless"? In short, because readers found it so. If what we say has no meaning to an audience then it has no pertinent, useful meaning whatsoever. This is why we often catch the listener, not the speaker, saying: "You have a point there..."

Thus, it is the reader who decides whether or not a poem/poet had (not intended, but had) a point or a conclusion in the first place. Rachel, you and I agree that the reader should find some point/conclusion in the work. What is not important is whether the conclusion drawn by the readers is identical to that drawn/intended by the writer.

This leads us inexorably to your second point, Rik:

I would argue that it matters very much to the writer that the reader is missing point A. If 10% of readers miss point A but the rest get it, then that is tolerable. If 70% of readers are missing point A, then the poem has failed in its mission and the writer needs to reconsider the piece.

On this, we definitely do not agree. Please forgive the humble anecdotal argument which follows.

I recently wrote a poem (http://www.firesides.net/poetry.htm#Arms) and posted it to another forum. One reader contacted me with an interpretation which was miles off from what I'd intended. True, my first reaction was: "Did he read the same poem that I wrote?" We aren't talking about Point B versus Point A here; his slant was more like Point Z from Outer Space. I read with growing fascination his interpretation and the evidence from the lines of my poem that he used to substantiate it. In the end, I was forced to concede that the poem that he read was much, much better than the one that I wrote. Nor was this an isolated instance. Other reviews came in with similarly astounding but plausible interpretations. None were even close to the pedestrian Point A that I had intended. A fluke? I don't think so. I had received similar reactions from a previous work (http://www.firesides.net/poetry.htm#Queen). Both were, for the most part, charitably received, but the interpretations were all over the map.

Was I even remotely distressed by these "misinterpretations"?

Nope. I was flattered and grateful that they had taken the time to read, interpret and respond.

Do I feel that I owe it to these readers to "correct" their interpretations?

Not a chance. Who am I to say theirs isn't more "correct" than mine?

Do I feel even slightly guilty that the modicum of success that these poems had with readers/critics derived more from their imagination than mine?

Not for a nanosecond.

Do I consider these two poems a failure because they didn't convey the exact, prosaic point that I had intended?

Hell, no. Once released from my clumsy hands the poems seemed to express stories of their own making.

If every reader walks away from our writing with the exact same conclusion that we intend we should be in politics, not poetry. As David Rutkowski points out, at the very least, it wouldn't leave much for our readers to ponder or discuss.

Best regards,

Colin