But What Does It MEAN?
A poem should not mean
But be. AM
I am a poet. I write poetry. Occasionally other things (as here), but mostly poetry.
The question I am most often asked is: what does it mean? I always answer the same way. I don’t know, I say. I just write it down.
I am not being coy. I really do just write it down. Which is not to say I write it down without thought and effort. Thought and effort make poetry, but they are not its ingredients.
I think of my head as an infinite slow cooker. For 45 years I have read and studied poetry, in more than one language. Pieces of what I have read and thought have continuously gone into that pot. There they simmer and stew. They are the ingredients of my poems. When the time is right, in some manner I can’t define, they pop out in lines that, once ordered by thought and effort, I write down, and are poems.
My poems run an anarchic gamut from traditional verse to surreal tumults of words. In many cases, I honestly don’t know what they mean, at least not in either the factual or the Platonic sense.
I tend to think poems don’t really mean anything until they encounter a reader. I write; the reader reads. Whatever meaning there is is created by that encounter. If the poem leaves the reader cold, to him or her it means nothing. This doesn’t bother me because I know that another reader might have that same encounter and think the poem is the greatest thing since Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Consciousness varies.
So the point of this mini-essay is: if you read a poem and don’t connect with it on any intellectual or emotional level, it just isn’t the poem for you. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Probably doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the poem. You just didn’t have an encounter of a close enough kind. Read on. You will.
And I will keep adding to my crock pot. When something leaps out, I’ll write it down. I’ll call it a poem, and if you ask me what it means, I’ll still tell you I don’t know.
Ambiguity keeps the world fresh.
