Saturday, February 6, 2010
Blog #10
Poems take on different personalities depending not only who writes them, but who reads them. It truly is in the eye of the beholder. One poem that we read this week was mine. My poem focused on two different relationships and how they compare and contrast to one another. The class generally saw it as one relationship or rather, the decline of a relationship. It was a comparative between two very different relationships.
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I totally agree. I've always said that what really matters is OTHER people's opinions, not our own, and I believe that 100%. If I insist that the poem I wrote is about X, but everyone else reads it as being about Y, then guess what? It's about Y.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, the point is, you can really learn from that, ya know? If everyone is perceiving a poem in a certain way, there's a reason for it. Use it as constructive criticism and make your poem that much stronger.
It's really funny how the reader spends so much time obsessing over the "true" or "correct" meaning of a piece. I find that reading poetry can have the same effect as the class exercise when we passed the sheet around and added our own words. The person who writes a piece may have a clear image in mind. The reader projects its own experiences into the words as it reads. Then, the reader tells how s/he derived at a specific meaning, and the rest of the readers incorporate that meaning into their own. Your poem was the same way. I now know your intent and it builds upon my interpretation as well as others'.
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