A Quote by John Barton
The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
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I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.
Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.
I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.
This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.
I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
I want to be a reflection of what's going on and let people draw their own conclusions.
Imagination should give wings to our thoughts but we always need decisive experimental proof, and when the moment comes to draw conclusions and to interpret the gathered observations, imagination must be checked and documented by the factual results of the experiment.
I let people draw their own conclusions about my similarities to Dale Sr.
My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions.
Reading a poem is a real thing, a worthy thing. So to be there right with the reader at that moment is part of the effect of a title like "Poem for" something or other. Matt Rohrer does this a lot in his titles, and I think I might have gotten some of the idea to do this, or at least been reminded of how it can work, from his recent amazing books.
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