![]() Somehow this made no sense to me whatsoever. All I can experience is my own mind deciphering the words on the page and constructing ideas from their raw materials.'' ![]() ``I can't know the author's thoughts even if I wanted to. ``I don't need the author,'' he proclaimed. We stood in his backyard as he put the finishing touches of redwood stain on his deck. The other day I was arguing about this lack of context with a friend who is an English professor. The reader is the creator, the meaning-maker, as he or she works through the poem. The author's intention, style, and overall vision are brushed aside. The primary relationship is between the reader and the text. But today, Deconstructionism, the dominant critical stance, makes the whole realm of the author a superfluity, mere afterthought. ![]() Its method demanded: Do not consider the author, neither his or her biography nor any previous writings focus only on what the poet has achieved in this particular piece, the universe of this single page. When I was in college, New Criticism was the reigning literary theory it erected a barrier between the poet and the poem. Which is why I am so puzzled by some of the contemporary critical notions about poetry. Poetry shifts the context of our words, and the context enables us to play the game of language at a very different level. It has been intensified, molded into shape, expanded into something musical or reduced to a bare essence surprisingly elegant and charged. The poet's language is our language - only more so. The same language that we use one minute to describe breakfast, the weather, or the cranky transmission in the station wagon can suddenly be pressed into service to convey the experience of a new home, the death of a grandmother, the birth of a son. The most exquisite or emotionally wrenching verse is constructed from the commonplace stuff of language: words, images, rhythms, tones, silences. This is what is so remarkable to me about poetry: same words, different context - new meaning. Did you catch the weather this morning? Better turn back toward home. The word rain might curl up from my voice embodying the question: Is it going to rain? The clouds from the east are dark and scudding quickly. You accept my hand and we confirm the pleasure the afternoon has brought us. Now, with just a hint of tentativeness, hand might serve as a request or the offering of a gift. Ah yes, you see it too! We see it together, holding the moment between us. If the context were not the grammar of a line but the being of a shared experience, our minds would read a different world into each of these syllables.īird might dart from my mouth with its own invisible exclamation point, meaning: There! Do you see it? The heron gliding from the reeds, drifting along the far shore, its wavering reflection ghosting beneath it across the pond's dark surface. ![]() How different the experience of these words would be if they were spoken aloud as we stood someplace together - let's say during a walk in the country. We are waiting for the fine detail, for the verbs to set these things in motion, the adjectives to shade in the mood and offer us the wholeness of a sentence. But the pictures are vague, two-dimensional, and we don't yet know what to feel about them. Each word calls up an image in the mind, like illustrations torn from a storybook, floating aimlessly. ![]()
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