- Sep 2023
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www.poetryfoundation.org www.poetryfoundation.org
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I want my poems to exist independently of me, to be new objects in the world, like paintings or sculptures, not expressions of myself or my intentions. Obviously my self, my feelings, my thoughts, and, yes, my intentions are part of the material that makes up those objects. But if the poem is successful, they are just that: artistic material
.I wonder if this is the goal for all authors,
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spoken by a dog, he is not misreading the author's intention but misreading the actual words of the actual poem. Again, this is a question of the text, not of the author.
This statement brings up what Professor Machado said on the first day of class, that other people can see different things in passages and that we should always find evidence to support our thoughts. It's okay to see different things. My favorite part about literature is that it is up for interpretation. There is no definite answer.
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I’m sure every writer has had the experience, sometimes frustrating, often exhilarating, of the work taking off in a completely different direction than that which he or she “intended.”
This is incredibly frustrating at least for me. It is also interesting to see what comes out of it though.
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Words, phrases, lines, and images come to me, though obviously I work and rework the material given to me. In many of my poems I am assembling and manipulating lines and phrases I've accumulated over a period of time that seem to go together: writing the poem is my way of figuring out how they go together.
Could this statement tie into the timeless time aspect? I only know what I am writing once I get lost and it's complete. Some of my best essays emerge when I find the evidence and form my reasoning while writing—like thinking on the page.
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To fully understand a Shakespeare play, if such a "full" understanding is ever possible, which is questionable, one must at the least understand what the words in the play meant at the time and to understand the literary, cultural, and historical allusions and references.
This particular statement has a good point. We can never fully understand something written in the past because it is in a different language than we have in the modern day, and there is no time machine to learn their version of English.
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