> > > Wolf "Hope I understood correctly what your poem was 'really about'" spirit
> >
> > Well, if you ask me, that's one of the absolutely LEAST important aspects of poetry -- at least my poems. I try to write in such a way that people can put their own private thoughts into it [...]
> >
>
> Oh. The reason I phrased my comment that way was because Den-Kara wrote: "I want to know what anyone else might think [about the poem] before I _say_what_it's_really_about_." So, she indicated she was willing to explain it a bit more at that point. Basically I was curious whether my impressions of "Help Me to Soar" were in the ballpark (i.e., more or less correct).

Now it's my turn to say "Oh." I didn't notice she had written that. But I also failed to get my message across...


> I agree with you that good poetry is such that the reader can draw his/her own interpretations from it. I wouldn't call interpretation the LEAST important aspect of a poem, however. If a text does not speak to the reader, and offers nothing meaningful enough to spark the reader's interest, there is no point in reading it. Personal and private writing meant for only the author's eyes is not hindered by this contraint.

Actually, I didn't say that INTERPRETATION is the least important aspect of poems. I said -- or MEANT to say, at least -- that finding out what a poem is 'really about', that is, what the author had in mind when he or she wrote the poem, is the LEAST important aspect of poems. When we analyzed poems in high school (one of my favourite paper assignments, by the way, I scored some A's there) I learned that ANY interpretation is good, provided it has 100% support in the poem. To me, the good poems often are those with multiple possible interpretations. I love the process of having a strange thought, translating it into a poem so that it may conjure other, completely new, strange thoughts in other people's minds.

I've written poems where I wanted to tell something very specific, but they didn't get good until I cut them down from 20 to 4 lines, making them much more ambiguous and vague, and thereby also opening them up for other possible interpretations.


> > Trav"Spooky... I had trouble finding even the appropriate *Norwegian* expression to use in the last sentence. Then suddenly the word "conjure" popped into my mind, and I had to look it up. It seems it was excactly what I wanted... This strikes me as spooky because there's English words I haven't used before and really don't know the definition of, but somehow I'm able to use them right anyway. This has happened to me quite a few times lately..."holt, taking in-name quotes to the extreme.
> >
> Heh. Travholt, your English is at LEAST as good if not better than many native speakers of the language. If you hadn't explained that your prefered language was Norwegian, I would have sworn your mother tongue was North American English.

Thank you very much! I hear this a lot around here, and I'm equally pleased every time. I'm starting to believe it! :-) But what gives me away are the silly inflection errors like the one above: "there's English words"... But at least I notice many of them, although often a tad too late.