Dear Poet: What does your poem mean?

My friend and fellow poet, Adele Kenny, posted one of her writing prompts recently that asks us to think about what one of our poems means. Think of this in the way a student might ask a poet that question.

As a teacher of poetry, I had many students - young and old - ask me what the poet (not present, perhaps long gone) "meant" by a word, line or the entire poem. That should be an easy question to answer if you are the author of the poem, but sometimes it is not easy.

Haven't you heard poets avoid an answer to that question? Perhaps because they don't want to hand you the answer, or because that don't want to trap the poem in one cage of meaning, or because they don't know the meaning for sure either.

Adele quotes Michael T. Young who says that

�When people ask what a poem means, it seems they expect to be led back to some point of origin that is a clear thought, articulated as prose, and which then defines the poem. The problem is that poems emerge out of fog. A poet doesn�t have a thought that he translates into words but more often he has a vague feeling, �a sense of wrong, a homesickness��as Frost called it�that he struggles to find words for. It�s one of the reasons it nearly always stumps a poet to be asked what his poem means."

I recall reading a new poem of mine aloud for the first time many years ago. The poem is titled "Weekend With Dad." After the reading, a woman came up to me and thanked me for the reading and in particular that poem. She said, "I can really identify with that poem because I am a single parent too." I thanked her, But, I am not a single parent.

I thought about, as Adele's prompt asks us to do, what my poem means. To me, it was about spending the weekend with my one son because I was giving my wife time with our newborn second son. The poem was about trying to protect who we are, knowing that we will both age, grow, and change. But I had to admit to myself that the poem and the title certainly open a door to the woman's different interpretation.

This is one of the reasons writers like to be in writing groups and read their poems and be read and hear what listeners and readers think about their work.

When you send your poem out into the world, like a child, it takes on its own life, and you have very little control over its destiny.

On Writing and On Being A Poet

"To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough

"Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards."- Henry Miller on writing.

"It will come if it is there, and if you will let it come.� - Gertrude Stein

"If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it�s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there�s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."  -  Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez

"Ars Poetica" is Archibald MacLeish's 1926 poem that references Horace's treatise by that name (translated as "Art of Poetry"), which was written in the first century A.D. Horace's intent was to write a how-to on writing poetry. MacLeish's poem begins:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown�

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

Billy Collins on poetry

Some thoughts by Billy Collins on poetry

• The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
• You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite�embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change.
• In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
• High school is the place where poetry goes to die.
• A sentence starts out like a lone traveller heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
• Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
• The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line.
• A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.
• A motto I�ve adopted is, if at first you don�t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

via writers-write-creative-blog.posthaven.com

The 4 Days in Nature Writing Prompt

How about this as a way to get out of a writer's block, a creative rut, or poetic funk: unplug and get out into the natural world..

A study published in the journal PLOS One found that spending four days in nature - away from electronic devices - is linked with 50 percent higher score on a test for creativity.

I am one of those people who spends too much time in front of a screen (computer or otherwise) but who also loves to take a hike.  The study looked at people who did electronics-free wilderness hiking trips for four to six days. (The hikes were organized by the Outward Bound expedition school.) 

They gave creativity tests to some the morning they started their trip and others on the fourth day of their trip and found the day 4 group scored higher. (I'm not sure why they didn't test all of them before and on day 4.)

Maybe it was being in nature, or maybe it was being unplugged. Maybe its both things. 

Another study was also cited that found that just seeing the color green before being given a creative prompt yielded more imaginative answers than seeing the color white before the prompt. 

Anyone willing to experiment and report back to us?

Why Write?

I wrote on another site about the idea of devoting 20% of your time to something outside you regular "work.". It's a philosophy followed at Google and other companies. It could be a workplace habit, but it could also be something to follow in your non-working life.

My 20% seems to be writing, whether that is poetry, journaling, research or essays online and in print. If I devoted a fifth of my free time to one writing task - like a poetry manuscript - I might be a more successful writer. But, like most of my distracted life, I split that percentage into writing different things in different places.

There are five blogs that I write on regularly, including this one, and three others that I contribute posts to occasionally. I don't get paid to do that writing. But I wouldn't say that I do it for "fun" either.  Plus, I do the regular Poets Online website which archives all of the prompts and poems that have been submitted since 1998. It's hard to explain to most people (especially to my wife) exactly why I do it.

I was reading another blogger, Maria Popover, who writes the Brainpickings.org blog. She has a "writing tip jar" on her site which says that "Brain Pickings remains ad-free and takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit, between the site, the email newsletter, and Twitter. If you find any joy and value in it, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of coffee and a fancy dinner."

That is like the public television and radio model. You listen, so you should pay something. Luckily, enough do pay, but the paying listeners are a small percentage of the listeners.

Most bloggers don't have a pay model or a contributor model using PayPal or some other subscription. Some blogs have ads. I do that. Amazon ads are one of the most popular vendors. I will put those links here for books I am discussing. But from all five of my blogs, I am surprised when in a three-month quarter they generate enough sales to have Amazon make a minimal payment which is only $10. So, I'm not getting rich by writing online.

I had always hoped that the ads would cover the cost of some domain names and hosting that I pay every year. You pay to own a domain name like poetsonline.org. Some sites, like this one on Blogger, are hosted for free. Others require a yearly fee.


There are people who blog and make a living at it. There are people who are poets and make a living at it. But not many. Every poet I know does something besides write and publish poetry to earn a living. Teaching is the most common job, whether it is in a school or in workshops.

So, why do we write our blogs and poems? I haven't come up with a definitive answer, but I have some ideas for myself.

I do hope it gets my name out there as a writer and that it leads to further opportunities and maybe some income. So, it is advertising for myself.

I like telling people things that I think will be helpful. I have been a teacher since 1975. It paid the bills, but teachers know that part of the reward is knowing that you are doing something good for your students and, in some small way, for the world.

I also like the occasional connections that come from writing online. That means anything from the person who "favorites" a post, makes a positive comment, emails a note, links to your writing. I have even had a few people find me online and ask me to do a workshop or give a presentation at a conference.

But all that perhaps isn't enough to "justify" the time spent doing this.

What are the other things that keeps us doing that 20% that we don't get paid to do? Whether it is poetry or volunteer work, why do you do it?  Comment?