On Whether or Not Your Reading of a Poem Can Be Wrong,
or, Could a Post Possibly Be Less Concrete?

Long story short, you can absolutely be wrong if you force a poem into being something you want it to be instead of the thing it is.

But there’s another way to express thinking triggered by a poem, one that can take rightness or wrongness out of the discussion. You’ll have to bear with some prelude, unless you skip down the page.

Here’s the problem, I think: students read a poem, and they call their thought after reading an interpretation of the poem. Then the teacher or a classmate challenges that interpretation, and all of a sudden everyone has gotten defensive. But not every thought is an interpretation; some thoughts are inspiration.

Let’s say you’ve been on some spiritual quest, and you read a poem in which the speaker makes a discovery, and you see that as an epiphany, and for whatever reason, at that moment, you have an epiphany. You may be tempted to think that the poem caused the epiphany.

But don’t confuse inspiration with interpretation. That’s the moral of the story. If you can’t find specific support for a thought you have after you’ve read a poem, then call your thought inspiration instead of interpretation. You might begin a reflection with, “This isn’t the main idea of the poem, but because I’m thinking about ____________________, the line ______________________ really stood out to me and took me in ___________________ direction.”

Just me trying to help, always trying to help, because you’ll find the teacher to be a little bit of a noodge when it comes to critical reading, but he also realizes that the spirit of a poem moves in mysterious ways. That’s why he’s so into the whole Borges’ “weft of the universe” thing with the big cat from “Inferno, I, 32.” If I don’t get us to that, make sure to send me there for you.

Later.

Here's something strange, and I need to remember to tell Sweeney.

Last night I finished reading The Road. I was hoping I wouldn't have apocalyptic dreams, and I didn't, but this morning, Kate and I went for a walk to get the newspaper. Once we got downstairs, she decided she needed to push her teddy bear in a stroller.

So we're walking along. The sky overcast. Remnants of storm on the ground and in the sky. Gray sky. And I can't help but think, as we cross the grassy divider that separates the northbound and southbound lanes of North Street, that the cart moves really slow off the road.

Toward the end of the walk, Kate asks me, Will the Earth last for ever?
As far as our ever.
Will I know it's heaven when I get there.
I think they'll tell you.
How old is Jesus?
We started counting years when Jesus was born.
Oh, 2009.
Yup.
Does he look old or does he look like when he was killed?
He looks like when he was killed.
Will I look like when I'm killed?
I don't think you'll be killed.

On a separate but possibly related note, how old are kids when they no longer feel the need to exclaim, "Train!" every time they spot a train?

Why A Typical Screwed-Up Reading of a Poem Will Turn You into a Pathetic, Lonely Hobo

It has pained me (well, that’s kind of melodramatic) over the years to hear people praise Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as some kind of anthem for nonconformity. If you want nonconformity, read the Beats. Anyway, people take the last two lines of the poem, “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference,” and they turn it into the whole poem. In fact, if you Googled “the road less traveled,” you would find the first references to be mistakes about the titles of Frost’s poem, instead of links to the book written in the 1970s by M. Scott Peck.

Here’s the poem, and below each stanza, a brief “what’s happening.”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Ok, so dude is walking in the woods, comes to a fork in the road, wants to go down both paths, can’t, so he takes a closer look at one of them.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

After checking out one path, dude checks out the other, judges it to be a little grassier, but realizes that it’s pretty much the same as the other path.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Dude decides to take the one he looked at on second glance, but would like to take the first path, too. Figures he’s probably not really going to, though, because we all know how way leads on to way (all we have to do is start following hyperlinks to see the truth in that little statement).

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And so, with a sigh, he shall tell one day how that choice, the path for which “the passing there Had worn them really about the same,” has made all the difference. He doesn’t tell us what kind of difference, just that there is a difference.

Now you can project all you want to on the poem, but that doesn’t mean it’s about not following everyone else. There is a lot of information out there about how Frost was playing games with this poem, and there is a lot out there that starts with the idea and then twists the poem to fit the idea.

So why does this matter? Why can’t a poem be what you want it to be and let everyone else worry about their own problems? I think I have an answer. You connect to a text – be it a song, a novel, a poem or anything else – because it helps you make meaning of your experience. If you connect to a text that has a flimsy connection, or a mistaken connection, then it’s a house of cards thing, or maybe it’s like finding the guy or girl you think is right for you, but no, not really. And you try to make it work, but the relationship is more of a struggle than a joy.

You’re better off continuing your search to find the right connection, because that poem, that song, that person, will be a consistent, reliable source of comfort. And that’s my argument about why reading a poem accurately matters.

You may be interested to know that this poem has a rating of 9.3 out of 10 on poemhunter.com. I guess the question is whether this poem was hot or not.

Reading a Poem: What’s Happening in the Poem

One of the most common mistakes readers make when they consider a poem is jumping to a final, reductivist (that means reducing the poem to a sound bite) conclusion. They identify what a poem is about before they identify what’s happening. They say what it means before they consider what it is saying. They want simplification where they should find possibility.

If you want to demystify poetry, then be a bit more patient as a reader. You don’t have to decode, interpret, analyze and assess in the same breath; that’s like eating the appetizer, entrée and dessert in the same shovelful while simultaneously chugging your iced tea.

Let me attempt to illustrate with a poem I really like, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. It goes a little something like this:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

The first four lines are pretty simple, a statement of truth that we may or may not pay attention to in our daily lives. The opening statement, “Nature’s first green is gold” isn’t exactly true; nature’s first green is green, with perhaps a yellowish tint. But given that gold is universally valuable, we get that he means it’s really, really pretty. We know that it is her hardest hue to hold because spring turns quickly into summer, and we who have watched a fruit tree or rhododendron in bloom know that the flowering phase is too brief, until leaf subsides to leaf, and the beauty of the blossom is gone.

Following that transition, Frost makes a comparison that allows us to make our leaps of meaning: the change from paradise to grief, the sadness that accompanies loss, is similar to the change from nature’s first green to the unromantic blare of the leaf blower (my suburban image, not Frost’s). Another comparison follows, with the accepted comparison of the birth/death cycle to sunrise and sunset, and then the final sentence, a lamentation on the fleeting nature of beauty or vivacity.

These are the objective facts of the poem. You don’t have to believe in the Garden of Eden to know that it has value as a symbol of paradise. You don’t have to quibble about the value of gold. If I look at what is happening in the poem, I can bring more of my subjective experience into the making of meaning than if I try to oversimplify the darn thing.

Here’s why my experience matters, why I must have thought of this poem for this exercise on this hot August morning. I was listening to my iPod while doing my humble little version of running, and the song “Wishlist” came on. There’s a great image among all the images: I wish I were “the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood.” Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Anyway, there’s a scene in the movie, The Outsiders, when Ralph Macchio’s and C. Thomas Howell’s characters are in hiding after doing something really bad, and they’re sitting on something, maybe a car, maybe a bench, with the best sunset in cinematic history in the background. And one of them recites that poem to the other as they lament the loss of their childhood, the end of innocence in the face of serious consequences for the accidental step they’d taken in their class war against the Soches ( I have no idea how to spell that, as I’ve seen the movie without reading the book).

The image is meaning enough for me; I don’t have to verbalize it, because it defies verbalization. But I can make the connection, and if you get it, you get it.

Well, I went a little farther than I thought I would, but whatev. At some point, I hope to get at how a failure to read what’s happening in the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” has morphed the poem into something it’s not in the minds of millions of middle schoolers.

Some Random Thoughts

So let’s get some things down.

First, firsts. How joyful, satisfying, happying or whatever smiley-faced emoticon deserving adjective it has been to watch the girls the last two weeks. First back dives, first flips off the diving board, and for Emma, first successful foray into bodysurfing down in LBI. Yes, even for me, first flip off the diving board; I chickened out on the back dive, but summer’s not over yet.

Second, The Idiot. I have to admit, I finished it more out of a sense of obligation than enjoyment. I clearly want redemption out of Dostoevsky, and The Idiot doesn’t give it to me. By the end of the story, Prince Myshkin had frustrated me so much with his inability to follow his own mind that I didn’t care whether he ended up with Aglaya or Nastasya; whatever coupling was going to happen wasn’t going to matter to me at all. And his response to what Rogozhin did at the end reminded me too much of Ellen Foster to make me feel like it was the response of a grown man who had had some of the prince’s insights over the course of the story.

Early in the story, the prince’s capacity for forgiveness was, if not inspiring, welcoming. His forgiveness became a deficit as the story went on; it’s safe to say that always forgiving everyone isn’t good. In your little circle, it makes the offending parties repeat bad behavior. In the bigger picture, uncompromising forgiveness establishes a status quo in which, culturally, the wrong people have the upper hand.

As we get closer and closer to school, I better start thinking about my classes. One thought that occurred to me as I considered my vacation was to write it as “The University of Long Beach Island.” There is a class in bodysurfing, and another in boogieboarding. You can take a seminar on Bay v. Ocean, or a course in Comparative Eateries: Greasy Spoons, Seafood Spots. There might also be an elective on Unstructured Vacation Time, in which the ethics of laziness are discussed, as well as providing instruction in game invention.

I better get my ass reading and writing poems, and think about whether or not I need to change up my AP class, and how my shared AP class is going to differ from my yearlong AP class, and to see if I should go to a different approach to the HLLC writing workshop – maybe a little more time spent on forms, you know, giving the how-to a go, or trying the University of idea and seeing what kids can do with it.

I also need to look into podcasting as a means of giving feedback. Sorry for the shitty quality of the writing here tonight. I’m not accustomed to writing in a room filled with the sounds of television and children.