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.