Glad we had this talk.
So today I had my weekly meeting with Problem Child, a literary magazine at Penn State. The range of poems is always fascinating, but like anything abstract, it's difficult to judge. Oftentimes, the poems are immensely personal and we can only infer what has happened. This is true for even professional poetry, but in contemporary poetry it's more prevalent because no one can be like "actually, I hung out with Byron and he was all 'I'm writing about that guy saying that thing that one time.'" Someone in Problem Child knew a submitter and confirmed that the poem talked about a specific, painful instance. While I didn't know the specific turn of events, I could feel the tension emanate from the poem, and while good poetry isn't about emotion, it evokes strong emotion. Thus, the turn of events became irrelevant because of how strongly the writer conveyed universal feeling.
Other times, the emotion is not so adequately portrayed. One time I wrote about my feelings on Twilight, and everybody laughed. This is serious stuff, people!
But when a poem is mainly plot driven, that's when the "judging" process gets trickier. We had a submission about dinosaurs, and there was a line that mentioned "coupling picnic style." While at first glance we gathered it was about some T-rex's galumphing around with their picnic baskets, we got to discussing the verb "to couple" and how, in conjunction with "style," it often refers to sex. Kudos to Urban Dictionary, we had the privilege of being set straight on what "picnic style" actually means.
Even I am not crude enough to repeat it on the internet. Look it up on your own free will, but I'd advise not to do any avid internet searches if you've consumed picnic food in the past, oh...ten years.
So due to that little discovery, we began looking at the poem in a completely different way. Could this be about pterodactyls humping each other, or a lovely little picnic scene? We had no idea. The tone wasn't as clear to as the first poem, so it could have fit either scenario. Dino-sex versus family friendly poetry? The world will never know.
This is the thing about judging anonymous poetry. There's only the text to gauge information from. I know that formalists and new critics alike would hit me over the head with a brick and say "dude, that was what we were trying to tell you all along." But I found myself thinking it would be nice to have the author there to bounce ideas with while trying to extrapolate the meaning of a poem. Perhaps I'm still subject to the intentional fallacy, but I still find it vastly important to let the author have some say in how the analysis on a piece of writing should go about. I don't know about you, but I'd be a little pissed if I wrote a poem that talked about jam-hands and English teachers started claiming it was all about love. Maybe the inability to twist open a jam jar is not actually a metaphor for trying to pry open a closed heart. Maybe I just had a battle with a condiment jar.
It just got me thinking that while the author's intent doesn't make the entire meaning of the poem, it shouldn't be completely discredited. So for poets that have long passed, we could be totally butchering their meaning without even realizing it. Just yesterday in English class we were talking about how one might defend Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV part 1, but for all we know, Falstaff was based off this douchebag guy that Shakespeare despised. Would it still be right to defend someone who was meant to serve as the shmuck?
I mean, we can infer all we went, but we'd feel pretty silly if Shakespeare came waltzing in and was all "actually, I was saying that turtles are invading the planet."
Although it would be pretty cool if that happened. A turtle dominated society would be pretty epic.
Namaste.
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