2 posts tagged “poem”

They say one has to "warm the pen"
But that's not really true
The ink will flow with passionate flame
If only I listen to you

How can I, with impoverished words
Capture the beauty which lies within?
With what aching stride, what longing ears
Can I sing the song my inner self hears?

The clouds, like ice floes, drift apart
Letting the sunshine warm my heart
The trees like dancing children sway
Inviting me to dance today

Along the Big Two Hearted River
Through the burnt-out fields I roam
Ahead of me lies hope and danger
Yet nothing behind can I call home

Step by step I cover the miles
The sun lays to rest in a reddened sky
I have no map for the treasure I seek
Beauty herself is my only guide

Trembling with a forest breeze
Upon a moth's white powdered wings
I look upon a misty lake
While stars, aloof, their anthems sing

Padding through the blanket of green
Duckweed's soft enveloping caress
The moon's bright children dance and run
Laughing with brilliant tenderness

My eyes are drawn to the distant shore
Beyond the craggy, whispering bend
Along the path that rises there
My evening's journey will find its end

JK Rowling has just "revealed" a hidden fact about Albus Dumbledore, one of the major players in her Harry Potter series.  (I won't reveal it myself...it's easy enough to find all over the Internet right now.)

In my opinion, once a work of art has been released, the artist has no more "authority" on what happens between the lines than the reader does.  If a fact was relevant, it should have been in the book.  If something was left out, it's up to the reader's imagination.  And if something was ambiguous...well, that's where the most fun of readership comes in.  Stories resonate with us in different ways.  The ambiguities are exactly what give us the joy of reading and imagining.

When I was really into Ernest Hemingway, I was reading not only everything he wrote but also everything I could find that was written about him.  He used to have an idea of a "whole story" and write a subset of it.  Stories like "Big Two-Hearted River" resonate with us because we know that there is a healing going on with the main character, a return to nature, but we don't know why.  If Hemingway was to say "Well, it's because of such and such of an atrocity that he saw during World War I," it wouldn't make the story better...it would detract. 

He left it out because the story resonates more with the reader by letting us put in our own inner hurts that need to be healed.

I also saw lots of articles about the Hemingway story Cat in the Rain.  It was amazing to me: people were arguing about whether the cat given to the "American wife" is the same cat that she saw outside.  But if you think of it from the point of view of Hemingway knowing how much to reveal and how much to leave out, you realize the entire point of the story is not about whether the cat is rescued.  If it was, he would have made it clear.  People have correctly identified this lines "Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important" as a turning point in the story, but some have said that it means that she is pregnant.  Hemingway allows you to imagine that situation, or not, as you like.  It is fun to go over the story in our minds, imagining different scenarios.  But since it is left ambiguous, we have to assume that it is not the "point" of the story.  And if we were to discover handwritten notes by Hemingway saying she is, or isn't, pregnant, that wouldn't change the impact of the story.  He left it out because that is not the point.

What the story is about has to be found in what is given by the artist when the story is delivered.  No further information that had been withheld by the artist can change that.  How the story makes you feel is produced by your imagination when you read the story.  The author has no right to tell you if your imaginations are right or not by telling you "what really happened."

I see Cat in the Rain as a story of a woman feeling like a cat in the rain, but discovering a power she didn't realize she had.  That she can influence her surroundings.  Somebody else may feel something different.  Our framework for discussion would be the story, not anything outside the story.

One last example.  Famous poem by Ezra Pound:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I never see this poem printed anywhere as just a poem.  It's always printed along with notes of how he came up with this poem (see an example here).  The poem and the notes together have become the work of art.  To me, that lessens the poem itself.  The whole thing becomes a new story--a fascinating story--but the poem itself has less room to move me.