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| Newest Draft, Read First. |
I think learning the way someone writes a piece is really intriguing and cuts a lot of labor out of trying to figure out what the author had intended. That being said, revealing the process of a poem is generally a big no-no. It takes a lot of the mystique out of the art form and peals away some of the layers of meaning and thus the overall enjoyment of the piece. See, a lot of what makes a poem appealing, outside of sound and imagery, is its ambiguity and interpretation. Contrary to what you may have learned there is a right way to read a poem, but that does not mean that your way is unacceptable. There is a world of difference between artist's intent (what I want to to convey in the piece) and how it makes you feel. Sometimes how a piece makes you feel totally changes the way you go about unpacking and scanning a poem (a process of analyzing the poems imagery, meter, word choice, allusions, and form) by skewing the lens in which you do so. This means your emotional reaction changes the way you can intelligently decode a poem. This can put distance between artist's intent and your interpretation.
or not.
maybe not at all.
Good poems live in this realm of clarity and ambiguity where you can know nothing and know a piece is beautiful. Sometimes the poet intends something and what is on the page is not that at all. The process can be somewhat akin to trying to nail a cube of jello to your forehead; it's gonna be hard, it probably wont work, and the process might hurt your head.
Poets are also very, very fond of taking credit for brilliance within their work that is entirely accidental, so me revealing how I do something cripples my ability to say I sought to achieve something when in actuality, I blindly tripped, dick over fist, into it.
Anyway...
