But that's what I wish my poem to mean . . . (5.31.20)

I'm always fascinated by statements like this one.  Its "but" opening gambit indicates not just a defense of whatever the writer of a poem has written, but an attitude about criticism and how an author handles it.  The "I wish" portion of the statement, duly couched mid-sentence, expresses not just desire but authority; that is, the authoriness of the author's authored thing.  It's as if to say, I wrote it and that alone makes my poem meaningful.  And then we come as we must to the end of the statement: "to mean."

Often, you'll hear this statement after someone--a reader, a workshop cohort, a critic--questions someone's use of language, diction, image, tone of voice, persona, and so on.  The poet has labored over the poem for some amount of time, has made some critical decisions here and there about what to put down, what to take out, what to leave in, and what to replace in the drafting process (assuming there has been a process).  And now the poem says (means) what the author wishes it to mean.

The problem with meaning is not just whether it is valid and acceptable or whether it is the result of deep thought and feeling or hard work:

"This really happened.  I deserve an 'A'!"

"This really affected me.  I deserve an 'A'!"

"I worked hard on this.  I deserve an 'A'!"

In some ways, the problem with meaning is its ownership and, beyond that, how that ownership is established (I would say, earned).  But most importantly, the problem of meaning in a poem has to do with recognition: knowing what I actually mean in any poem I have written.

I can tell you from long experience that often enough I don't know what a poem means, what I wish it to mean, until I've written the poem.  And even then what I mean (in the poem) emerges only slowly, in pieces, through multiple re-writings and re-readings, and may induce me to revise yet again the better to amplify that emerging meaning.  This, for me, is true of even the simplest poems that I write.

I find that my weakest writing is the result of starting out with a specific meaning in mind, a meaning I wish the poem to get to.  When I've stated that meaning, revealed it in lines and images, voila!  A finished poem!  This approach--which is intellectual as well as procedural--handcuffs the writing process.  It closes off, artificially, possibilities and opportunities for the poem to become a poem. It makes the poem less art, more rhetoric.  It is the intellectual equivalent of paint-by-number.

And it is cheating (the poem).

So how does a poem come to mean anything?  It will tell you how and when it begins to mean.  More importantly, a poem will tell you what it begins to mean . . . if you're paying attention to it. You're job as the poet is to follow where the poem leads.  It will give you a pathway here, close one off there, if you're paying attention (and being honest with yourself and your process).  In a very Aristotelian fashion, the poem you are writing will come to be; it will move from what was possible to say and to mean at the start of the process to what is likely or probable, finally to what it must mean.

And this necessary meaning may look nothing at all like the meaning you had in mind at the start of the process, though it may be traceable to that original intent.  After all, it was the intent that set you down at your desk with the will to write something.  But the great art of writing poetry depends on the poem arriving at a meaning as the result of actual writing, not of intention.  You follow whatever path the poem presents, and if the poem offers more than one way through, you choose.  And that's you being the author.

Then and only then can you rightly say, that's what I wish my poem to mean.