The last couple of posts have put me in mind of the topic for this one: how a poem, or any art, for that matter, is not there to be admired for itself (ugh! what vanity!), but as a site for conversation, debate, negotiation. Structured table-talk.
We write and read poems to be in conversation with one another. In a group like Wednesdays@One, we formalize this conversation a step further by organizing a weekly "focused" discussion around each other's work. These aren't "ice-breakers" to get us talking about whatever is on our minds (though too often I catch us wandering off topic quickly because some image or turn of phrase resonates with something in our consciences or consciousnesses), but loci for inter-action. And the poem is not created for itself, but for this inter-action, even if only potentially. True discussion of a poem is always site-specific, occasioned by and defined by the poem.
What I'm saying is that poems exist only for this kind of exchange. If a poem (or any work of art) cannot generate inter-action, it might not be a poem to begin with.
Ladies and gentlemen, for me, this is a hell of an insight! Mind-blowing!
What I have in mind is the field of exchange of ideas that every poem, every work of art, opens up for us each time we come to it. The poem sets the parameters of the exchange (which can be broad, and unstable) and the terms of engagement.
As much as I have fog-horned over the years that a poem is a physical work of art made of words, an artifact, I've probably also created the impression that I think it's somehow monolithic, free-standing, made for itself, self-contained. Dead. I don't think that. Or, I should say, I'm wrong whenever I do think that.
So let me swing the other way maybe a little too far. A poem is not so much a thing unto itself as a pretext for having a deep conversation . . . about its poem-ness, about an understanding of art and language and locution, etc., about feeling, about history, about this very moment in time. About just about anything that the poem permits within the parameters for conversation that it creates.
Strange and funny to think of a text as pretext. That puts us in Roland Barthes territory. Conundrums. Self-affirming negatives. Agendas. Unspoken motivations. Inter-actionality.
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