Category: Collections

As the reader interacts with the text, they come up with an interpretation. Multiple people have multiple interpretations.

So then you say, well, how can we prove that that interpretation even exists?

They have to have a defensible, or defendable interpretation, in which they use text directly from the poem. The interpretation must support their thesis on how they classify the poem.

So for me, there’s no such thing as genres.

There’s only text and there’s only a reader. If the reader’s a cowboy, he interprets it as a cowboy. If the reader is a modern day person, they’ll interpret it through modern day lens. Only thing that matters of substance is how that text, how they react to it, how they relate to it and can they defend their interpretation using text.

So they must use the text from the poem, explain how they interpret it and how they classify it. And that’s all there is to it.

Multiple people will have different interpretations. Therefore, I believe that there is no such thing as a poetic structure, only that there’s multiple interpretations. And those interpretations must be defendable by the reader.

Without a reader, a poem is nothing. And the writer technically has no bearing on it because the writer, if they want to tell you what the poems mean, that’s great, but it doesn’t mean that that’s what the poem’s about because there are only one person who’s interpreting. They too would have to use text to argue their interpretation, even though they wrote it.

I’ll give you a good example. Axl Rose (Guns and Roses) wrote a song called Mr. Brownstone. Later, he was in court and the prosecuting attorney said is your song about heroin? You’re singing about Mr. Brownstone. He’s been knocking. He won’t leave me alone. These are all heroin. He’s like heroin is a brown rock.

To which Axl rose with a long pause replied, Mr. Brownstone can be about anything, any type of habit that you don’t like. And he’s like, some people might interpret Mr. Brownstone as a neighbor, who’s been driving them crazy. And he said it is a song. I think interpretation is up to the listener. So could it be about heroin?

If that’s how you feel, Mr. Prosecutor, that you personally see it as a song about heroin then to you. It’s a song about heroin. But to me, it’s a song about overcoming obstacles. That was his answer in court acts on one, and then the prosecuting attorney lost that case. Nice, right? Cause it’s true. Anything you write has no meaning until there’s a reader or listener.

Arrogant college professors + scholars go around and try to classify things and try to tell other people what poems mean when nobody should ever tell someone else what a poem means. If I write a song, I don’t want some “expert” to tell everybody what my song means.

I want it each listener to interpret it in their own way, but they have to be able to defend their arguments, using lines from my song. Otherwise you could just make things up. You could say it’s about a dinosaur that learns how to hang glide. And I would say where in my song, did you get that from, if they can’t point out the lines, then they’re just making stuff up.

I don’t like classification of any poetry and, or song. The woman writing that poem was not sitting there thinking, well, how are they going to classify this? It’s true. It only exists for the reader – and if you find themes, moods, symbolism, you have to then use the text to defend your argument.