« Another Moment | Main | Another Poem »
August 27, 2007
Another, with a couple to come
[as yet untitled]
Words have no weight
no heft, no meaning
unless you are there
to make them mean.They say what others
say they say and so
they say nothing at all
of what you intended.But should that stop you
from saying at the start?
Should the novel rest unwritten
the poem unpenned?What weight words have
will gives them, intent
imbues with purpose;
a sentence unsaidfor fear it will be
resaid, misunderstood
is a tragedy and a selfishness--
depriving all.
I wrote this upon reading Harold Bloom's comments on W.B. Yeats. He typified Yeats as "virulently anti-Christian," and yet, one can read Yeats very much within a Christian context and have it make perfect sense. In a sense, this must be enormously frustrating (for Yeats, who is in a position to no longer care). But for me it is one of the great wonders of the written world. What I write will mean differently as it is encountered by different people who read the poem from the poem they are.
Posted by Steven Riddle at August 27, 2007 8:28 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.stblogs.org/scgi-bin/mv/mt-tb.cgi/22788