Intent vs Result/Interpretation

personally, I love it when I can write something so universal that people can pull their own experiences in and take something away from it. My intention can be what they get or not, as long as I write a piece that makes the reader get something, I am satisfied.

It's one of the things I love about poetry. To me, it only fails when the readers step away with nothing either emotionally or intellectually.

I hadn't really thought of how the community dynamic changes poetry interpretation, but it really does. The ability for the poet to get instant feedback on being understood and the ability for readers (other poets) to be able to explain what they saw and felt in the reading of the poem goes a long way in interpretation being an important part of the poetry writing exercise, and the poetry reading exercise - it forces us to really think about it in order to interact in the community. But I imagine it also has an impact on the future works of the poet as he sees what works and what doesn't in stirring that emotion or creating that image or making that point and what sort of details, word choices and metaphors do to a reader or group of readers. We have instant feedback on how our poem's intent was received and can make adjustments almost immediately in the next piece - putting those things we learned to use.

I noticed this specifically yesterday with "regret." -- I had been having a wonderful dream about my new girlfriend yesteday, who lives a long away from me, so the only time I can see her is in my dreams. I didn't realize until after I saw the replies that people thought I was referring to lclary's death, and assigned a much darker tone to it than I had intended.

So yeah, I think knowledge of the poet, and community interaction can definitely affect interpretation.

I'm never satisfied if my intent gets lost in my inability to write to it, no matter if other people enjoy it.

The only reason I ever write is to connect with people who can never be with me inside my head. If we don't share the moment, for me, it didn't happen.

I'm probably limiting my scope with this stance, but so far, I haven't been able to help it.

It's interesting, Jamie, because very often I think you write to very specific experience and there isn't much room for interpretation. (so I guess that means you are successful, at least with me as a reader and my understanding of your work).
And I have some work more and more recently, where there isn't a whole lot of room for interpretation either. It is about what it is about, it is fairly obvious, and the differences in interpretation more often come down to a line or two in the piece rather than the whole picture.
Now in those cases, when writing to something very specific, I think I would be disappointed if people couldn't get into my head, because it should have been obvious what the poem was about. And I consider that something very different than the "universal" pieces I was talking about in my other post.
I guess the difference for me would be "was I trying to make myself clear or wasn't I?"

I know for me that a lot of people probably had no idea where I was going with Painting Chattauqua or even Heads or Tails and they brought their own Ideas into it which was fine with me, whereas, I didn't allow any wiggle room with Inconsolable.

...I'm not on top of the craft enough to say this for sure but I think that some writing styles lend themselves to interpretation, more so than others. If one writes concretly with lots of detail readers will be more hard put to attribute individualistic interpretations, compared to when one writes more abstractly. Both styles are perfectly fine, of course, and examples of each can be found in all anthologies in the genre.

Ken, I do think the level of abstraction in a piece has a lot to do with it, and so does the depth of the metaphor.

...I suspect you're right about metaphors.
Have to give this some thought.
Would be great to have an example here to work with.
Bet something of Poe's would be a good candidate.

Perks, I think a lot of poets feel the way you do. Poetry is an incredibly personal thing, and it can be infuriating when someone takes a poem that's meant to build a bridge between your interior self and your readers' understanding, and twist it into something completely different.

Stew, you make a good point about community. A forum can be an amazingly useful place for learning how your words affect your readers by hearing directly from them! I know I'd still have a lot of bad habits, lazy ways of writing that made sense to me but left others scratching their heads, if I'd never spent time on a forum.

The result vs interpretation thing has actually led me to adopt a peculiar belief. I like to think of poems as living creatures of some sort. As if the world of ideas has its own ecosystem, and some types of ideas for whatever reason choose a person, or a person calls them out, to leap the gap into existence on this side of the world as creative works. Depending on the nature of the idea and the skill of the maker it could end up as a poem, a song, or something far more practical, like a really delicious stew or a car engine that runs perfectly and can go years without a tune-up.

Who knows if there's any truth to it--but I think believing that motivates me to be a more diligent student of the craft of poetry. Because if I think of a poem as a living creature, then I have a responsibility to it to bring it into existence with all of its parts where they ought to be, in full possession of itself. And if it ends up being a different idea than I thought it was when it first popped into my brain, then that's a tribute both to the strength of its will to exist and my ability to reach outside myself to create.

Sometimes interpretation can be really frustrating though. A few yeas ago I was in a poetry class, and we all had an assignment to write a poem starting with the line "my parents were fish." I ended up writing something that came from some pretty bleak and angry feelings, but all the other students in the class but one thought it was a positive and heartwarming poem.

If you want to find something by Poe or one of the other greats, Ken and everybody, that is a great idea. But if it would be interesting I'd be happy to post that poem of mine as a case in point!