How Do You Describe A Poem?

If the poem is rich with metaphor - the underlying meanings you suggest - I would typically state it that way.
"It's a poem which uses the metaphor of stealing a rose from a garden for untouchable beauty, guilt and silent accusation."

If anyone were specifically looking, a run-through of the majority of my posts in the poetry games & exercises section would pretty much lead to an overall description for what I'm writing right now as: "the aftermath of betrayal." So although individual poems may have multiple meanings and NOT be about anything related to betrayal specifically, that emotion seems to lie under the surface of nearly all of them. It just happens.

Have a great day or week and your poetry seems to reflect the upward surge of your emotion.

Does that make sense?

anis said:

thanks Stew. With my own stuff I'm not entirely sure what the underlying meaning is. I have a fair sense of it, and in some ways make efforts to place it there, but I couldn't really spell it out specifically and pin it down. But I guess I could give a general description of it, so maybe I'll take your advise and go with that.

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hmm, interesting.

i'd expect that the author would have a pretty clear idea of what they are poem-ing about.

i'm guessing though, that the success or failure of the poem probably doesn't rely on how well the author thought he/she did in passing the ideas, themes, images, etc along.

expressing self without self expressing defines a quality poem.

anis said:

most poems aren't really about what they're about. There's lots of sub-text and underlying meaning packed into the stanzas.

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I don't know that I agree with this. Some poems do what you say, but are not many poems about exactly what they say on the surface? Even metaphors are sometimes easily understandable, and the substitutionary meaning is clear from the context.

I don't go looking for hidden meanings in poems.

So if you're called upon to describe a poem, you've written or read, how would you proceed? Would you focus on the poem's apparent meaning, e.g. "it's about a flower, or woman named Marcy;" or would you attempt to convey the hidden meaning, e.g. "it's about the fragility of emotions, or whatnot?"

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Some of my poems contain secondary meanings more than what the words say, but most do not. So I pretty much just describe the surface meaning. For those few of my poems which contain a secondary meaning, generally it was written for someone who will understand that meaning, and I don't feel compelled to tell anyone else.

For the poems of others, I would focus on the surface meaning, the "pretty picture". If a secondary meaning seems to be implied, I might mention it, but I might not if I think I'm stretching too much.

Best Regards,
NDG

I personally believe that all human endeavor has some sort of "self connection" involved. I do believe that often the layers of meanings, inuendoes, perspectives, connections, etc. aren't even consciously apparent to the person from which the idea/activity is originating.

I believe there is always an element of self discovery to human thought/action.

my 2

kid

If a reader finds a secondary meaning to a poem, not the poets, more power to them. I like poems that have some mystery about them, but I think generally the poet has wrote them that way.

But just because you or I may not understand everything the poet wrote, does not mean he/she put more then one meaning to it.

Poems don't have to have this element - they don't have to be metaphors for other things - expressions of themes - sometimes they are just a poetic interpretation of a scene or a memory or an emotion. Metaphor is just one of the many poetic devices used.

And I've written several that are memories. Dancer, for instance, and Secret Tango (is that what it was called? I can't remember.) Memories explained poetic-like.

Some of them are metaphor-heavy - Apparition, for example was entirely metaphor, rose garden was entirely metaphor.

Norman D Gutter;2657526 [I said:

Some[/i] poems do what you say, but are not many poems about exactly what they say on the surface?

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Exactly my point in KTC's other thread on educating the idiot. (BTW, great title for a thread!) IMO, how arrogant is it to claim to 'teach' poetry by dissecting a writer's work? "What does the red firetruck really represent and what emotion is expressed by the fire?" What?! Maybe it's about a freakin' firetruck and a fire. What makes the prof qualified to interpret for others what the writer was feeling/thinking/meaning when he wrote it - or how they should feel when reading it?

Isn't the personal interpretation - how it affects the writer or reader - the essence of poetry?

Isaac Espriu said:

I do, however, feel that a poet should strive to impart meaning to some extent - or at least attempt to make the intended meaning somewhat apparent. I've read too much stuff lately that is just words thrown on pages - sure they're nice words, but a spam generator could probably do the same thing...

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Oh yeah, definitely agreed. Otherwise why bother sharing it? I do find sometimes that my thought process will flit from one thing to another in a string that I find cohesive but that others will not. Y'know how that is: you start out thinking of "grass" and end up thinking of "bacon" through some logic that only you can understand. I try to avoid putting those random bits down without some connection, but they can sneak through.

The meaning of most of the poems I write is pretty obvious, or the metaphors are easily interpreted. Sometimes a person will offer a meaning entirely different from what I intended. Most of the time when that happens, I say to myself, "Hey, that's really neat, I wish I had thought of it."

When I'm reading for enjoyment, I don't like to have to work too hard--I let myself be entertained, not make myself be entertained.
So I tend to write that way.

Hmmm ... like trying to define the colour of white noise this!

All depends on the poem - I reckon!
I mean if you listen to the poem closely (even the simple scribble of its idea/s) they seem to write ( and hence speak for) themselves.

All the writer does is tie the lil sucker down to whatever form and either whips it into life or death!

My closet is full of red ink and howling words ... eeekkkk!

anis said:

I'd have to agree, too. With my own stuff I wouldn't mind at all if readers attributed this or that meaning to it, even if they were off base. But if somebody of influence came out and gave a definitive meaning to my work and said it meant this and only this, then I wouldn't be pleased.

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No poet would--and that's a less than experienced reader; a poem does have specific things to say, but it has a lot of them, and part of the meaning of any text is in the reader--and all of us are different.

I doubt that I ever get exactly the same meaning from a poem I've written as I did when I first wrote it. And why should I? I change, grow older, wiser, emotions up or down, needs different on different days and times.

I not concerned with the other authors exact meaning of poems I read either. I get what I get.

I'm looking at a depression era photo of Dorothea Lange's right now. A young mother is standing in a calico dress with head bowed and arms folder across her waist. A very young daughter is to one side and back on the steps of the house is a small boy child. In the door's window can be seen a young girl of maybe 16 looking out, fixing her hair.

One window has an old news paper pasted over a cracked pane.
A child's jump rope lays in the dirt. No one is smiling.

I could write several pomes from this photo seeing things that Lange probably did not or did not think about. Why?

Because I'm interpreting it for myself to fit within my own vision.
Ask thirty people to interpret this photo and you will get new things from them all.