Cold (Still) & Interpreting Poetry
Posted on January 29, 2007
Filed Under Poetry, River Notes, Teaching | Comments Off
It’s minus twenty-one (F) as I write this at 7:30. Carole has already headed off to the barn where she boards her horse to muck out stalls, which she does to help pay her horse’s board. (The call it “board” even though I’m pretty sure the horses don’t eat from a table.) She wouldn’t have to — it’s not that much money — but it sure as hell shows dedication. Nothing show dedication like shoveling frozen horse shit at twenty below zero. I don’t have to go in to teach this morning until around eleven o’clock & it’s still going to be bitter, though it looks as if the sun will be shining. When the sun came out yesterday after a long string of gray days, people seemed much happier even though it was still bitter cold. Looks like another bright, cold day. I’ll be going in to teach my two sections of Introduction to Literature this afternoon, with whom I am having the damndest time getting them to give up the idea that “everybody has their own interpretation of a poem.” My students make claims that “two people can have completely different interpretations” of a poem. A few seem to be beginning to understand that interpretation can be flexible without being entirely random. I have tried to introduce the distinction, perhaps artificial, between interpretations, which I define as establishing the “defensible meaning(s) of a poem” & responses, which are one’s own individual reactions & feelings evoked by a poem. Multiple interpretations can hover over particular lines of a poem, but I’d argue that a successful poem, read with consciousness of its historical & cultural context, can be given a relatively narrow range of interpretations, using my distinction above. When it comes time to respond to the poem from our own experience, of course, we can draw many “meanings” from it. But we cheat both the poem & ourselves if we leap over interpretation immediately to response.
