@katharine.coles
Katharine Coles
@katharine.coles · 4:35

Who gets to say what a poem means?

There is somebody you can call it the me, the speaker up there in the sky, observing with affection and love what's going on down below. So rather than saying to myself, oh, I never meant that, therefore it's wrong, what I did in response to her email was to open myself to the possibilities that I myself had put into the poem, waiting for her to enliven them for both of us

#poetry #beauty #meaning #interpretation

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@Loloflow
Laura L (she/her)
@Loloflow · 1:27
Hi, Katharine. Thank you so much for this. I think about and enjoy so much this process of being the creator of something that might show or reveal or bring to surface something for the consumer of my writing that I'm not necessarily intending. There's just so much conscious and unconscious material, especially when we're using poetic language, that, just like visual art, whatever the perceiver is taking as the meaning is always right, in my humble opinion
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@DBPardes
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:55

@Loloflow

And I sang my first song, which is a pretty intense song. I forget it, but I remember it was like one of those heartfelt ones. And I decided to go down to the audience and there was about, I don't know, 25 young women. And I said, let's circle up. And we circled up and I said, I'm going to read the first lines of that song again. I want to talk to you about it and see what it means to you
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@Swell
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15

Welcome to Swell!

@OwenWilsonsNoze
Lindsey Morrison
@OwenWilsonsNoze · 1:13

Beautiful

Me. I love your poem and I love how beautiful your words are and your cancer when you are speaking. And it's just beautiful. Like very like velvet. It's very smooth. And I loved that poem, especially the last line. And I like how you do leave it up for interpretation. I find it really hard to I do the show and tell like you're supposed to show and not tell. And I tell everything. It's a challenge for me
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@katharine.coles
Katharine Coles
@katharine.coles · 0:59

@OwenWilsonsNoze

It's very, very hard for a young poet, may be the hardest thing to be precise with language and at the same time to create that space for the reader to come in and have not your meaning from the poem, but an experience of their own within the poem. And the fact that you know that and you're thinking about it and you recognize as it is maybe the hardest hurdle to get over
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