Double Take Magazine once printed a little pamphlet in which I listed 10 different things you should- you should do.
I can't remember all of them but the- the first one is turn off the television set.
I don't think you can- you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
Um, the idea on how to read a poem is based on the idea that uh, that poetry needs you as a reader,
that the experience of poetry, meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem, and a reader-
and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. That readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poems.
And the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem, and the reader.
And that as a reader you have a task to do
something to do, you bring your experience to it. Its not all inherent in the poem.
Um- The great Holocaust, post Holocaust poet Paul Celan said that a poem is a message in a bottle-
sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it would wash up
on land, on heartland perhaps, the idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that
its sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee
of the literary text. Celan was picking up something that the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had written in 1916
called On the Addressee. Mandelstam says- a poet you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past
you open it- Mandelstam says its okay to do so, I'm not reading someone else's mail
it was adressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore its addressed to me.
And that when you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text.
And I felt that the reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what - the experience of poetry was.
And so my focus is on the reader, and that the poets job is not to inspire himself or herself
the poets job is to inspire some future reader.
And so as a reader, you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages
and experiencing whats in them, inside of yourself.
I think that's a connection you can only hope for, its not something that you can make
because it demands, it needs someone else.
Um- I find in Walt Whitman an American tradition, a certain kind of, I would say desperate American friendliness
in which you reach out, in which the poet tries to reach out through the page
make a connection by the side of the road with some other person
but ultimately that- that's a longing, not a completion that has to be made by other readers
you can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting-
you can pack something in salt so that its well made and you can hope that it outlasts time
but ultimately, that't not up to you, ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth
but it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text- and a text cant do that work by itself
and you as a poet can only do your best.