Quote of the Day: Never About One Thing

"A poem is never about one thing. .. . You want it to be as complicated as your feelings."

That from an article in the March 29 issue of the "New York Times Magazine," entitled "Galaxies Inside His Head" and subtitled "Race and Identity in the Poems of Terrance Hayes."

What Hayes appears to be suggesting is that he packs his poetry with multiple issues – and perhaps not in a linear fashion.

Like a good wine, complexity is critical.

That's one way of looking at the notion of "more than one thing."

But there is an alternative. Poems, and arguably stories, are chiefly about more than one thing because readers interpret the same work differently and not because of anything the author says.

This gets back to the topic of literary intent, which I discussed briefly in the second half of my first blog post, which has now been incorporated in the "Welcome" page at the top of the blog.  What I said stemmed from a NYT "Bookends" exchange on the question: "Should an author's intentions matter?"

In response to the published exchange of views on that topic, the NYT subsequently received a letter from Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of the estate of Anglo/American poet W.H. Auden.

"One (i.e., Auden himself) is sometimes asked what is meant by a poem. The meaning of a poem is the outcome of a dialogue between the words on the page and the particular person who is reading it. The interpretation can only be false if the reader does not know the contemporary meaning of the words."

That, Mendelson said, is from a previously unpublished essay by the poet that will appear shortly in "Auden's Prose. Volume VI: 1969-1973."

Auden's view leaves an author in the role of a catalyst – something that helps a reaction take place, but is not part of the product. Stuff is floating around out there and when a writer assembles it in such a fashion that it captures interest, people apprehend it and react to it, each in their own way.  After doing his or her job, the author is left standing on the sidelines.

It could be even worse. "Are writers' intentions even known by the writers?" asks Rob Carlson in another letter to the editor on the same topic. Probably not, he suggests, arguing that modern psychology credits the unconscious with much of what humans say and do. Same goes for readers, he says, making it exceptionally difficult to understand a literary work. Just another way of saying it isn't about "one thing."

Then there is the nature of our celebrity-obsessed culture.

As Hayes has become increasingly well-known and well regarded, a problem has arisen.

"With popularity, it gets harder to know if people take you seriously. … I'm a person who never really wants to have his door closed. I want to have it open and see who's going to come in. (But lately) more and more people at the door care about me but not about poetry." 

Perhaps the more successful you are, the less successful you become -- at artistic endeavors at any rate.

R.H. Quaytman, an artist, arrived at a partial solution to that problem by requesting that gender pronouns not be used in any of the wall texts accompanying exhibitions of her art – initially because she didn't want to reveal herself in her work (the notion of artist as catalyst?). "It also began this interesting thing where they had to write press releases about the paintings instead of about me," she said. That's from an article in the March 29 "T," the New York Times Style Magazine.

Grist for the mill. What does it mean to be a writer or an artist? Probably more than one thing.