At a school visit recently, I lied to a teacher. I lie regularly when people ask what I meant when I wrote something. I usually look at the poem and explain what the poem is about. But that’s not necessarily what I meant when I wrote it.
Clarion, October 2011.
The poem in question on that day was “Written in Snow,” from BOOKSPEAK! POEMS ABOUT BOOKS (Clarion, 2011). The poem shows stories venturing out, leaving tracks, and hurrying home. I think I was comparing stories to bunnies. (Awwww…)
But that’s the easy answer. It’s like saying I must have been shopping for a teal skirt because that’s what I bought. But I was probably shopping for pants that didn’t gap embarrassingly when I knelt down. But the store was sold out of those, and I ended up with a teal skirt instead. I can tell you why I like the teal skirt now, but I can’t explain what brought us together. The brain does its mysterious thing, you know?
I have lots of poems that I don’t know what I meant to say. Here are just a couple of first drafts from my poetry diary.
the woman ahead
wears the world
for a hat
I sway like
an indecisive meteor
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
Underwater
My cup holders overflow–
Heavy mermetal music thrums waves–
And the wind tastes like chlorine
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
There are moments that intrigue me in each draft. But if I ever revise these and build real poems, I wouldn’t be able to say what I meant when I sat down and started the poem.
Once a poem emerges, then I figure out what I’m trying to say. It’s in the revision stage that I usually give intention to a poem. Often, what I think I want to say totally changes during revision. For BOOKSPEAK!, for instance, I wanted to write a poem about how trees become paper, which I think is cool. That’s what I meant to write about. And I did. I wrote a really forced, dry first draft.
I Was a Tree
They chopped, pulped, squeezed, dried
I was reborn as a book–
Recycling magic!
Ugh. But somewhere in revision, the tree morphed into a writer itself, writing on the sky. And then it became paper, a sky for another reader.
Paper Sky
My limbs wrote on the sky with orange leaf pens.
Now I will be your sky.
Are you ready?
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
Millbrook Press, February 2012.
Lovely collage art by Josee Bisaillon makes the metaphor clearer. But I’ve had readers ask, “What did the tree write on the sky?” (Good question…What would you write on the sky if you were a tree?) “Was it really writing? Or did it just look like it was writing?” (I think it was just winter branches that reminded me of pencils.) “Is the tree making an environmental statement?” (Nope. At least, not consciously.)
I’m not trying to be flip. And I understand why readers want answers. I would love to crawl inside my favorite writers’ minds and witness their process. But these are questions I often can’t answer.
Not only do poems change in meaning from first draft to last, but sometimes I don’t even remember writing them! In that case, I have not the slightest idea what metaphor I had in mind or what image I saw. The best I can do is recreate what seems to make sense to me now.
Here’s a poem I know I wrote. But I don’t remember writing it at all. It’s from my 2010 poetry diary.
Homework: Become a Snake
My editor said,
“Write a poem
about this picture”
Slithery snake
wearing a sly smile…
two tiny pink mouse feet
and one whip-slip tail
disappearing down
the snake’s throat
Couldn’t I just conjugate
“to swallow” in Latin?
Or write a 500-word report
on the habits and habitats of corn snakes?
Or diagram snake anatomy,
including spine and stomach, heart and fang?
But I am a writer, a poet, a magician.
I must be the snake,
undulate my muscles across fields,
soak August sun into my scales,
and feel the crunch of fragile mouse inside my mouth
and like it
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
At least with that one, I know what it means. Here’s one I don’t remember writing, and I have no idea what I meant by it:
High-speed life
Hi-def
Til death
Tilled dirt
Stilled birth
Afterburn
Fore and aft
Pacin
No spacing
Racing
High-speed life
–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved
I guess what it all comes down to is that when you ask a poet what she meant in a certain poem, she might not know the answer. And since I feel strongly that a reader creates half the meaning of a poem, I’d encourage you to try to answer it yourself. You have at least as much chance of being right as I do!
Laura Purdie Salas.
Laura Purdie Salas is the author of more than 100 books for young readers, mostly poetry and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection is BOOKSPEAK! POEMS ABOUT BOOKS (Clarion, 2011—Minnesota Book Award, NCTE Notables, Bank Street Best Books, Nerdy Book Award, White Ravens Award, Gelett Burgess Honor Book, and Librarians’ Choice). You can visit Laura at her website, blog, Facebook, and Mentors for Rent site (an hourly mentoring service for writers).
[...] blog, The Hate-Mongering Tart (who can resist that blog title?). I’m writing about “Poetic Amnesia: or What Did I Mean When I Wrote That?” [...]
On her own blog, Laura doesn’t often talk all that much about process and all but what she points out here is true of most poets and writers: we don’t often know what we’re talking about until we’ve said it, it means different things to us in different phases of the work, and then often means something utterly and completely other to our readers.
I think that works especially well for poetry for children, because they need to learn early that they are part of “the conversation” and the narrative in literature, and that there are no right/wrong answers, despite what your lit teacher may try and tell you about “what the poet was trying to say!”
Yes, Tanita! (And as I’m sure you figured out, this whole poetic amnesia thing is why I DON’T talk much about process. :>)