Intention and Critique

[Leanne]

there’s a difference between writing a poem and writing a thesis on gophers.
If poets knew their own minds well enough to understand what they were writing, they’d just write a note with fifteen bullet points.
Poetry is therapy for the writer, like free association writing, but with rules to give it the semblance of useful work. When the poet writes, he only half knows what his subconscious is trying to see.
Hence the poetry of Eliot and Dylan Thomas, and Hopkins, which seems to have layers of meaning.

So in summary, there is no intent.

Big thumbs up to Achebe, who knew what he was writing, even if he didn't intend to know...

But yes. Poets might make deliberate word choices, but meaning choices? That's up to the reader, and the meaning will shift once it's out of the writer's head. As an editor, one-on-one with a writer, I will sit and ask specific questions about intent -- but as a reader on a workshop, who doesn't get paid to do that, I'd prefer to explore what the poem does to/for me instead and not what the writer's second cousin's racist aunt thought about the dog next door.