Poetry Tip: Don't Communicate

[Leanne]

One of the habits of beginner poets (and many not-so-beginner) is belabouring a point to make sure that the reader knows exactly what the poet intended, and if the reader doesn't get the same idea out of an image that the poet thought was going in, the poet feels he/she has failed to communicate it properly. In fact, what the poet has done is befuddle the poor old reader, who has a whole other set of experiences and understandings and quite likes to impose those over the poems he/she reads, so that when he/she comes across a very specifically-drawn, overly explained image so much time is spent puzzling out what it means that the guts of the poem become completely irrelevant. I generally call these "closed images" -- they allow the reader no scope and actually don't give the reader a lot of credit for imagination, they just demand a single interpretation as if they're clues in a cryptic crossword.

I don't like them, can you tell? And I hate it when I discover them in my own writing, but we all like to be understood and accepting that the reader might get something entirely different from our poem is a very difficult step.