Author’s Intent doesn’t matter, and other inanities.

[Erthona]

Author’s Intent doesn’t matter, and other inanities.

People are fond of saying that the intent of the author does not matter. Of course it matters. It matters a great deal if I write bog, when I intended to write dog.

“I have had my bog for ten years and he is getting where he can’t see well.”

“His mind was as crooked
as a bog’s hind…”

The thing is that people are fond of picking up these sayings, and then repeating them without ever considering the impact; often offering them up as though fact.
I would ask people to consider what they say before they say it. The intent of a site like this is to help people become better writers; spreading misinformation does not help in that endeavor.
There are other catch phrases like this I could point out, but I will limit myself to this one and allow someone else to highlight another.

Dale

[Todd]

Dale,

I don't know if I would necessarily consider that phrase misinformation. It's more a type of shorthand that doesn't account for context.

Part of the creative process tends to blur the edges of intent in writing (at least in my experience).

I think what that phrase is mostly trying to say is: Hey author! Clarity is not the reader's responsibility and your ability to 100% interpret your work ends in a real way when it is realeased into the world. What it's probably mostly saying though is that intent by and large is crap what's important is actual execution.

All that said, I do agree with you that parroting a phrase without explanation isn't ultimately helpful.

[Leanne]

Yes, it matters. When a reader and I come to an agreement on what the poem means, it is a happy dance moment -- however, as Todd said, as a writer I have no control over where the reader goes with a poem and therefore, if because of different experiences, understandings or even just mood the reader takes it to an entirely unexpected place then that's a good thing too (unless they get exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve, in which case I usually write them off as irony-impaired or thickos...)

The basic understanding of the poem should, if it's well written, be similar for both writer and reader. How precisely the understanding of each element of the poem matches up largely depends on "the writer's intent", but a different kind of intent. If a writer intends a poem to be a clear narrative, for example, and instead it becomes difficult to work out who said what to whom, where they were and why the donkey looked nervous, then it's probably in serious need of help and can be considered a (temporary at least, until it's workshopped) failure. If the writer intends to make the reader laugh and instead the poem induces vomiting and an uncomfortable loosening of the bowel, one can assume it's missed the mark. If, however, the writer intends to present a set of carefully chosen images and concepts to spark the reader's own thought processes and send him/her on a surrealist journey with flamingo sausages, then whatever meaning the reader takes away from the poem will be largely personal, with just a slight nudge in the same direction as the writer.

I agree with the both of you lads, though, that repeating something you've heard somewhere by someone who claimed to have some authority but you don't really know what, without finding out the original context, is entirely useless and sometimes very damaging.

[Wildcard]

I know that intent of the author doesn't make a damn for me. I intend to write about all kinds of things, but I just write gibberish

I don't know a lot about all of this, but I'm learning a lot from listen to you guys prattle o- I mean discuss this subject knowledgeably.