Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

fuck it.

the reader doesn't read with my eyes and i don't read with the readers eyes.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying that "authorial intent has no effect at all on the actual words." That seems either carelessly phrased or downright false.

it has no effect because the bastard poet is probably telling a fabricated story. is every thing you write the truth? if not then how the fuck are we to distinguish lies from truth unless we see some external source material. it's one of the reasons i/we tell people "don't tell us what the poem is about after they write a preface or footnote. it psychologically taints the reading of the fucking poem. what's the point of feedback if we've already been told what it's about.

i can pick 10, no 50 poems most people wouldn't have a fucking clue as to what's being said, most people who read poetry don't even look beyond the words for hidden depth, they don't try or want to understand any metaphor, they read it and say "oh that's a lovely fucking poem. they don't start thinking mmmm, 'i bet because of the suffering in this poem she's took it up the arse a few time.' or 'this is a happy poem about kids, she must have 4 of them 2 of each and be married to great guy. we write happy poems and sad poems, dark and light poems, what type of person are we. the truth is we don't know, it's all guesswork without real facts.

poets write poetry, good poets write good poetry, seamus heany  wrote some good poetry [the titles escape me. he died a short while ago, all i know of him is this, he's fuckin dead, he's a man, he's irish, he wore glasses and he was a pretty fuckin good poet i didn't get any of this from his poetry ok maybe him being irish from the name ( it's still a guess though) i never felt his pain of love or hope, i only read of my own in his words. were his words true, i didn't care or need to know. it seems you do need to know the poet, it's a shame really because to as certain as you seem to be of who they are would require more than a psychic, it would require an act of god.

that
s my last word so fill your boots:J:.

Billy, point taken. But the dichotomy between truth/falsity you are presenting is superficial. Every lie, in some roundabout way, points to the very truth it tries to hide. That's all I've been trying to say. Sometimes, we can't help but to see the trace of the deeper mask that is the persona of a writer, behind the mask he dons in the act of writing. This is what often lends reading poetry and poetic fiction its poignancy for me. This is also why Hesse is one of my favorite authors: for him, writing was a way of wrestling with himself, as he projected all of his own struggles, pains, triumphs and hopes into many of the protagonists of his various novels.

Personally, this sort of esotericism is the sort of stuff that I live for. It is not exclusive to poetry, and often requires a godly amount of patience, meditation, re-reading and attentiveness. I am admittedly lacking in all of these. Sometimes, however, it all gels together, and I can see what lies beneath.

I'm convinced that the best and most devoted readers among us can ferret this sort of stuff out, even if I can plainly admit that I'm really only aspiring at this point. But what I'm talking about is the hidden gold within poetry that makes it so terribly rich, and keeps weirdos like me coming back to it, preferentially, over other forms of literature.

Richad Wollheim, a philosopher I admire, used to go to a museum in San Francisco, and sit for literally hours at a time in front of paintings. He would say that the painting would only start to get good after 45 minutes. I have to imagine he was seeing something, in those instances, than what he was projecting onto the paintings. What that something was, I think, at least in some cases, was at least a partial vision of the soul of the painting's author.