Oh, the Irony

[Erthona]

Re: ambiguity. As with any trope, ambiguity can be put to good or poor purpose. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses it to excellent purpose in "Young Goodman Brown". When ambiguity is used so that the possible answers move past a certain level, the writing begins to become senseless. When a phrase can mean anything, it means nothing. When ambiguity is used purposefully and well it restricts the choice of the reader to one of two choices, such as it was a dream, or it was real. If for instance there are three phrases in a poem that are ambiguous, and each phrase could be interpreted as any one of five different possibilities, then there becomes the possibility of 125 different combinations; the higher the possible combinations, the higher the amount of meaninglessness. Generally the source of a high amount of ambiguity is the writer assuming that the reader knows everything he knows. When the level of ambiguity becomes too high, the reader is presented with too many choices and becomes overwhelmed, finding that the writing is simply not worth the effort to decipher, or that it can not be deciphered. Either way, little to no information is conveyed from the writer, to the reader, and one has to ask the question, "Why write at all?" If one person among many comments that they do not understand all or part of what you are saying, it can generally be ignored and the assumption made that person has too small amount of intelligence to comprehend what has been written. If two people comment about the lack of clarity, then one must seriously consider the possibility of a problem that exists with the writing. If all who comment point to a lack of clarity, or meaning as is the case here, then one can no longer hide behind the excuse of dumb reader, and must admit (or fall upon the choice of being willfully ignorant), that there is a problem with the poem and not the readers. I see nowhere in the comments that anybody was expressing anything more than sincere confusion as regards the poem. If however, you are looking for people who will only praise your work and never offer serious criticism, then there are plenty of vanity web sites available to suit ones purpose. If you like I can tell you of one site where they let you remove any comments you dislike, if you could do that here, you would have no comments...

An excellent way of discouraging people from giving honest comment, and thus a real valuation of the poem is to attack anyone who gives you a comment you dislike. Any decent poet welcomes joyously anyone who will to point out flaws in his work as he understands that although often painful, it is the only way we will improve as writers.

from-Giving Critique and Feedback.


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