12-29-2011, 04:12 AM
It's funny where our brains lead us. I remember the conversation that sparked this -- it was with a young, very promising poet who was lamenting that people always demanded she explain everything to them and she felt that defeated the purpose of writing it in a poem. She asked me (as if I would know) why people need to have things laid out for them in perfect order and why they feel they should then offer life advice based on what they think they're seeing in a poem. She (and I) felt that these attempts to "fix" us were doing immense damage to our poetry, while the fixers walked away oblivious because they'd never really felt the poetry.
It could be worse