Reading Between The Lines

Having been an avid reader for practically my entire life, I have done a fair bit of reading between the lines. I will never forget that all through high school, I fought tooth and nail with Martha Carlson about poetry and it's meaning. Her philosophy was that when a writer wrote a poem, that it had one meaning and one meaning only and it was your job as the reader to get inside the writer's head and discover that meaning. I completely disagreed. Now that I am much more educated than I was in high school (thank you $70k worth of debt), I know, pretty much without a doubt that I was right. 

I fancy myself to be a writer... as you know if you are reading this blog. The whole reason I started it was to force myself to write more, and it's been working. Someone asked me yesterday what inspired my poetry, and honestly, there's no one source of inspiration for me. Sometimes I see something outside that blows my mind... even more often it's a smell that gets me going. On the way home today I smelled the most amazing and intense "pine needle in-the-sun" smell. That gets me going. Sometimes it's events that are occurring in my life, sometimes it's stuff I've seen on TV or read about in another place, or dreams that I've had or the drama that might be going on in someone else's life. It's hard to say all the time where it comes from, but sometimes the words just flow and one thing leads to another and a poem ends up on paper. I look back at my writing and sometimes I don't remember writing things or what I was thinking about at the time. 

I remember hearing a story from a professor in college about the poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke. Supposedly when he first wrote the poem, it was a happy memory for him of good times spent with his father. Apparently when he looked back on it later in life however, he saw it as something totally and completely different. He re-read his own words that came out of his pen in his hand and instead of seeing that happy memory, he saw a drunken and disorderly dad and a dysfunctional family. That just goes to show you, that even the writer him or herself can read between the lines differently depending on the time. 

When you read, you bring all of yourself and your background with you to what you're reading and I think that's why I love to read so much. Every time I read something, it might mean something different to me. I have read The Great Gatsby a million times, and every time I read it, I get something different out of it. The same can be said for every piece of literature I have ever read. Depending on my frame of mind, my mood, what I've eaten or watched on TV, conversations I've had, dreams I've had... it means something different to me. 

I remember taking a Critical Analysis class in college (two actually, but that's a long story for another time) and I was told very specifically when analyzing poetry, you never refer to the person in the poem as the author. Just because a person writes a poem, that does not mean that they are the speaker in the poem. Poetry is not necessarily non-fiction. It could be entirely false. Chances are, it just might be.