On June 23rd, the three of us tackled MEANING in writing. We come from a generation of polysemantics, or writing that has multiple meaning. We started off with a Edwin Denby quote provided by past guest, Tinker Greene: the holding of the poem renders meaning. Can we say that something has meaning when it has coherence? Another level of meaning is contained in the conversation about a piece of art, even when we might be questioning the piece's efficacy. We talked about how writing constraints play with the possibility of meaning.
Art is always a form of communication, a social object. When we make art, we may have an audience in mind. Readers bring their own stuff to the poem that informs the meaning they derive from it. But even if we are not invested in the meaning our audience gets from our writing, how do we react if a reader derives meaning that runs contrary to our core values? Through this conversation, we grappled with the 'death of the author.' Once a poem is released into the world, in a sense it no longer belongs to the writer, because the audience will imbue it with meaning.
Towards the end, we talked about how journalling fits into our ideas about meaning, and how writing that is never shared with others functions within our writing practice.
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