Poetry and Interpretation (Or Not)

Though we tended to be perceived as very similar men (which I suppose we probably were), my father and I did not share a great number of common interests. There were the ones he trained into me (like being a Mets and Jets fan. Thanks, Dad.), and one or two that I adopted so we'd have something we could do together when I was old and smart enough to want those things, but for the most parts, our definitions of fun were fairly divergent. He was all Statler Brothers, I was all Billy Joel. He was about solos, I was about the band. He preferred blondes, I preferred brunettes. And he never really figured out why I liked to write and why I called it "poetry" when it didn't rhyme.

Not that there weren't things we enjoyed together. We played many satisfying card games together - spades, pinochle, sheephead, euchre. We could both lose half a day to a good bit of historical nonfiction. We both habitually looked for the algorithms that defined number sequences. But I always suspected that we came to things a bit differently, and stuck with them for different reasons.

Near the end of his life, I discovered my father liked Scent of a Woman. We never discussed it, but I always had the feeling he best enjoyed the parts where Al Pacino was giving someone hell. It wasn't all that big a stretch to imagine my father applying a ranger choke hold as part of defending something he felt strongly about. But those aren't the parts of the movie that attract me. I liked watching Chris O'Donnell be honorably passive-aggressive, giving people a more gentle grief than the caricature his costar was portraying. It used to bug me a bit, that even when we agreed, my father and I, we disagreed (and on the golf course, the card table, and the homework desk, it was clear this was frequently the case). It took a long time to just get comfortable that there was something we could appreciate together, to enjoy for no other reason than that we both enjoyed it.

Fast-forwarding, I recently shared poem with someone who's known me for quite a while but only recently discovered my writing hobby, and this precipitated a predictable discussion ("Wow, you really write poetry?" "Is this the kind of poem you usually write?" "Do you read Good Housekeeping? I saw a poem in there last year."). This well-intentioned but generally uninformed sort of dialog has at times been a mild irritant for me (which I'm sure you can trace in the archive without too much trouble), and it surprised me not to have that reaction this time. My recent rediscovery of Poe  has me reliving some dusty memories that have softened my edges a bit.

This includes experiences like a college classroom debate about "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", in which the professor posited a possible interpretation of "His house is in the village, though/He will not see me stopping here" as an atheistic comment. I remember that students who hadn't had a strong opinion about anything in the past 2 months were suddenly agitated and vocal. I also remember them breaking into two camps, basically "all real poets are skeptics" versus "Robert Frost is Norman Rockwell." I don't remember how it ended, but it's evidence of why "Woods" is a great poem - it evokes interpretation and passion. Decades later, I still don't know what Frost meant. It's not important to my connection with the poem.

While it's nice to have a shared mindset with someone, I realize that's a basis for forming a club, not for creating great poetry (or art in general). I've finally gotten comfortable accepting the "This can't be poetry, I get this!" response and people's confidence that they know exactly what I was trying to say. It's good just to be happy that they have a strong response to my poems. At least we can have that much in common.