Creating Purpose - Sydni

There are two different types of purpose that make a poem: the purpose for which the author writes and the purpose that the reader finds in the poem. Neither are easy to identify seeing as it’s very seldom that we know the exact thoughts a poet is experiencing when they write a piece and because a poem can reach millions of people, all of whom can have just as many ideas about the one poem. Just the other day I mentioned my thoughts on Regina Spektor’s song “Reading Time with Pickle” to a friend who is a huge Spektor fanatic. I believe the whole song is symbolism for sex and masturbation while my friend vehemently disagrees and I have yet to find anything of Regina confirming or denying the meaning of her lyrics. Already one piece of art has three interpretations, three purposes: mine, my friend’s and the author’s.

In a themed poem or one with a strong outline, such as Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary or Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, it’s hard to miss the artists’ obvious purposes for his or her work. Poetry with such strong convictions is made to inform and persuade, to offer a completely different viewpoint on an idea or occurrence or to present it in a new way. Nowak contrasts the stories of Chinese miners with one story from America and a classroom instruction to show differences in safety and technology and comparisons in heartache; Smith gives a hurricane a voice, depicts simple stories of people running from a disaster. Their purposes aren’t hard to miss though on a case by case basis several readers can still come up with several ideas to such theme driven works of poetry.

But what of poetry that is more metaphorical than straightforward. Having written an essay on how Walt Whitman used poetry as a means of revealing himself as a homosexual, I know that there is poetry with a variety of lenses a reader can adopt. It’s these sorts of poems that allow for a laundry list of interpretations and blur the line between the author’s purpose and a reader’s. Whitman’s poetry specifically allows for broad interpretation; though a majority of his poems are stories or concentrate on nature, many deal with emotional responses in metaphorical ways that allow for unique interpretations and give readers a different sense of purpose. Applying emotions, observations and morals from writing can occur in many ways, one example being The Bible: there are people who interpret it in many different ways or who don’t find it credible at all. Each reader gives it and whatever else they read its own purpose by applying the idea to his life based on his preexisting morals and standards.

The existence of the two types of purpose is usually my main argument for analyzing poetry: even if the author is attempting to write about a specific subject and with a specific reason, our own interpretations are the ones that matter because we apply it to ourselves. But without this freedom to express our own ideas, we would be at a loss for poetry and no one would be writing. We all write for a purpose that is entirely our own, though it may overlap and coincide with the purposes of others and we can interpret our own purpose in writings, share our ideas and agree or disagree.