Birthday Bouquet
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May 17: Every time I get into one of my attempts to say what a poem is, I say something different from what I've said before. For my blog at Schoolwide, I'm now saying (tentatively) a poem has four layers: 1., what's on the page (or air if oral); 2., what the words mean to us semantically; 3., what the meaning means to us emotionally; and 4., the symbolic meaning of the poem--what its images, taken as symbols, say about one of humankind's Central Questions. I now see, I think, that I'm not describing what a poem is, but what the experience of it is. The movement of a poem into our brains.
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