On Wed, 13 May 1998, cris cheek wrote:
> What worries this writer, is the idea that to have more readers
> engaged with the meaning-making that is reading of one's work, somehow
> attributes 'value' to the writing.
It worries me a little too, but since readers generate 'value' it's
natural enough that some authors/publishers overshoot when
trying to get an audience.
My 'worry' is more that many peoople I meet have narrow range of
meaning-making modes. Too often there's a phase 1 where the
literal meaning is extracted - the poem is translated into
prose, allusions are dereferenced, ambiguities converted into
lists of possibilities. Not until the poem has passed this
test of "meaning" does phase 2 begin, where people ask
"What does it really mean?" "What is it about?" and expect
short answers - a list of keywords to index the poem under.
This approach works ok on the poems read at school, but doesn't
work well where the pyramid is flattened: where wordplay and
character development compete on a level playing field, where
expectation-based disambiguation is unavailable, etc. FWIW,
some notes are in
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/resolution.html
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