Reading Response for 4/19 : Constructing New Meaning

Stephen Dunn's "The Poem, Its Buried Subject, and the Revisionist Reader: Behind 'The Guardian Angel'" had some very valid observations about the reading and writing process such as his point about how when you come back to an old poem you have written, after years of not thinking about it, you come back as more than just the creator but as rather, as another audience member bringing a new understanding of and/or ideas about the meaning of the piece to the reading. His exact words on this concept were, "If twenty years have elapsed since you've written a poem... then you're likely that poem's revisionist" (210). One thing he writes shortly after that really reminded me of what poetry writing Professor Jeannie always reminds us in our workshop revisions and that was; "as author, no matter how well you've blended your intentions with your discoveries, the reader always completes your poem." That said I can also completely relate to the feeling Dunn expresses about this feeling of it being like someone trying to rename your child. When I had my first creative writing course at my junior college, having to listen to feedback on my work was the hardest thing because everything I'd written up to that point and even through that class were things that I had only intended for my own eyes and had no intention of sharing with a class full of my contemporaries. That said, over the last six years, much like Dunn I have come to the realize the importance of this process and value the feedback regardless of how hard it can be to hear sometime. I like how Dunn segues from this topic back to the revisionary process and one's own reading of their work. Similarly to how Dunn "rediscovered" his "Guardian Angel," just this week actually, I found some old journals while looking for a smaller notebook to carry in my purse and in it were a few old songs and poems I had written between the beginning of junior high through my early college career (I was always a sporadic journal writer and I never stuck with the same book long enough to fill it completely so I've lost many journals like this). It was interesting to see how differently I though about certain topics I had written about then (boys, animosity towards my step mother, etc.) in comparison to how similarly I perceive others like, nature, or my best friend (though even in this, my vocabulary had significantly improved with the years of practicing as had my mastery of the English language until I now am able to much better articulate the messages I'm intending to express through my poetry.) I have yet to have an epiphany of realization such as Dunn describes of his reading to a colleagues students. Despite this, I really like the concepts Dunn describes at one point between pages 214-215 about looking at his poem as architecture in eliminating excess content, that's seems like a very accurate description of how I felt in trying to thin out my catalog poem for class. I like how he played with the different endings for his poem and how in doing so, comes up with very different results each time but went with the one that spoke to him the most; I've never thought of it as having the decisions made for me before in my own writing. But, Dunn does a really good job of explaining the writing process he went through while creating "The Guardian Angel". While reading this I kept mental noting all kinds of useful writing tips and tricks I wanted to try for my revisions. This is a very useful, interesting article and I really enjoyed reading it, I didn't see the guardian angel as a metaphore for for the condition of the American poet coming but it was a suprisingly pleasant twist!