Identitying A Poem
Stanley Fish’s identification of a poem is not primarily based on the appearance of lines, stanzas, or various pentameters; rather he believes that the way to identify a poem rests ultimately in the reader‘s ability to assign meaning or interpretation to a group of words. Though Fish’s belief that, “interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing” is outlandish and farfetched to some, my beliefs on determining poetry parallel with that of Fish. I believe that poetry can be any group of words as long as they are defended poetically; which means that there is an underlying meaning in each group of texts and that underlying meaning is constructed by the reader. Furthermore, a poem is a poem due to its properties of deeper connotation, its opportunities for personal interpretation, and its unapparent relativity to poem structure.
Too often poetry is bound and rarely diverges from the rules and regulations of what structured poetry really is. Poetry is delimited by thoughts of quatrains, couplets, and syllables which ultimately demand one certain thought of sequence to be attributed by a reader who might have been discouraged in his or her interpretation of a poem. In addition to Fish when it comes to critics who support this notion of constructing meaning by the reader, is Jerome McGann who finds meaning is created through the reader’s experiences therefore allowing of a certain text to attribute their own meaning and intimately understanding the text of which they just read. I support these two critics because they believe that it is important for the reader to get out of the text whatever he or she can that will personally stimulate the reader’s thoughts of meaning, intimacy, and personal interpretation. Looking at Sample 1: Transcripts, after reading it I immediately saw this as poetry. To most readers of Sample 1, it may look like a conversation or an interview even between two people; but I saw this sample’s meaning lied in...
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