"Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important"
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Laughlin is quietly pushing back against the cult of the poet-as-oracle. Calling a poem a "two-way street" sounds almost disarmingly plain, but it smuggles in a serious aesthetic argument: the reader is not a passive consumer of meaning, they are a collaborator. A poem that arrives fully sealed, requiring only dutiful decoding, is "no good" because it leaves no room for the reader's private inventory of memories, associations, and half-buried feelings. The key verb is "suggest". Laughlin is defending indirection as the engine of lyric power: the poem provides a charged set of cues, and the reader completes the circuit.
That first movement could be mistaken for a case against authorial presence altogether. Then he swerves: "But I do think poetry readings are very important". Subtext: the poem may be co-authored by the reader, yet the poet's voice still matters as an initiating force. In the mid-20th-century American poetry world Laughlin helped shape through New Directions, this matters culturally. Modernism and its descendants prized difficulty, fragmentation, and open-endedness; at the same time, poetry was fighting for public oxygen as mass media consolidated attention elsewhere. The reading becomes a kind of bridge technology: not a replacement for the intimate, solitary transaction of reading, but a ritual that re-socializes the art, lowers the intimidation barrier, and reasserts poetry as a live, embodied act.
Laughlin is threading a needle: defend interpretive freedom without sliding into "anything goes", and defend performance without pretending it can solve the poem for you. The point is participation, not permission.
That first movement could be mistaken for a case against authorial presence altogether. Then he swerves: "But I do think poetry readings are very important". Subtext: the poem may be co-authored by the reader, yet the poet's voice still matters as an initiating force. In the mid-20th-century American poetry world Laughlin helped shape through New Directions, this matters culturally. Modernism and its descendants prized difficulty, fragmentation, and open-endedness; at the same time, poetry was fighting for public oxygen as mass media consolidated attention elsewhere. The reading becomes a kind of bridge technology: not a replacement for the intimate, solitary transaction of reading, but a ritual that re-socializes the art, lowers the intimidation barrier, and reasserts poetry as a live, embodied act.
Laughlin is threading a needle: defend interpretive freedom without sliding into "anything goes", and defend performance without pretending it can solve the poem for you. The point is participation, not permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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