Essay on the Poem as Gift

It seems natural to think that the poet gives their poem to the reader as a gift. The poem connects with the reader by giving them something of worth through the poem – enjoyment, hilarity, poignancy, a life message. The reader receives the poetic gift – finds it in their Facebook feed, for example – and likes or even loves it, and maybe comments appreciatively in the thread, giving the poet the crucial sense that the reader has been touched.

There’s no reason to belittle this nice view of the poetic exchange, except for one thing, which all poets acknowledge: readers are not anxious to read the poems that poets generously make available. Readers mostly ignore them – except, interestingly, for a few readers, also poets, for whom the poet has performed the generous and somewhat onerous service of reading and responding to their poems – or at least some of them.

I want to say that it's not so much that the poem is the poet's gift to the reader (the reader didn’t ask for it and doesn’t want to stop what they’re doing to read it), as that reading the poem is the reader’s gift to the poet. The poem is a gift mainly in giving the reader the opportunity to give the poet the gift of reading the poem.

The poet might say that they did everything they could to figure out what the reader wants and enjoys and will find valuable. The poet wasn’t writing onanistically for self-enjoyment, but was always solicitous of the reader, knowing the reader’s wants and needs and fulfilling them generously and selflessly. But the poet’s assumption of knowing what the reader needs is actually a bit of an affront to the reader. How do we feel when a stranger or even a friend claims to know what we want and need? We feel that our space has been violated and that someone is exercising power over us. The poem as gift affronts both our sense of self-worth and our desire to be left alone. How dare the poet presume to know what I need, and then intrude on my time and privacy? I believe that this is why nearly all potential readers ignore the poem and refuse the poetic gift, unless the poet has created an obligation in them by reading their poems.

The poem, to repeat, is a gift mainly in that it gives the reader the opportunity to give the poet the gift of reading the poem. For the reader, it’s an opportunity to experience the pleasure of recuperating the poem (but, of course, the reader doesn't know at first that the experience will be pleasurable; in any case, the pleasure may require a lot of work). Once the reader has recuperated the poem, the pleasure is the reader's not the poets, and at this point the poem really is a gift. It belongs to the reader now. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be incorrect readings, only that reading is ultimately where the meaning, the message, the pleasure of a poem resides.

It's worth pointing out that the poetic exchange does not take place in a vacuum. There is a triangulation:

        the poem/poet

        the reader

        the language, including the history of poetry

The poet and reader must share a language; otherwise, the poem is unintelligible; this is what Milton meant by his “audience fit though few.” If the reader chooses to read it, the poem switches on the lights of the language elements that the reader and poet share. The poem can only be a gift to or from one who has learned its language.

The main point is that the poet does not present the poem to the reader as a finished item like a necktie, a completed message that the reader simply consumes. The reader has to finish the poem – the last step in the brewer’s art. The reader pours the poem into their own glass made of language and of the history of poetry. The reader’s enjoyment of the brew is their gift to the poet. But the reader doesn’t have to give this gift, and it’s better if the poet doesn’t solicit it (the advantage of conventional publishing over self-publishing). It’s fine for a poet to make their work public, but no reader has time to read all the poems they’re constantly barraged with. Reading a poem should be a free choice, not an obligation.