I hereby vow that I will not spend the next ten weeks hyperventilating about analyzing poems down to the molecular, nay atomic, level. I won’t. I will read the path of poems chosen, enjoy them or not, think about them, dip into the discussion and run away at the earliest possibility. It would destroy my brain to think that a) poets ponder the meaning of every word and bit of punctuation they write down and that b) we somehow know more about the poem than the author ever did.
When people pester me about what my quilts “are about” or what “it means” I ask them what they think. What comes out is their reaction to my work. If I caught them blathering about what *I* mean by it, I’d knock ’em upside the head and tell them to shut up.
