PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I have over the years come to realise that we probably never actually share meanings with our words and language but rather share and partake/participate in conventions with which to produce meanings. People can receive exactly the same denotation while inhabiting very different emotional or conceptual worlds. So even when the denotative referent may be identical, the emotional and moral field could very well be radically different. Language and words themselves trigger these associations, and interpretation has begun even before we are conscious of our process.  In that sense, language not only communicates though but predisposes thought. On the receiving end, who gets to decide what a word means? Language may succeed linguistically while simultaneously failing socially. A case in point is watching movies again after say a decade or two. Our interpretations would have changed over time. In the end, for now, it would seem that language conventions are only the entry fee. And a poem does not derive its force from dictionary meanings but derives that force from what happens after convention has done its work. What the reader does with them while any number of realities generated from them proliferate. Hence, a word itself may be less a container than it is a trigger, more a seed rather than a parcel. Words invite rather than divulge. Poetry survives better than philosophy for this reason. Philosophy often seeks correct understanding while poems often dwell in fertile misunderstanding. Not in error but more in a multiplication of meanings that neither poet nor reader entirely controls. Perhaps it isn't really a failing of language but a distinct dynamic of language in daily use. Perhaps.