The Poetics of Interpretation

by Wren Smith
March/April 2009

In Interpretation for Park Visitors, William Lewis introduces the concept of the interactive threesome. In describing this dynamic “Y” intersection where You the interpreter meets Your visitors at Your site, Lewis inspires the poet in me to see the similarities between the interpretive and poetic processes. After all, at the heart of interpretation is a poetic sensibility that is dynamic, creative, and inspiring.

Exploring the Work and Words of Poets can Inspire our Interpretive Efforts
We interpreters are as busy as most in the whirlwind of modernity. However it’s good to slow down and listen to other voices, to find amid all the details and deadlines still pools for reflection that resonate with our inner landscape. The poetic landscape is such a place. Freeman Tilden said, “An interpreter must be some kind of artist and at best a poet.” He understood that the same processes used by poets to hone their skills are also necessary to create powerful interpretive experiences. As you read the following excerpt from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, substitute the words interpretation and interpreter for poetry and poet and you will see that the passage rings true. Both disciplines arise from the same fertile earth and the inner landscape and both, arguably, have similar aims.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also it began through the process of seeing…feeling… hearing … smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. A poet uses the actual, the known event or experience to elucidate the inner, the invisible experience….

Whether writing poetry or prose, employing certain poetic devices helps make our language livelier and more evocative. In his book Interpretive Writing, Alan Leftridge reminds us that “poetry can provide emotional/intellectual responses not always possible in prose.” He also discusses how interpreters can and should use active verbs, alliterations, analogies, metaphors, similes, contrast and comparisons, and other techniques to clarify and energize their message. Although most of us routinely employ many of these poetic devices, we can become more attuned to their interpretive implications when we ponder our shared processes.

Poets use tangible things to convey intangible ideas, linking the known with the unknown.
Poet William Carlos Williams said, “There are no ideas…but things.” Williams was not suggesting that ideas don’t exist at all, but merely reminding us that ideas (whether shared by a poet or by an interpreter) are only available in the context of real things.

Mary Oliver echoes this notion in A Poetry Handbook.

In every instance something has to be known initially in order for the linkage and the informing quality of the comparison to work…. In the metaphoric device, this essence is then extended so that it applies to an unknown thing.

Beginning poets often omit concrete details from their early efforts. They try to tell rather than show their readers what they mean. They may write verse after verse containing “beautiful, lovely, peaceful days” and other similar abstractions. As they gain experience, however, they learn the value of using a more rooted language. Instead of saying “the beautiful blue sky,” they might say, “the sky, like a piece of polished turquoise shone above our heads.”

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda celebrated everyday things in much of his poetry. The following lines are from his poem, “Ode to a Pair of Socks.”

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd’s hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin….

By naming, knowing, or noticing the details of that which they love, poets can celebrate these “things.” In 1920, German-speaking poet Rainer Maria Rilke makes it clear in a letter to a friend, however, that really noticing or knowing about these “Things” can be difficult.

These things, whose essential life you want to express, first ask of you, “Are you free?”… and if the Thing sees that your are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off…. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe….

Interpretive Implications: Like inexperienced poets, new interpreters may be tempted to tell their audiences about beauty, loss, or the threat of extinction but fail to show them, either literally or figuratively, what they mean. Like poets, our awareness and our language should be “rooted” in the good earth of particular “things” or concrete imagery. Such attentiveness honors the vital force that we find there. Attention to the small details is essential but so too is the larger picture.

Poets sometimes bridge a perception gap between the small details and universal ideas by using a “telescoping” technique.
Poet Leonard Nathan, in A Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher, tells of a phenomenon discussed among quantum physicists known as the Principle of Indeterminacy. According to this principle, the more we concentrate on the details the more we miss the whole and the more we concentrate on the whole the more we miss the details.

Using contrasting perspectives poets strive to reveal how the large world is infinitely connected to the small. When a poet focuses on something small and close at hand (say an acorn), then attempts to perceive the tree or even the forest, he or she is employing a telescoping technique. The following familiar lines by William Blake illustrate this approach:

To see the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

When poets contrast the small world of details with the larger world of ideas and vice versa, they invite their readers to experience the ordinary in the light of the extraordinary.

Japanese poet Issa evoked the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye. Photo by Cris Knopf.

The Japanese poet Issa appears to have employed this telescoping approach in a famous haiku, by evoking the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye.

Interpretive Implications: Try switching back and forth between the small details, for instance the flowers of big bluestem, back to the big picture, perhaps noticing how prairies are havens of diversity, and back again. Telescoping is one way to scope out and develop potential themes. This technique also helps ensure that our interpretive efforts don’t become so immersed in details that we lose the big picture.

Like poets, we interpreters simultaneously delve into the processes of distillation and expansion. You give either a poet or an interpreter a peach, and both may attempt to share the hum of the whole orchard.

Poets use imagery not only to paint a picture but also to create effect.
Mrs. Shye, my seventh-grade teacher, took our class on an imaginary journey into the heart of a lemon. She invited us to close our eyes and imagine a lemon on the desk in front of us. She suggested we notice the shadows cast by the lemon, to feel its weight, to hold and roll it around in our hands. She encouraged us to notice the tiny pores and the knobby place left by the stem. She invited us to slice our lemon with an imaginary knife, to pick up and examine a lemon half, to notice the little translucent packages of juice and the white rind forming its wheel-like pattern, to smell and squeeze the lemon, to hear its juiciness. Soon, all of us were virtually bathing in this sensory-rich citrus experience. But that wasn’t all! Mrs. Shye ended our journey by asking us to take a big bite of that lemon! An audible gasp erupted from the class as we felt our faces contort and the saliva flow.

Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Lemon” invokes imagery to help us see this fruit as a cathedral. Photo by Vangelis Thomaidis.

Notice how Pablo Neruda leads us on a journey into the heart of the lemon through his use of imagery in a few lines from his poem “Ode to a Lemon.”

Cutting the Lemon
the knife
leaves a little
cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light of topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades…

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch.

Interpretive Implication: Learning to speak “imaginese,” poets and interpreters can evoke hidden worlds.

Although my first journey into the heart of the lemon was over 30 years ago, I never forgot the experience or what I learned about the power of imagery. Interpreters who effectively use imagery can help visitors experience the tangible world in new ways. Through imagery, we can offer our audiences experiences rich in mood and meaning and sometimes even transport them to other times and places.

Conclusion
Basho advised the poet writing of a pine tree to learn from the pine tree. When we interpreters go directly to the source of our wonder and inspiration we “fill the well from which we will draw.” When we allow our focus to switch from the small details to the bigger picture and back again, we create a footbridge across perception gaps. When we use language rich in imagery, we cultivate the possibility for illuminating encounters with the resources we cherish. The interpretive value of such a synthesized encounter is often greater than the sum of its parts. Both we and our visitors not only hear the music of prairie flowers but also of distant stars. Not only do we help our visitors forge emotional and intellectual bonds with our resource but we enable them to see the “trees” and the “forest.”

As interpreters, we share much in our labor with many fine poets and songwriters as we attempt to convey the passion we feel for the places we love. Kentucky poet Wendell Berry puts it beautifully in “Life’s a Miracle”:

I believe that this need for a whole, vital, particularizing language applies just as strongly to the sciences as to the arts and humanities. For the human necessity is not just to know, but also to cherish and protect the things that are known, and to know the things that can be known only by cherishing. If we are to protect the world’s multitude of places and creatures, then we must know them, not just conceptually but imaginatively as well. They must be pictured in the mind and in the memory: they must be known with affections, “by heart,” so that in seeing or remembering them the heart may be said to “sing,” to make a music peculiar to its recognition of each particular place or creature that it knows well.

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Wren Smith is a poet and an interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. Wren welcomes your insights and comments.