Frank Stella has died. He’s the one who said, “What you see is what you see,” with reference to painting (his painting, at least), a slogan someone described as “pithy and enduring.” I liked it so much I had it printed on a tee-shirt several years ago. Then wore that shirt.

I’ve adapted Stella’s slogan, with added emphasis, to reading poetry, because I have a bias, which is this: Publishing has consequences. I should have a say commensurate with the writer’s as to what a poem “means.” It falls to me, a humble (?) reader, to sense its burden and weigh its import. My job is to summon attentiveness, the poem’s to deserve it. What I make of the poem needn’t be, nor even can be, what Helen Vendler or Yvor Winters made, or would make, of it.

This cocky stance gravitates against a nagging unease that a poem will hover beyond my grasp, that I will fail to apprehend the message or signal encoded in it. Here’s a thought: The poem’s words and their layout on the page are its signal. The poem’s message becomes what I take from it and keep for a length of time. If it leaves no mark, verse stayed on the page, poetry didn’t happen.

My attitude makes nothing happen critically, but it keeps me chugging through shed-loads of verse with a mulish resolve verging on enjoyment.

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