Panel on Meaning

On March 23rd there was panel discussion on Meaning at the Tree Reading Series of Sina Queyras, Rob Winger, Susan McMaster and Erín Moure.
(A better picture is John W MacDonald’s here]
Here are some gleanings from my jottings. (No vid of the event went online yet.)
Susan said the essential quality of poetry is the act of paying attention.
There was some discussion on how Lucy versus Rae Armantrout respond to Dickinson. Are loose ends all tightly wound and tucked or let be directions outward?
Sina talked about how what you say comes as a response from the context of what you can’t say.
Erín said that when you consider it, writing is preposterous when you could just talk. To go to the trouble to write assumes a wider audience that you wouldn’t normally talk to which brings in the element of the communication being an ethical gesture.
When asked how closely he followed the actual life or Muybridge, Rob in part of his response raised the question, why not fabricate for pleasure? In different kinds of stories there is a diiferent ethical weight to embellishment.
Sina talked about a series of exercises she gave to make a poem of 1) a nagging childhood worrysome memory
2) an historical event 3) a hated peer 4) a poem that combines the previous 3. This gives a space between self and the inner moral judgements that you do and do not want to make and forces a posit of a fiction.
Rob said that to ask meaning from a poem can be a nonsensical question as much as why is platform back updown your banana face? There’s a tyranny in a priority categories.
Erín said that to reduce a poem to what you already explicitly consciously know and be consistant with what you know is to confine yourself to sense and known things but to make sense of something is the job of the reader. To write and to read is to reach beyond what you already know.