not ‘proper’ poetry – just a bit of fun with words wot rhyme!
War of the Words
Now Barthes once said ‘The author is dead’ so I have to let go of my prose, however redeeming, whatever the meaning, it’s only the reader who knows
how words which are read (like things that are said) can take on a whole different meaning, as issues of who (and knowledge and truth) depend on who’s doing the reading.
All writers will find, below each bottom line, there’s a host of mixed interpretations, with lots to be learned from the postmodern turn and its crisis of representations.
As we start to unravel the roads we have travelled which bring us to our destinations we see how the ‘asks’ in our research-based tasks are linked to our social locations;
but what matters more are the battles and wars which are fought between structure and agency, where so much depends how we manage this blend between selfhood and who self might want to be.
It’s the same for the poet and life as they know it, reflected in all their renditions, where words try to strive, to catch and describe all the quirks of the human conditions,
so I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s not hard to see how research and poetry blend, how issues of seeing, of truth and believing, are similar things in the end,
and the skillset to write what is clear and concise is all part of the art of creation, whether PhD thesis or poetry treatise they both have the same motivation.
For wordsmiths and seers and text engineers and dabblers in quests and hypothesis, for teams of reformers or lonely explorers of credence and theories of consciousness,
what your words mean (and how they are seen) is based on the world we’re all living in, and this knowing in turn depends how we’ve learned to interpret our social conditioning.
At the end of the day whatever you say or do to express creativity, people will moan, and grumble and groan, for you can’t control their subjectivity.
So I have to conclude all meaning is skewed as we all possess unique philosophies, and what we receive and what we believe helps build our creative ecologies.
Our epistemology and our ontology all affect our observations, so you might write the words but it’s clearly absurd to expect to rule interpretations.
Researcher or poet it’s not how you know it, it’s all about setting it free, because Barthes spoke true and whatever you do…the meaning is all down to me!
Sue Watling (August 2016)
digital academic 