Confession...

I have a bit of a confession to make.. I've never really liked solving riddles and I've never been that great at it! As a child, I would flip to the back of my activity books almost immediately, without even attempting to perform the mind tricks necessary to solve the puzzles seemingly designed to aggravate me. Even in "Choose Your Own Adventure" books I would read the end conclusions of each narrative path before deciding whether to take door one or door two.

It's perhaps not surprising that for most of my adolescents I was one of those individuals who believed poetry to be "difficult," a code one had to crack. There's something satisfying in an allegory wherein a=z, b=y, and so on. It took some time before I realized that poetry did not operate in this fashion. Even allegories do not operate in this manner, and rather hold the literal and symbolic meanings simultaneously, like the magician's juggling balls suspended in air. Poetry is full of paradoxes, two opposites things held simultaneously and at once. Perhaps this, despite my initial frustration at solving puzzles, is what drew me to poetry, and to the genre of riddles.

Riddles, like all metaphor, allows you to hold two things in your mind simultaneously, and retain their differences. Metaphor "is" and "is not" at the same time, a distancing and pulling closer. Riddles are an act of simultaneity that engages in an appreciation of language, and for this reason I feel like the wool that's been pulled over the reader's eyes is swept away. By highlighting the act of solving riddles, as though poetry is a code that the reader must crack, I feel that I am exposing the magician's secrets. By placing so much emphasis on the act of solving, I feel (perhaps somewhat paradoxically) that the reader is freed from the language of means and of ends, and can appreciate the poem's language, its purely literal interpretations, or nothing of this sort.

I don't believe that poetry is meant to be "solved." I need to mull this over a bit, to bring some clarity to my thoughts, but I don't think that riddles are really meant to be solved either, in any concrete way. I think that the real game is beneath this pretense; it is the act of concealing and revealing through language.




(maybe)