After the poem is written, the creative process continues. People experience it in their own way, with their own interpretations and their own feelings. They are reading their own poem within my framework. Now who is the poet? And what is the poem?

No matter what is written, the readers will change it:

1. They will add their responses, thoughts, and images.
2. They will subtract the phrases that they don't elicit a reaction or an understanding.

And each time the poem is read, it is a different poem, in the light of the present moment's feelings and perceptions. The words of the poem will appear to change shades of meaning as we change; and different poems will seem to arise from the one, as it is shared and given life by people's enjoyment.

We can deliberately make our poems vague and airy, to allow the readers more freedom to write their own poem within the gentle suggestions of the written verse. Perhaps our thoughts are so alive that we don't want to define them into specifics that would lead the readers down a straight-line mental experience to a logical conclusion; instead, the readers can use imagination to add the details -- the setting, or the appearance of the characters.

"... Every reader must be at least half a poet, and bring a creative response to the poet's creation." (Lawrence John Zillman, in The Art and Craft of Poetry, copyright 1966 by Lawrence John Zillman.)

When we read a poem, we give the energy of our attentiveness as a gift to the poem. We can feel an outward flow of energy which gives life to the poem, and then we experience our own life in its words.

Oriental pen-and-ink drawings express incompleteness, as the artist conveys feelings of the frailty of this world's reality. The thin, indistinct lines fade into emptiness, as though the wanderer in the illustration will walk into that emptiness, or perhaps create the lines of another mountain to climb.

As Dylan Thomas said, "You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in."