finding a reader

It's really neat to write things, like poems, and eventually have those things blend into or make an unusually favorable impression on another consciousness. Most readers will not care for your stuff. Experiences and the tastes derived from them are variable. Some dispositions of soul are not commensurable with yours, and that's life. There's no guarantee you will ever reach a perfect reader for your poems or whatnot.

But if you do find that reader, it makes it all worthwhile.

Sometimes I ask myself: what are you up to, in a general sense, with your poem writing? I'm too scatter-brained to form a coherent answer for myself. Maybe there is no coherent answer. But when I find a special reader, it sure seems like I've been up to something with an overall thrust or meaning. 

A person who has given me some resonant feedback is Isabelle. The depth of her commentary leads me to believe she has indeed sounded far beneath my waves of words. She provides clues that help me understand my written effects and what they're straining toward. There is a genuineness to her remarks, and they are without flattery. She gets whatever it is that I'm trying to do with poems. Most cool.

It's not a uni-directional thing. You discover, among your few close readers, an appreciation forming in yourself for their own artistic visions, their own crafting of world into distinctive, peculiar shapes. 

I realize how much I respond to Isabelle's world of expression. Her paintings -- subtle washes over an almost spiritized draftsmanship -- speak as something familiar to me, as some alignment with myself to her deftly rendered forms and understated coloring.

How could it be otherwise? And what would be the value of Me-ism -- of simply placing another's appreciation for some things I've written on the shelf of ego? It has to be about something other than interior shelves. It has to be about the outside, in the open mutual air -- a commune space, with a boulevard for walking into one another's sensibilities.