Are Friends Diaries?

This poem is a question;
This question is a poem:
Are friends diaries?
Are diaries friends?


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I've had an idea for a kind of poetry-iceburg, where the tip-of-the-iceburg is a poem and the leviathan lurking below the waves is literary-analytical commentary of the poem I've just written by the poet himself. The whole of which becomes itself a kind of poem. Of course the author is dead, and the submarinian leviathan (the bit you're reading now) becomes a bit of a zombie which hangs on afterwards and tries to pursuade you that the poem really means what thinks it means.

Meaning resides in the act of reading and sense-making, in the the parsing of individual words or the deriving of a general sense for broad passages (what for example are you thinking reading this extended ramble in relation to the somewhat tighter passage above?). So now this iceberg becomes an interaction, perhaps a battle, between what you think the poem means, what "I" tell you it means, and what you think me telling you what it means means, and then what you think having the two together, one on top of the other, means.

If anything.

Perhaps it's something of a futile Ozymandean task to posthumously (since the author is dead) control the interpretation of my thoughts.

To stop this meta discourse for a moment and return to the damn poem, it's a sort of metaphorical form of "hendiadys" - it's a real rhetorical device you can look it up. It's essentially the linking of related but distinct concepts to at once flesh-out and problematise a description. Shakespeare uses it a lot: for example in Richard II, 'Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s, | And nothing can we call our own but death | And that small model of the barren earth | Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.' Usually the two concepts are linked by an "and", as in the example, which strives to highlight the linking similarities.

Here (as in, in the italic text you are about to read, and then when you read the poem again to see how it applies) hendiadys is being used to highlight the etymology of the word 'metaphor' itself, coming from the Greek 'to carry over' - itself a metaphor: a metaphor doesn't literally carry over the aspects of one thing to another as it is not a physical being with limbs with which to carry, nor could one physically carry an aspect. Anyway go and look back at the poem with all that in mind, ta.