approximate like feelings

Sometimes if I read a poem or listen to a song I don't know exactly what each part of it, or every word of it, means -- and I like it anyway.  Or don't.

This aspect is addressed on The French Exit blog, Feb. 14th, 2013 post:

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Knowing exactly what you mean is a sure sign that your poem is bad.  It is hard to know exactly what Jeff Alessandrelli's poems mean, and that's what makes them waver and shimmer, like the air above a fire.  They are approximate, like feelings.  If you have tried and failed to describe your own experience to yourself, you know what it's like to be in an Alessandrelli poem, a place where you can know something but not believe it, and vice versa; a place where understanding is not deeper knowledge but an alternative kind of access.
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Reading that made me think of the Peanuts comics, when one of the "gang" would hear someone say an answer to a question that had been on his mind, and then, recognizing the right answer, the 'wondering' character would be drawn with his mouth open very wide, crying out, in the cartoon balloon for speech:  "That's IT!"  And the other cartoon character would be thrown, by the strong, loud assertion, into an involuntary somersault, head-over-heels....

Reading what the French Exit's poet wrote up there made me feel like I was going, "That's it!!!"  ...

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"It is hard to know exactly what...poems mean"

"and that's what makes them waver and shimmer"

"Like the air above a fire"

"They are approximate, like feelings"

"a place where unerstanding is not
deeper knowledge, but --

an alternative kind of access."
========================== that'sitthat'sitthat'sitthat'sit

Tina Turner says something similar to that -- she says she doesn't want to give "a message" with a song -- she said for her it's not what the words are specifically, but more "the feeling that a song gives."

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