Give a two-year-old a book by a celebrated writer. No illustrations. No cover. Just text.
What have you given them? Something to stack, tear, or throw. Where is the celebrated writer's work?

Leave the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre after everyone has gone home. Put Homer and Ovid back on their shelves.
Lock Mozart's manuscripts safely in an archive. The materials remain: paint, paper, ink.
But where is the painting, the poetry, the music?

Now imagine Salieri looking at Mozart's score. Poor Salieri.
So overwhelmed by another man's creation that he fails to notice who is producing the music at that very moment.
He is.

Mozart cannot hear it for him. Nobody can. The sounds Salieri hears as he reads those marks exist through his own act of perception.
At that moment, Mozart is not there. No author is. There is only the music, and the one producing it.

I propose that perception is reproduction—and we should pay considerably more attention to the "production" in that word.
Reading a poem, seeing a painting, hearing music: in each encounter, someone brings a work into existence.
No reproduction is a lesser copy of an original. Each one is the work.

What they can perceive, what they can reproduce, and what they create through that reproduction belong to this particular encounter.
Nobody else can do it for them. The person who made the manuscript or covered the canvas has already done their work, and vanished with it.

Nobody knows who Homer was. The Odyssey has never needed to know. We still call one name "the author."
Perhaps that is a matter of contracts, not of creation.

So what are you doing when you read these words? Receiving something I have already completed?
Or producing something that cannot exist until you read it?

P.S. This would be an excellent moment to close the page in irritation. That possibility is included.