[a spin-off from Metrical Poetry:My Secret Kept Alive]

Carol Taylor - "In my opinion, if practiced readers can't find the meaning in a poem, (and by the meaning I mean the one the writer is trying to put across)" ... then the writer is writing for himself ...

bear_music - is it required that every poem make clear what it is "about"? In the particular instance, I specifically did not want to do that.

Porridgeface - I think you should announce it to the reader with some sort of preface that: "This poem has no specific meaning."

Call me old-fashioned, but I always have problems with the idea that the poet's intentions should be a factor in the reader's appreciation of a piece. Who knows what a person really intended? And if a poet writes what they think is a sad poem but everyone else thinks is a superbly funny one, then the poem (but perhaps not the poet) is a success.

I think poetry can embody many types of "meaning" (from
the type of meaning an essay has to the type of "meaning" a melody has) and not all the types sit well with the idea of intention.


The idea of a poem needing a central meaning troubles me too. Maybe "Voice" or Word's Outliner are to blame. I often like pieces without a centre ("The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" - Glyn Pursglove)

I've always enjoyed Archibald Macleish's Ars Poetica, in which he says,

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the empty history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea --

A poem should not mean
But be.

i think "aboutness" is a kind of optical illusion, like
perspective. it depends on a reader's familiarity with
certain cues. after tradition, there is only familiarity
with a body of work or the works of a clique, or else
various pseudo-contexts, such as the media or a given
canon.

writing in ignorance of this can produce work that rings
hollow or seems deeply mysterious, depending on your taste.
but it is almost impossible to write something profound
without using symbols that have a history to them.

...but it is almost impossible to write something profound
without using symbols that have a history to them.

But therein lies the problem - the architecture and the tools to build them with are tainted by culture and history - the imposition of shared meaning upon them. It was the problem faced by modernists - to dispense with the tools of tradition as they were not able to offer something new. It was essentially the same argument the Frankfurt school said of popular culture, in that it was so overwhelmingly reified, it was not possible to overcome its domination - and that only the 'New' - like Adorno's 'New Music', was able to offer liberative potential through dialectical interaction. Adorno had to eat his words after only a few years. Real art has Benjamin's 'Auratic effect', and can be difficult to pin down precisely - but I do believe the 'old' is still, for me, the best way of finding newness - the urge to disappear beyond the extreme limits of interpersonal understanding is an academic exercise which does not necessarily come up with good poetry (as neither does keeping within the metrical tradition - but I believe it's more likely). I agree with Bob - good poems are. Why they are, of course, is socially mediated - but I know my bias and understand it.

In the end, can we be wholly new? - isn't everything a recapitulation of something else - books speak of books - but it might appear to be a fresh take on an issue.

Now - can someone make a Horror film in a new way? That would be something.

I have always maintained that language itself is borrowed, handed down from generation to generation, and although we might create "new words," we are still using the same old consonants and vowels...When I think of "new," I think of new arrangements. I.e., the parts are old, but the thing as a whole has never existed before.

Back to Tim's question: bear_music's poem inspired me to reconsider "voice," or maybe a better word would be "personality" or "character" as one alternative to a definitive meaning for a poem. I won't go so far as to say that Shakespeare "invented" the human a la Bloom, but the way I experienced "My Secret Kept Alive" is similar to the way I would experience most of the characters in Shakespeare's plays: They don't appear to be completely self-aware. They talk their talk, but my impression of them is different than their apparent impression of themselves. This presentation of a "character" is different than the way Shakespeare's sonnets work. In his sonnets, he's presented a voice which seems very much self-aware, a voice which knows exactly what it is saying and how an audience will hear it. Consequently, we have an easier time of defining the meaning intended in the sonnets: the speaker is telling us that meaning directly. In the plays, however, we are often presented with a humorous or pitiable--generally, a partial--character, and there's no definitive meaning. Presumably, the disparity between how that character sees himself and how we see the character is the meaning: something created in this interplay of perspectives, or this mixing of subjective/objective perspectives. This might be a way of presenting meaning through a kind of circumlocution, or by plotting two different perspectives which circle the same speech of the character. I experienced bear_music's poem similarly.

Curtis.