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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>meaning</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>meaning</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, December 28, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At the core of his email on
irony, Chris Stroffolino asks:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;">but</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt;"> it seems that what you're driving
at is the question of WHAT OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is
assuming that it IS also meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a
safe assumption in the 20th century)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Beside suggesting that Chris
check his calendar &#8211; it&#8217;s later than you think &#8211; I would concur with his assessment
that this discussion is ultimately about much more than &#8220;just&#8221; irony &#8211; consider
just how far <span class="SpellE">afield</span> the discussion has traveled since
<a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2385722414">my
original flip aside</a> concerning Jennifer Moxley&#8217;s poetry &#8211; and would turn
the question rather on its head: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what are the ways in which the poem
manifests meaning? </i></b>Underneath which sits the further question: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what
is meaning?</i></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of which takes me back
to the first three sentences of a wonderful book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-465-05674-1">Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought</a></i>,
co-written by George Lakoff &amp; Mark Johnson, which are presented also as the
first three paragraphs:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The mind is inherently
embodied.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Lakoff &amp; Johnson are,
among others, founders of what today is called cognitive linguistics &amp;
George has been both a friend and an influence on my poetry for some 25 years.
Nowhere in his corpus are its underlying findings more concisely stated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is an idea I&#8217;ve, uh, thought a lot about, and have a
great deal more of thinking yet to do. At one level, the concept explains the
possible power of an <span class="SpellE">irrationalist</span> poetics like that
of Jack Spicer. At another, it suggests to me that the reading process &#8211; even
when we are paying the greatest attention, doing literal &#8220;close&#8221; reading &#8211; is
itself more unconscious than not. Both it and the idea that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mind is inherently embodied</i> go a
considerable distance toward explicating the issues posed, for example, by
electric guitars or why poets might take a line such as &#8220;green ideas sleep
furiously&#8221; as meaningful when old-school linguists (the Chomsky generation,
say) do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thought is mostly unconscious</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> destroys a project such as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tractatus,</i> though not (we note) Wittgenstein&#8217;s later forays into
this same territory. It has, of course, a certain Freudian, if not Lacanian,
ring to it, yet it is not in that psychoanalytic direction that Lakoff appears
to be pointing. Even if we understand reason, for example &#8211; just one mode of
thinking among others &#8211; as a series of syllogistic operations, a number of
multivariable &#8220;if&#8221; clauses that would lead ultimately to the consequence of
&#8220;then,&#8221; Lakoff &amp; Johnson&#8217;s position suggests that what we imagine to be
complex enough procedures with dozens of steps may in fact have hundreds, if
not thousands, conducting not only in our waking life, but elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here of course is the
principle behind the idea of waking up to a solution that, prior to a night&#8217;s
sleep, had seemed impossible. Or why anybody &#8211; you or I &#8211; might be able to
apprehend when something someone asserts sounds &#8220;wrong&#8221; to us, well before we
can honestly articulate precisely why. It represents the architecture of the
&#8220;gut feel.&#8221; It is in this sense that a poem like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketjak</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting</i> can be
understood literally as single syllogisms that cannot, in fact, be paraphrased.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here also is the reader&#8217;s
participation in consuming, and in so doing reproducing anew, any given text.
To have excluded the reader&#8217;s contribution to the meaning of a text may have
seemed &#8220;neat&#8221; to the New Critics in the sense that it offered boundaries that
they might then patrol, but to do also yielded (&amp; still yields to this day)
a kind of literary dyslexia, an illiteracy in the name of reading competence &#8211;
the same illiteracy that sometimes will cause a grad student to conclude that
langpo is &#8220;difficult&#8221; in some manner that the world itself is not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Song approaches the question
of embodiment far differently than does poetry &#8211; as virtually every attempt to
blend the two eventually proves all over again &#8211; but embodiment is essential to
both. The music of vowel &amp; consonant is no less a constituent of meaning
than is any argument the denotative text might make. This is a reality that
might be discounted in one or another tendency within poetry, but it is not one
that can be safely abolished. My own interest in <span class="SpellE">vizpo</span>
is real enough, but it is much more anthropological than it is literary, for
which I make no apologies. The visual is never for me an adequate condition of
embodiment for the poem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This does not mean that I
require poetry to be &#8220;beautiful&#8221; prosodically &#8211; some of the most interesting in
recent years has, I think, sought out a sonic realm I would associate more
closely with post-industrial life than with song &#8211; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> or </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rod Smith</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, to
name two who seem especially adept at this. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poetry that pays little
attention to how it sounds &#8211; there&#8217;s enough of it out there that I don&#8217;t need
to name names &#8211; strikes me in exactly the opposite way. Such work seems at
times the aesthetic corollary of a serious stroke victim &#8211; unable to complete
its thought. Thus the best argument in the world, if it pays no heed to the
question of embodiment, strikes me as not very meaningful &#8211; a condition of far
too much &#8220;political poetry.&#8221; Even as the simplest lyric is itself always
already political.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So what is meaning &amp;
where do you find it? Williams called it &#8220;the news,&#8221; but that phrase, bandied
about as much as it is, is often understood in far too narrow a fashion. I
often will find it in a poem lurking not in the words as such so much as in the
vowels, or in the way a phrase alters my expectation (a particularly NY School
approach), in how lines enjamb or a phrase is inverted, in the length of a
line. All to me seem primary modes of meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">&amp; the student who is not
taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Posted by
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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