At the core of his email on irony, Chris Stroffolino asks:

but 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)

Beside suggesting that Chris check his calendar – it’s later than you think – I would concur with his assessment that this discussion is ultimately about much more than “just” irony – consider just how far afield the discussion has traveled since my original flip aside concerning Jennifer Moxley’s poetry – and would turn the question rather on its head: what are the ways in which the poem manifests meaning? Underneath which sits the further question: what is meaning?

All of which takes me back to the first three sentences of a wonderful book, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, co-written by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, which are presented also as the first three paragraphs:

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Lakoff & Johnson are, among others, founders of what today is called cognitive linguistics & 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.

Thought is mostly unconscious is an idea I’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 irrationalist poetics like that of Jack Spicer. At another, it suggests to me that the reading process – even when we are paying the greatest attention, doing literal “close” reading – is itself more unconscious than not. Both it and the idea that mind is inherently embodied go a considerable distance toward explicating the issues posed, for example, by electric guitars or why poets might take a line such as “green ideas sleep furiously” as meaningful when old-school linguists (the Chomsky generation, say) do not.

Thought is mostly unconscious destroys a project such as the Tractatus, though not (we note) Wittgenstein’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 – just one mode of thinking among others – as a series of syllogistic operations, a number of multivariable “if” clauses that would lead ultimately to the consequence of “then,” Lakoff & Johnson’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.

Here of course is the principle behind the idea of waking up to a solution that, prior to a night’s sleep, had seemed impossible. Or why anybody – you or I – might be able to apprehend when something someone asserts sounds “wrong” to us, well before we can honestly articulate precisely why. It represents the architecture of the “gut feel.” It is in this sense that a poem like Ketjak or Tjanting can be understood literally as single syllogisms that cannot, in fact, be paraphrased.

Here also is the reader’s participation in consuming, and in so doing reproducing anew, any given text. To have excluded the reader’s contribution to the meaning of a text may have seemed “neat” to the New Critics in the sense that it offered boundaries that they might then patrol, but to do also yielded (& still yields to this day) a kind of literary dyslexia, an illiteracy in the name of reading competence – the same illiteracy that sometimes will cause a grad student to conclude that langpo is “difficult” in some manner that the world itself is not.

Song approaches the question of embodiment far differently than does poetry – as virtually every attempt to blend the two eventually proves all over again – but embodiment is essential to both. The music of vowel & 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 vizpo 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.

This does not mean that I require poetry to be “beautiful” prosodically – 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 – Barrett Watten or Rod Smith, to name two who seem especially adept at this.

Poetry that pays little attention to how it sounds – there’s enough of it out there that I don’t need to name names – strikes me in exactly the opposite way. Such work seems at times the aesthetic corollary of a serious stroke victim – 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 – a condition of far too much “political poetry.” Even as the simplest lyric is itself always already political.

So what is meaning & where do you find it? Williams called it “the news,” 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.

& the student who is not taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.

Chris Stroffolino suggests that the term irony covers up a broader range of issues:

Dear Ron – –

I've been wanting to respond to a point you made on the blog about "irony" – specifically this...

“I would characterize irony – the ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to the denotation – as one aspect of humor & an especially important one in this epoch in the U.S. (I don’t want to generalize here.) Context is so important in humor &, by definition, so pliable & subject to change, that it is almost impossible to ensure that what is uproarious in one setting will remain so over time.”

I like this perception/insight. One issue for me about the above definition of irony (and not with your statement in particular – since it's part of a common definition of irony) is that it seems it could also equally be applicable to a lot of things that aren't called "irony." That old "New Critical" saw that (I'm probably slightly misquoting it) "a poem should not mean but be" (or a poem should not JUST mean but also be) would seem to be very similar to your definition of irony. Is any awareness of a difference between connotation and denotation, or between a singular intention and multiple interpretations, or of a suggestive ambiguity that often is reduced to being read one way, necessarily "ironic?" If so, then, doesn't the word "ironic" become so broad that it would become itself a mere connotation rather than a denotation; that it refers to a mood the reader is in when s/he reads the poem or other writing-act?

I guess it is because of such "definitions" of "irony," that I am wary about its usefulness as a critical term. To label such a process "irony" seems too narrow – which is why I often buckle at the way the word "ironic" is used (whether dismissively or even as a non-pejorative kind of shorthand characterization) to describe a poem or poet. This also applies to something called "non-ironic" (since that term presupposes irony)....

I know there is supposed to be a "serious" vs. "ironic" distinction, that is perhaps ultimately "musical" (and thus – I'd argue – in the ear of the beholder), but 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). And it would seem that a poem that does, on one level, have "something to say" may be at odds with itself as a poem much more than a poem that doesn't have anything to say.....and this may be why "didactic" or seemingly didactic poetry makes some people uncomfortable, and why others sometimes crave it.... For me analogies with rock music songs are helpful in addressing this question – in part because I took rock lyrics seriously before I took poetry seriously. When I started taking poetry seriously, one of the questions I asked myself was: What is it that poetry must do that song lyrics don't do? What is the equivalent – in poetry – of the singer's "voice" or the guitar solos, etc? There's a lot to say about this, but, to be brief and tie it more explicitly back to your point, it seems to be that this question, to you (by your definition of irony), might be paraphrased as "what must a poem do to be ironic?" Thus, is any awareness of aestheticism (however "dissonant" or "discordant" or "clunky" or whatever) in poetry automatically irony? Well, that's one of the implications I see in your definition....

Perhaps the more profound issue is the term "postmodern irony" – If I tend to see what is often called (though not by me) "postmodern irony" in pre"-postmodern" writers, it could be that I'm simply reading them with my own "postmodern" sensibility, but it could equally be that what's called "postmodern" irony isn't as "postmodern" as some like to believe.

Okay, I'll stop here now – –

I just wanted to write because I really appreciate what you're doing with the blog....

Chris

On the issue of humor, I got emails from several people. The most detailed response came from Gary Sullivan, who advocates a temporal theory of wit:

Hi Ron,

I’m typing this in Word, hoping I’ve got the settings correct so you won’t get question marks where apostrophes or ellipses are intended (a problem that I think I just fixed, but ... we’ll see ... if not, my apologies).

Your blog today touched on two of my favorite topics: humor and context.

Before I start in on all of that, though, I should say that “But I’ve always thought as well that Pound believed Mauberly to be a barrel of chortles” made me laugh out loud. (It was “barrel of chortles” that did it, for what it’s worth – in other words, the linguistic construction, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

The thrust of your argument seems based more on ideas about irony, specifically, and less so than on humor, or there seemed to be some conflation of the two as I was reading it.

I think you’re right about that Arensberg poem, it’s not really interesting. But, is it the lack of context that makes it so? Obviously, some context would help. But I’d argue that it would still be a lame poem (for me, anyway) if I knew who Hasekawa was. Also, the “humor” there seems more about something universal than Hasekawa (who may, ultimately, have been a made-up name, referring to no one in particular). The problem though isn’t – to me – that it’s simply humor, but a failed attempt at humor:

Perhaps it is no matter that you died.

Life’s an incognito which you saw through:

You never told on life – you had your pride;

But life has told on you.

There’s something metaphysical about the humor there, this idea that “life” is an “incognito.” But the ideas are so fuzzily presented, we don’t know what that really means – it’s too abstract. We (or I anyway) don’t know what he means by “Life’s an incognito” ... maybe he’s getting at something about the “life-force,” that it isn’t “personal” or that it’s invisible? Or “You never told on life.” What could that possibly mean? “Life has told on you,” probably means that Hasekawa, whoever he was, died anyway, as we all will. I mean, it’s impossible to tell. My sense is that we probably wouldn’t know even knowing who Hasekawa was ... unless Hasekawa had made some statement about life and incognito – in other words, unless this is Hasekawa’s language being used against him. In which case, touché, you’re right. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I doubt that that’s the case here. It seems like this is Arensberg’s language here. In which case, the problem is probably not lack of context, but poor structure.

I really believe humor requires more than just making manifest enough context for it to be understood, and that comes from laughing out loud when I was a lot younger at Woody Allen or Donald Barthelme or Firesign Theater pieces where I had no idea what they were “talking about.” (Months or years later, I’d figure it out, and it was as often as not less, not more, funny – although there was that feeling, yes, like, “aha! that’s what you meant!” In other words, “aha!” and not “ha ha ha,” which happened earlier, bereft of context.) It wouldn’t matter, in other words, if I knew who Pound was or, if I did know of Pound, what Mauberly was, but that, “barrel of chortles” is a completely hilarious construction.)

Humor depends largely  – not exclusively, but I’d argue predominantly – on timing, if verbal, or measure, if written. Why, in other words, has the Greek Anthology persisted – and not simply as a kind of historical item read in college, but as something even contemporary poets as well as humorists might pilfer from, retranslate, read for pleasure, or otherwise use. Epigrams give less opportunity for context about what is said than they do for the mechanics of what is said.

But, again, it seems like your primary argument is not about whether or not humor will last, but whether or not irony is read as irony over the years. Some English students may remember reading Swift’s Modest Proposal and “not being sure” at first if he’s “kidding.” But not me. Because, although there is no real context presently for that piece in the piece, it always arrives framed – in an English textbook anthology with an introductory essay, maybe, or however else one might conceivably receive it (in a Penguin edition, with footnotes explaining?) Same with Petronius’s Satyricon. Context can get carried over by others, by previous readers. Swift is, in other words, probably less shocking today, because we often get it with a set-up. Someday, your Stein quote will be recontextualized by a scholar somewhere, and that might be, for the next hundred or so years, that. Anyway, back to Swift, because as an example he’s “as obvious as an ear” – part of his plan, so it seemed, was that one would not know he was being ironic. That readers of the day would internalize the argument, to some extent, and then come out of that experience, understanding some level of concomitant participation in the genocide of the Irish. But, irony of ironies, he’s now read with the foreknowledge that he was being ironic. And the effect of reading him is, ironically, diminished.

That, btw, is the kind of irony I’m often most interested in. And it does have a very limited, immediate value. We’ll never read Swift – no one will – as he was then. But I think he’ll be remembered, and learned from, mimicked, used, referred to, and enjoyed, for a long time, despite that.

As you say, “Humor is always – & only – in the eye of the beholder.” I agree with that. But I also believe that meaning/intention and value are also always – and only – in the eye of the beholder. It’s all problematic or changeable or contingent upon context, I’d argue.

How is Celan’s work read by those who don’t know who he was, his history?

Enjoying the blog,

Gary