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.