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.