At last week's Wednesdays@One salon the poem I shared--"Everything About This Moment"--has an interrogative in the first stanza . . .
Who knows but it will be a fine script,
maybe the greatest poem I shall ever write?
. . . but, someone noted, both I and the companion reader spoke the lines like a declarative statement. This led me to think about ambiguity and its role in a poem.
What I'm talking about here is not the unintentional ambiguity we sometimes find in our writing or speaking, vagueness or impreciseness, in other words, when we seek to be specific and straightforward. I mean the conscious (at least marginally), meaningful ambiguity that seems possible only in poems and jokes. (Though having just written that, I immediately think of the prose of James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov.)
The English literary critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, a book whose ideas went on to influence literary criticism and the way poems are approached at least through my college years. (Most of us who studied poetry in college were taught by a New Critic.) The main point of Empson's book, and why it became formative for the New Criticism, is that the poem is a product of the poet's intent and should be interpreted so; any reference to the poet's personal biography, psychology, faith, politics, gender, is beside the point, or at least secondary to a legitimate reading of a poem. You don't understand the poem through the poet's background; rather, you understand the poet's mind through a close reading of the poem. The poem is a puzzle of intent, and the only fair reading is to solve the puzzle.
In Seven Types, Empson identifies . . . er . . . seven ways that a poem can produce multiple, often conflicting readings, or, if you will, puzzle pieces. No need to go through those here--you can look them up yourself. The thing I'd like you to think about is this: ambiguity in a poem relates to multiplicity of meaning; a conflict between thoughts and feelings that the poet attempts to resolve through a single image or word use; evidence of a divided mind, as in, "being of two minds" on a subject; and, most importantly, simultaneity.
This idea that an image or use of a word in a poem can mean two or more things at once (simultaneity) seems fundamental to the idea of poetry itself. Or it once did.* Empson argued that this "at once-ness" of a poem reveals the complexity of the poet's creative mind, which in turn constitutes the poem's worth or value. The more subtle or inventive the complex of meanings, the better the poem. Note that "complexity" never meant "vagueness," lack of clarity, to Empson and his cohort. It meant depth. New meanings might be discovered with each re-reading of a poem. It came to mean, by the time I attended college, "hidden meaning."
By the early 1960s, the notion that complexity equals quality in poetry began to give way to its opposite: simplicity, straightforwardness, "honesty," directness, and "authenticity." Read "The Wasteland" and then Donald Hall's famous short anthology, Contemporary American Poetry (1961) if you want to get a sense of the sea-change. This is when ambiguity became a knock on a poem and an otherwise well-written poem could be faulted for not being "clear," "authentic," "immediate," or "accessible."**
In Shakespeare's plays and poems, as in those of many of his contemporaries, the very idea was to let multiple meanings compete or spill out or, most often, emerge slowly. The word "mortal" could mean "human," "subject to death," and "deadly" all at once in an expression, and Shakespeare would have been aware of all the meanings in play. "Crown" might mean "king," "state," "head," and/or "money," if understood as a noun, and a "blow to the head" or "to be anointed" if understood as a verb. And nobody could make a word function as both a noun and a verb in a single expression and simultaneously quite like Shakespeare!
The English literary critic William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, a book whose ideas went on to influence literary criticism and the way poems are approached at least through my college years. (Most of us who studied poetry in college were taught by a New Critic.) The main point of Empson's book, and why it became formative for the New Criticism, is that the poem is a product of the poet's intent and should be interpreted so; any reference to the poet's personal biography, psychology, faith, politics, gender, is beside the point, or at least secondary to a legitimate reading of a poem. You don't understand the poem through the poet's background; rather, you understand the poet's mind through a close reading of the poem. The poem is a puzzle of intent, and the only fair reading is to solve the puzzle.
In Seven Types, Empson identifies . . . er . . . seven ways that a poem can produce multiple, often conflicting readings, or, if you will, puzzle pieces. No need to go through those here--you can look them up yourself. The thing I'd like you to think about is this: ambiguity in a poem relates to multiplicity of meaning; a conflict between thoughts and feelings that the poet attempts to resolve through a single image or word use; evidence of a divided mind, as in, "being of two minds" on a subject; and, most importantly, simultaneity.
This idea that an image or use of a word in a poem can mean two or more things at once (simultaneity) seems fundamental to the idea of poetry itself. Or it once did.* Empson argued that this "at once-ness" of a poem reveals the complexity of the poet's creative mind, which in turn constitutes the poem's worth or value. The more subtle or inventive the complex of meanings, the better the poem. Note that "complexity" never meant "vagueness," lack of clarity, to Empson and his cohort. It meant depth. New meanings might be discovered with each re-reading of a poem. It came to mean, by the time I attended college, "hidden meaning."
By the early 1960s, the notion that complexity equals quality in poetry began to give way to its opposite: simplicity, straightforwardness, "honesty," directness, and "authenticity." Read "The Wasteland" and then Donald Hall's famous short anthology, Contemporary American Poetry (1961) if you want to get a sense of the sea-change. This is when ambiguity became a knock on a poem and an otherwise well-written poem could be faulted for not being "clear," "authentic," "immediate," or "accessible."**
In Shakespeare's plays and poems, as in those of many of his contemporaries, the very idea was to let multiple meanings compete or spill out or, most often, emerge slowly. The word "mortal" could mean "human," "subject to death," and "deadly" all at once in an expression, and Shakespeare would have been aware of all the meanings in play. "Crown" might mean "king," "state," "head," and/or "money," if understood as a noun, and a "blow to the head" or "to be anointed" if understood as a verb. And nobody could make a word function as both a noun and a verb in a single expression and simultaneously quite like Shakespeare!
Most of the time, in our poems at W@1, we seek the opposite of ambiguity: we expect absolute clarity of language, and by this we often mean mono-signification: each use of a word in a poem constitutes a single meaning for that usage. For us, as for the vast majority of casual writers and readers of poetry, mono-signification is a sign of a well-made poem or image.
We think of poems as reductive engines that boil words down to their "essential meanings," that clear away the imprecisions of everyday language like so much debris. And so, when we write poems, we aim for the simpler term, the more straightforward syntax, the unambiguous, and we often fault a poem whose language is not simple enough, whose word order is not S-V-O straightforward, and whose meaning is not unambiguous.
But regardless what some poetry may have become in the last 60 years in American writing, poetry historically celebrates the richness of language, its multiples of meaning, its layered quality. Language is much more slippery than mono-signification allows. Here's an example of layered-ness:
Wilfred Owen's hunched
Over his shovel,
Muttering about
Corpse-stench, mustard gas.
And no matter how loud
I shout, he won't look up.
His ears are ruptured;
His brain, concussed
From gigantic artillery
Explosions.
He's dug
Enough trenches
To fill the entire
Twentieth century,
Yet no line is deep enough
To save a single one of us.
Is this poem, by Gregory Orr ^, about the futility of the trenches dug in WWI and of trench warfare, or about the inefficacy of poetry in the face of human catastrophe? Well, these two interpretations depend on how you read the last two lines of the poem and what you take "no line is deep enough" to mean. The device of literary ambiguity invites you to understand both meanings at once: the depth of a trench along the front, the deeper meaning of a line of poetry.
So, to return to the example I began this piece with, when we see a question mark at the end of a sentence, we expect that sentence to be formulated like an interrogative (verb precedes subject), and the sentence to be uttered with rising pitch, as our voices do ordinarily when we ask a question. What happens to our critical eye and ear when a question mark comes at the end of a sentence that is otherwise structured like a declaration (subject precedes verb) and/or is uttered in a falling or level pitch (as I read the line above at last week's W@1)? You know what I mean? You know what I mean! Ambiguity happens. Is this a good thing in a poem or a bad thing? Does it lend meaning to the poem or the line, deepening it intellectually or emotionally, or does it merely confuse?
We think of poems as reductive engines that boil words down to their "essential meanings," that clear away the imprecisions of everyday language like so much debris. And so, when we write poems, we aim for the simpler term, the more straightforward syntax, the unambiguous, and we often fault a poem whose language is not simple enough, whose word order is not S-V-O straightforward, and whose meaning is not unambiguous.
But regardless what some poetry may have become in the last 60 years in American writing, poetry historically celebrates the richness of language, its multiples of meaning, its layered quality. Language is much more slippery than mono-signification allows. Here's an example of layered-ness:
Wilfred Owen's hunched
Over his shovel,
Muttering about
Corpse-stench, mustard gas.
And no matter how loud
I shout, he won't look up.
His ears are ruptured;
His brain, concussed
From gigantic artillery
Explosions.
He's dug
Enough trenches
To fill the entire
Twentieth century,
Yet no line is deep enough
To save a single one of us.
Is this poem, by Gregory Orr ^, about the futility of the trenches dug in WWI and of trench warfare, or about the inefficacy of poetry in the face of human catastrophe? Well, these two interpretations depend on how you read the last two lines of the poem and what you take "no line is deep enough" to mean. The device of literary ambiguity invites you to understand both meanings at once: the depth of a trench along the front, the deeper meaning of a line of poetry.
So, to return to the example I began this piece with, when we see a question mark at the end of a sentence, we expect that sentence to be formulated like an interrogative (verb precedes subject), and the sentence to be uttered with rising pitch, as our voices do ordinarily when we ask a question. What happens to our critical eye and ear when a question mark comes at the end of a sentence that is otherwise structured like a declaration (subject precedes verb) and/or is uttered in a falling or level pitch (as I read the line above at last week's W@1)? You know what I mean? You know what I mean! Ambiguity happens. Is this a good thing in a poem or a bad thing? Does it lend meaning to the poem or the line, deepening it intellectually or emotionally, or does it merely confuse?
Let's try an experiment for our next project. Let's use a word "pluri-significantly" in a poem. That is, let's each find a word in the language that can have multiple meanings and try, consciously, to exercise its many meanings. Bless you if you can make like Shakespeare and deploy a word once in a poem in such a way that its different meanings can be understood all at once! But here are some easier options.
Option 1: select one of the following words and use it in a poem in as many ways as you can find meanings for it, so that it has one meaning in one line or stanza, another meaning in a second line or stanza, and so on, until you run out of possible meanings. (Note: the meanings you deploy should be fairly recognizable to your audience. No fair making up meanings or creating new "portmanteau words.")
Option 1: select one of the following words and use it in a poem in as many ways as you can find meanings for it, so that it has one meaning in one line or stanza, another meaning in a second line or stanza, and so on, until you run out of possible meanings. (Note: the meanings you deploy should be fairly recognizable to your audience. No fair making up meanings or creating new "portmanteau words.")
mortal, crown, dispatch, fair, cleave, quick, buck, foil, loose, true, spirit, cell, hot, queen, mark, butt, rag, tattoo, walk, line, sing, hatch
Option 2: write a poem that contains a phrase or an image in which a word or words can have two different meanings (within the context of the poem). Length of the poem is not the issue, but you should write something involved enough to provide context for a term or phrase that can be read differently.
To help you get a sense of what I am suggesting, in the passage below, take a look at the use of the words "accept" (in the seventh line), and such phrases as "face of the water," "the glacial calve," and "the muzzle in thirst."
By the time I came upon him, it was late in the day,
he was pounding water near the rock-walled well,
standing over the bucket of water so black in that December light,
so like a mirror, one hand gripping its rim, the other, a fist,
a hard pink fist raised over the back bent to the thing
he was so earnestly about. The fist came down and down
onto the face of the water which seemed to accept it,
the pummeling, as water accepts all things--
the diving sea-hawk, the sea wreck, the suicide,
the fly-cast, the glacial calve, the tea bag, the muzzle in thirst,
the test finger, the leaf released, Narcissus' gaze . . .
What are some of the many ways that water "accepts" things? The last three lines of this stanza list them. In this poem, these are all possible meanings of "to accept" at the end of the seventh line. Listing them all together tends toward ambiguity--the water is more than just a reflective surface. In this case, the ambiguity of meaning is emphasized. But also note the ambiguous terms or phrases "the muzzle in thirst," "the glacial calve," and, at the start of line seven, "the face of the water," where key words can have two meanings. The additional meanings of these are not so emphasized, yet they are there to be understood, should you pause long enough to consider them.
------------
* Ambiguity was an expression of High Modernism in poetry--think T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens. You had to be erudite to write great poetry, and erudite to read it. (The New Critics came along after WWII to help the rest of us--veterans attending college on the GI Bill, but also working-class people like me in the 60s--make sense of poetry.)
* Ambiguity was an expression of High Modernism in poetry--think T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens. You had to be erudite to write great poetry, and erudite to read it. (The New Critics came along after WWII to help the rest of us--veterans attending college on the GI Bill, but also working-class people like me in the 60s--make sense of poetry.)
** Take this a step further into Confessional Poetry, and the authentic poem becomes a cri de coeur. Keep going, and here you are, Instagram Poetry!
^ In The Last Love Poem I will Ever Write, Norton: New York, 2019.
^ In The Last Love Poem I will Ever Write, Norton: New York, 2019.
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