Interpretation as subjugation (4.29.22)

For those of us who studied in the 60s and 70s, it was one or another movement, like New Criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminist criticism, Structuralist theory, Deconstruction, etc.  Each a new form of literary interpretive tyranny!  If you've mastered all of these approaches, there's not a poem in the history of poetry that can get by you.

I've pulled this paragraph from the previous blog post, "Onions" (4.28.22).  The thought occurred to me when I wrote it that there is more to say on the subject of being so steeped in literary theories that no poem can "get by you."

Of course, as art, all true poetry resists being fully defined and understood, subjugated as it were, by readers, even readers as knowledgeable and astute as Harold Bloom.  It is the business of a poem to remain a mystery to us, to always withhold something of itself from us.  Otherwise, it fails as a poem, at least in some small way.

Blake insisted, "we murder to dissect," and generations of readers and scholars have taken this statement as an argument against interpreting art, poetry especially.  Or at least against paraphrasing it or explaining what it means or essentially rewriting it into our own language.  In our desire to not let poems get by us, we destroy them.  Poems are supposed to be artifacts unto themselves, whole and unified.  Any mucking about with them, a slice here, a puncture there, a prod elsewhere to get at what they "mean" results only in what we want them to mean.  The poem itself is what the poem means.

Inexperienced writers will take this as a warning not to critique their work, or any apparently obvious lyric, for that matter.  My friends at Wednesdays@One have often accused me of over-interpreting their poems.  They wrote the poem, after all, and they know what they had in mind when they wrote it.  Or, they wrote the poem and the language is clear because the words are common and the images straightforward because the figures of speech behind them are well-worn and tested.

"My love is like a red, red rose."

Nothing too difficult about that.  We're talking about a flower and a color that everybody's familiar with, and we're using a standard simile to compare a loved one to that colorful flower.  There's not an obscure, difficult Latinate word in the line.  What could be clearer?

Well, what could be clearer, that might reveal greater depths of meaning to the line, is an understanding of how often this comparison has been made in Western poetry over the centuries.  What could be clearer, and would surely lead to a deeper understanding of the line, is why someone would compare a person to a flower, and a red one in particular.  And what could be clearer is a better understanding of all the associations any given reader might have with the image of a red rose, or what mere "likeness" means when we make such a comparison (instead, for instance, of a complete identification, an "is-ness," if you will).

We can't get at these other possibilities of meaning without also considering our own biases when it comes to writing and reading a text, or without using certain tools of discussion (if not interpretation), like feminist theory or deconstruction theory or Marxist literary theory or reader response theory, etc., etc., etc.

And yet.  Even if you've mastered all these theoretical approaches, become intimate with the history of red roses and similes in Western poetry, or even understand to the bottom your own drives and biases, you will never get to the bottom of this line or any poem that it is found in.  You will never fully grasp, own, subjugate the line or the poem.  

This is not license to blatantly misread any line or poem.  You can't make a poem say whatever you want it to say.  The poem itself is what the poem means.  All you can do, and all you should ever wish to do, is try to understand how you experience it at different times in your writing or reading life.  Reading a poem, any real poem, is a never-ending experience--there is no bottom to it.

Onions (4.28.22)

Reading poems should be like peeling an onion.  The act should have layers of experience, if not of meaning, as you read and reread, as you and the poem become more intimate.  This is not the same thing as interpreting the poet's meaning or uncovering the poet's intent.  It is much more like getting to know (or remember) yourself through a work of art: whatever you bring to the reading, no matter whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, engages, and if you are paying attention, that is, reading conscientiously, you will come to know it.

Poems do this for us better than other kinds of writing and probably better than the other arts, so long as we stay open to the possibilities of one or more readings.  And, like everything else about art, the more we know about poetry's history, movements, styles, techniques, and examples, the more open we can be when experiencing any given poem.

A case in point: polysemous interpretation.  Thomas Aquinas wrote the first definitive text on the layers of meaning that can be uncovered in a poem.  He had sacred texts in mind and was concerned about how to read and interpret the stories in the bible.  He said all biblical texts are capable of being interpreted on two levels: the literal (a.k.a., historical) and the spiritual.  The spiritual level itself can be applied in three ways: the text has an allegorical dimension, a moral message, and an anagogical meaning.  In Aquinas's view, the literal interpretation of a biblical text appeals to those who are less equipped to understand a text's deeper meaning.  The spiritual interpretation requires training, practice and intellect.  Thus, 

• Historical or literal meaning (or reading): there was a bush that burned but was not consumed by fire because God (Yahweh) was in the bush, making Himself known to Moses
• Spiritual meaning: the burning bush is an allegory of revelation, it is a message to Man about the mystery and glory of God, and it is, without saying so directly, an instance of salvation (seeing the light)

How this spiritual dimension works out as allegory, morality and anagogy (meaning a mystical interpretation) is not important here and beyond me to explain.  But the point is that, at least since Thomas Aquinas, we've tended to think of certain texts as "hiding" something from our direct apprehension or understanding, that present to us a surface which either masks a depth of understanding or leads the diligent reader more powerfully to those depths.  (An idea that has all kinds of implications for mysticism, oracles, the Elect, and classes or hierarchies of knowledge, and therefore temporal power.)

Dante, much later, applied this same idea of polysemous-ness to non-sacred texts, namely to his Divine Comedy, but also to all heightened poetry written in the Italian vernacular.  His poem, or any serious poem, can be (must be) understood to mean more than what it says on the surface, the "surface" being the vernacular of the text and its referents in the world of people, that is, history.  Words you encounter first, but not alone.  They "point" to or orient you to something else, and that "something else" can only be paraphrased and interpreted.

By this point in my discussion, you should be recalling your high school and college English teachers.  They, after all, were our oracles and priests who had access to these deeper meanings, and we, the acolytes, were supposed to follow them toward enlightenment.  (In my experience, we were supposed to guess what the teacher was thinking but not telling us.)

Thus, a figurative use of language in a poem, like a simile or a metaphor, or a tone of voice like irony, is never just ornamental, but code for some deeper meaning.  And the more you know about these figures and how they work, the deeper into the poem you can go, the more "meaning" you will get from it.

Of course, we want to rescue poetry (and our own poems) from such a tyranny of interpretation!  Which is where I'm headed at the beginning of this post when I compare interpretation to peeling back an onion and how you bring your own experience--literary and lifetime--to a poem, even if you don't necessarily think you're doing so.  You cannot interact with a text and not put your own experience into the mix of meaning.

That last term is important.  For peeling an onion isn't the best analogy for reading a text.  The text doesn't merely turn into an ever-shrinking version of itself as you go into it until you come to nothing.  Reading and interpreting are much more organic and complicated than that.  They are generative, in fact.  Each person who reads a text anew adds to the mix of it, because that person brings personhood into the exchange.  Each person who rereads the same text does the same again.  To the extent that you're familiar with other peoples' readings of a poem, and some of these can be famous in themselves, you can bring increasingly complex associations to the experience.  But these are filtered through your personal experience and capabilities.

What keeps the polysemous interpretation from tipping over into mere relativism or interpretive chaos, or worse, arbitrarily imposed meanings?  For Aquinas, it was following certain strict rules of interpretation, laid out by the Church and by the Scholiasts.  For those of us who studied in the 60s and 70s, it was one or another movement, like New Criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminist criticism, Structuralist theory, Deconstruction, etc.  Each a new form of literary interpretive tyranny!  If you've mastered all of these approaches, there's not a poem in the history of poetry that can get by you.  Ha-ha.

But all schools or systems of interpretation are fundamentally arbitrary, at least all the prescriptive ones are.  They are not organic or "natural," but mechanical; we might say technological.  They are devices for coming at or into an aesthetic experience and somebody had to invent them.  But all systems agree on one thing about a poem: it can mean many things to many readers.  Some of those meanings we can agree on.  Some are radical, some superfluous.  The impetus underlying a system or theory is to exclude the radical and the superfluous.

And some are just plain wrong, the products of misreading or misjudgment.  But I'd buy at the drop of a hat the book on the history of misreadings of poems,* if there is such a book.  Because even a misreading adds ultimately to the mix of a poem's polysemous-ness.  Of course, the potential for misreading a text doesn't make it right to try to wring blood from the proverbial turnip, only interesting in the best of cases, perverse in all others.  Conscientiousness and honesty about what we're doing when we read a poem will steer us clear of the perverse.

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*In some ways, literary history itself is a history of misreadings in which one academic or critic or literary historian or school of them takes issue with another's interpretation of a text.

When poems resonate . . . for better and worse (4.24.22)

Last week, I brought up the subject of "surface and depth" at our W@1 salon, in relation to how poems present themselves to readers.  While my comment was not as coherent as I'd have liked (I was thinking out loud & off the cuff, as it were), I'd still argue that there's plenty of insight in the idea that a poem has a "surface" and an "interior" existence for every reader that are at play as we read and that potentially create a very satisfying tension.

It would be inaccurate (and stupid at this late date) to insist that one of these terms suggests form and the other content, or put another way, embellishment and "meaning."  What they do suggest to me is that the terms relate to how we experience a poem as we read.  Do we experience the poem as an artifact made from language, or as a statement about something, or as an expression of feeling and opinion?

I think the answer is obvious: we do, but all together and all at once.  Most poems are messy in that way.  They appeal to our sense of language and its plasticity; they refer to the world of things and ideas with which we may or may not have experience; and they communicate emotion and point of view.  They do all these things together because we read that way, mainly by bringing our own histories, interests, biases, insights, misunderstandings, assumptions, etc. to each reading.

But it would also be inaccurate (and naive) to insist that only we readers invest a poem with art, reference, and emotion.  Writers have something to do with the poem, too!  Intention, always a slippery path into and out of any poem, does have a role to play in how we read and how honestly or fairly we read any given poem.

One thing that makes a poem poetic is its language, or rather, its presentation of language.  A poem is poetic because its words draw attention to themselves as the material from which the poem is made; they draw attention to themselves ahead of any potential, paraphraseable meaning or emotion.  Poems are artistic constructions in which the words themselves are foregrounded, meaning that everything else is backgrounded.  Language is the material from which every poem is made, and to the extent that a poem's language is opaque, that it encourages you to consider it, that language is poetic.  

This opacity is the "surface" that the poem insists on being experienced before anything else.  The more easily you can "look through" or ignore that surface, the less you are experiencing a poem.  (And, conversely, the more you are experiencing an exposition or a howl.)

So what is "depth" in a poem?  (Type "deep image" into the search bar of this page and scroll through the various posts where I've talked about "what lies beneath" in poetry.)  To me, it's a psychological term, or rather, a term that describes a poem's emotional and intellectual effect upon me as I read and react.  To me, a poem controls its own depth much less than its surface because I and everything I have ever experienced become implicated in the poem as I read. (And even more so as I reread the poem.)  And this is why a poem can "mean" different things to different readers, sometimes greatly different things.  

The way into a poem's depths often is through its images.  Images are like sink holes or rabbit holes in the best poems--down which you go (or fall, if you're not prepared for them), like Alice.  Images can be deep and seemingly bottomless.  But they are like potholes in less well-crafted poems: just deep enough to jar, and to annoy, but not deep enough to reveal.  You can't get very far into a poem built with potholes; your experience of it is very "surface."

Does this mean that surface is a bad thing in poetry?  Absolutely not!  Surface is everything.  As I say, if a piece of writing does not call immediate and constant attention to its own language ahead of everything else about it, chances are it's not a very good poem even though it may be a very good example of exposition or argumentation or cri de coeur.

Sometimes, a poem's language calls attention to itself inartistically.  Take cliché, for instance.  A cliché, as you all know, is an overused expression or locution.  It has traded in its spontaneity and power to arrest for facility, shorthand, or worse, non-thought and non-feeling.  It has exchanged specificity for vagueness.  A cliché assumes either too much about how you see the world and how you feel about things, or too little, as the case may be.  It trades the rabbit hole in for the pothole.

So a poem that's built on cliché is "all surface" and no "depth."  Its language calls attention to itself not ahead of any other way of experiencing the poem, but instead of.  Such a poem is "empty" in this way.  While such a poem may express a feeling or an opinion, these are "borrowed" feelings and opinions.

A well-made poem has both, surface and depth.  A successful poem links the two intimately, so that you experience it as art, as statement, and as expression all together.

Now obviously, the writer of a poem bears a great deal of responsibility for how the poem gets read and received.  We usually call that responsibility "intention," what the writer "means."  When I write a poem, I "mean" for it to resonate with a reader, to touch upon or to open up a well of thought and feeling, a "psychology," as it were, in the reader.  To the extent that I target a thought or a feeling, like anger or sadness or joy or disgust or pride or awe, I fail the poem and I shortchange the reader.  I manipulate.  (And isn't this what cliché does, manipulate?)  I don't so much "open up" as "close down" my reader's experience.

A poem that is only surface has nothing to say and shortchanges the reader.  A poem that seeks to make words disappear extends no hand to us and shortchanges us.  A poem without surface fails to resonate.  A poem with only surface also fails to resonate.

So how do we make a poem resonate?  Through language that calls attention to itself and that opens up possibilities to meaning(s), which may or may not come from ourselves.  What are the techniques available to us for making language work this way?

That's for another posting.

Streaming poetry (4.1.22)

Somebody used the phrase "stream of consciousness" in relation to one of the poems we shared at a recent Wednesdays@One salon.  Was this just to describe the feel of the poem, a criticism of the poem, or a technical assessment?

It occurred to me at the time, and still does as I write this, that we at W@1 have no solid definition of "stream of consciousness" as a poetic style or sub-genre, at least none that we can agree on as a group.  It's rather like that famous (and weaselly) definition of pornography, meaning, it resides in the eye and ear of the beholder.

But can stream of consciousness be defined formally?  Is it a literary sub-genre?  I dived into my library to find out.  And so far, I find nothing.  So I jumped to Wikipedia for some basic facts.  

Daniel Oliver, a 19th Century psychologist, coined the term in a book titled First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine.  He defines it this way:

If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas.

Three observations, to begin, that may impact our understanding for our own poetry writing.  One is that it's a medical term, or was once, describing not a state of mind but a process of thinking.  One is that SOC is spontaneous, not rationalized or crafted thinking.  Another is that stream of consciousness isn't the same as "free writing" or "automatic writing," much less non-formal writing.  Stream of consciousness "is determined by certain fixed laws of thought."  It's a way of thinking.

The first important literary use of this "way of thinking" was in the novels of Dorothy Richardson (see the same Wiki entry on SOC as above).  Not only did this writer write in the SOC mode, but she completed a series of thirteen semi-autobiographical novels using the mode!

The Wiki page defines SOC as a literary method in this way:

Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue . . . or in connection to their actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which are chiefly used in poetry or drama. In stream-of-consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device.

Some famous practitioners of SOC: Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Pynchon.  (I've been reading the first novels of Remembrance of Things Past for the past six months or so.  I'm here to tell you that SOC is very much there, and it's a literary device, not a free-writing exercise!)

And what about poetry?  I'd be willing to make an argument that all poetry that "flows" or appears to "flow" from one thought or expression to the next, is SOC writing.  I'd also go so far as to say that the poetic element of all poetry (of all writing, for that matter) is this "flowiness."  This could include large portions of The Iliad, but perhaps less in The Aeneid.  It might describe many parts of Song of Myself, but not much other American poetry written in the 19th Century, not even by Whitman.  It would certainly better describe the method used in W.C. Williams' Kora in Hell than even his epic Paterson.

And as you might deduce from the examples I cite in the paragraph above, SOC is apparent, not "real." It's a style, meaning it is fabricated.  To believe that Joyce just let his mind "flow" while writing Ulysses is not to understand literary art.  For long portions of that novel Joyce may have tapped into a psychic stream of images and thoughts, and drawn from that, but the writing is thoroughly shaped in the end.

One key element of SOC is audience, or lack of audience.  Apparently.  Unlike dramatic monologue or soliloquy, SOC is not consciously addressed to a hearer or interlocutor by either the "speaker" or the author.  It's a record of an internal monologue.  And when I say a "record," I mean a shaping of the constant flow or stream of images and thoughts that we experience continually, even while we sleep.

A poem, even one written in the SOC style (I might say, especially one done in that style), abstracts from the mind's continual image-thought activity.  A poem done in SOC is still art, meaning, it is intentional, purposeful, shaped, delimited, as it must be if it's to be understood as art.

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What about our project for next week?  Let's try to write poems in the mode of stream of consciousness.  Perhaps easier said than done.  Our first impulse might be to narrativize our poem (I'm talking to you, June!).  But stream of consciousness is not storytelling, per se.  So steer clear of "this happened, then that, then the other."  A related impulse to the narrative is the purely descriptive approach (I'm talking to you, Suzy!), which you'll also want to de-emphasize.  Descriptive writing--much contemplative writing falls into this category--points the mind or our consciousness outside ourselves to some object or scene that we can describe minutely because it is frozen in time (and sometimes place): a landscape, a still life, etc.  Stream of consciousness suggests its own objective: to write from the subjective point of view, to abstract from a constantly moving, changing thing: your mind at work.  Yet another impulse might be to speak to someone, to address an audience (And I'm talking to you, Curt!), which injects rhetoric into our writing, meaning, having an argument to make or an agenda to accomplish.  Think of SOC as non-rhetorical writing, that is, writing that does not seek to move a listener or reader.

Now, it looks like I've eliminated all of the writing styles that we're accustomed to at W@1!  I will add one more: no strict literary forms, such as rhyme, formal metrical cadences; no sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, terza rima, uniform stanzas.  (I am talking to you, Judy, Bennett!) These will only encourage you to "make sense," when what you're after is to steer your internal image-thought activity into a new "word flow," kind of the way the Army Corps of Engineers steers a flood into a stream.  Take your internal flood plain and give it some banks and pitch.

But how?  That's the experiment!  I'll share a tip from teaching days.  When I taught freshman comp in my early days, I asked my students to do the following.  

1. Free write (also known as automatic writing).  That is, open your notebook and just start writing down whatever comes to mind.  Don't stop to correct or edit.  Don't "develop" a thought.  Just keep pen to paper (or these days, fingers to keyboard) and write.  Don't bother with lines or paragraphs or even sentences.  Don't even stop to think about what to write next; if you get stuck, rewrite the last few words of what you just wrote down, again and again, until you get unstuck, then move on.  Do this for ten minutes.  And remember, no pauses to collect your thoughts!
2. Focus write.  Where free writing is largely unfocused, focused writing narrows your field of consciousness to some general notion, like warmth in a room, humidity in the air, noises off, your own posture while writing, a mood.  It's more like meditative writing in which you pay closer attention to what's immediately around you, what's distant, what's moving, what's still, etc.  You aren't commenting on any of it and you aren't attempting a detailed "photograph" of it.  In Zen terms, you are merely acknowledging its presence.  Whatever you focus on will come from your ten minutes of free writing.  Do this for ten minutes.
3. Associate.  That is, "sample" phrases and passages from your focused writing, sorting for like to like or posit to opposite or "leap" to "leap."  Did one thought or image in your free and focused writing lead to some other thought or image, regardless whether the two are logically connected?  Great!  Abstract them from the focused or free writing.  Do this for twenty minutes.
4. Make.  (Note: I never used the term "make" with my frosh students; we were after expository essays in the end, not poems.)  Another way of saying "make" in this context is "shape it."  Your goal is to retain the feel of the flow of steps 1 and 2 above, using the groupings of thoughts/images from step 3, while giving the content some shape or form (again, no formal forms like rhyme, strict meter, etc.).  In this step, you might be looking for ways to lineate the material--through rhythmical units, enjambment, repetition, jump-cutting, and so on.  This step may also lead to a re-ordering of your material.  Feel free to move units around, up or down the lyrical stream, as it were.

Do this, and your brain will feel it in the end.  It'll feel fagged and maybe even a little achey.  It should!  You'll be doing the equivalent of exercising your biceps in a new way.  That's because what this project is about is process, not product.  And that's because SOC writing is a process designed to tap your own internal monologue for art.

Have fun!