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.
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