I was washing the dishes yesterday morning after breakfast (yes, we do them by hand around my house, it's a Zen thing) when this thought struck me.
At Wednesdays@One each week, we talk about what somebody's poem means. People weigh in with their versions of a poem's meaning, a debate ensues once in awhile, and we can get vigorous in our defenses, downright dogged in our points of view.
And that's what meaning comes down to in a poem, after all, a point of view. When we read a poem, each of us brings a personal history--our beloved bedeviled baggage--to what we engage with on the page and from the tongue. That personal history is informed by so much experience beyond the technical, the academic, and the intellectual.
You can argue that anyone's meaning is still valid meaning is just relativism. If everybody's "right" about the meaning of a poem, then . . . what does the poem mean?
Well, that's the wrong question to begin any discussion of meaning with, isn't it? The question you want to start with is what do we mean by "meaning?" And whenever you read a poem, no matter whether you're reading it for the first or the eleventh time, before you start you ought to ask yourself, "What do I mean by 'meaning'?"
Is meaning something you find outside of a poem, like some kind of parallel universe of value and understanding? Most people think so because most of us were taught from the first poems we encountered that there are poems and there is what poems mean, explanations that can be rendered alongside the text of a poem in other words. Every essay your teachers ever asked you to write about a poem, right up through your doctoral dissertation, turns on this notion that meaning is what can be paraphrased out of the text itself.
That, of course, leaves the question, what is the text of a poem, then? What's it there for?
And if a poem "has meaning" which can be paraphrased, then my paraphrase should be as valid as the next reader's, right? Even if that reader happens to be Northrop Frye or Susan Sontag. Meaning is point of view. Points of view may be more or less informed and professional, but they are all valid.
We're back to relativism.
Is meaning a cultural understanding? That is, if you grow up in the West, in America, in the Middle West, in a small town, in a neighborhood where doors are never locked and church bells ring on Sunday morning and Friday nights are for football and fish fries . . . etc . . . is a certain set of value standards--what counts and what doesn't--instilled in you? And if you never leave that place, never "broaden your horizon," . . .
Emphasis here on your truth. We're back to point of view and relativism. Of course, your truth can take on the trappings of The Truth when you find yourself gravitating toward other readers who've grown up in the West, in America, etc. But this is just relativism as power--a particular point of view that's ascendant.
And so the title of this posting, What does meaning mean?
In my experience, meaning means nothing at all. Poems don't mean because they are art, and therefore self-referential. Meaning is the red herring your teachers relied on in order to have something "intelligent" to say about a poem, it's a feint for your inability to "understand" a poem. Which is why modern literary pedagogy is so fascistic, a game of power relations between those in the know (teachers and other experts) and those not (students and lay readers).
A poem can't be paraphrased. By paraphrasing a poem, all you do is to make a new and lesser draft of the text as you found it.
So then, how does one talk about a poem, in one's own mind or with other readers? If we can't talk about what a poem means, then what do we talk about? How a poem is constructed? How it operates? How a poem makes you feel? Whether a poem is sincere art? Good art? Accomplished art? Whether a poem is hip, with it, cool, au currant?
We run into this problem every week at Wednesdays@One. The first thing anybody has to say about a poem that's just been read to us by its author and then by another in the group, usually verges on no-talk. No-talk is saying something about a poem without really saying anything at all. "I like it!" "This poem so so classically YOU!" "I don't understand this poem but it's beautiful!"
What I try to do each week when we discuss a poem is to steer us out of the no-talk and into the relativism of personal point of view. I want to know not what the poem means but what it means to each of my W@1 colleagues. It may be the old teacher in me, but each week with each poem I want to learn again what a reader reads in a poem and why that reader reads it, that is, the experiences and thinking and feeling that brought that reader round to what he or she has just said about the poem. In this way, I hope to open my fellow readers' eyes and ears to two things: 1) what other things the poem can mean to them, and 2) the value of each of those meaningful options in relation to each other and to each reader's experience.
What is meaning? Nothing. What does a poem mean? Nothing. What can a poem mean? Nothing. Nothing, that is, until we talk about it. A poem is itself and that is all it is, as any work of art is just and only what it is. The rest is just point of view to be shared and considered.
And man, were those dishes done!
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