What does mean mean?

Is anything truly meaningless? I think that we're back to the whole 'tree falling in the woods' scenario. If there is no one there to give it meaning then it has none. Meaning is an attribution. It is not intrinsic to anything. In The Day After Tomorrow the books meant warmth, nothing more, and by extension, life. Let's consider the following:


To anyone who doesn't read Greek it's meaningless. Let's translate it:

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

To a Trinitarian this is proof positive that Jesus and God are part of a divine trinity. To an atheist it doesn't prove anything. Of course there are those who will argue that this is a mistranslation, it should read "…and the word was a god" thus disproving the trinity. Whoever would have thought that a single indefinite article would cause so much trouble and, if the damn Greeks were so clever, how come they never thought to use one? Eh? There are those too who think that it can mean anything they need it to.

Without getting tied up with linguistically trying to define meaning, because that will open up a whole can of wormy definitions, the dictionary provides two simple ones:

1. What is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated.
2. The end, purpose or significance of something.

Question: What is the meaning of poetry? Answer: For the purpose of this post poetry has no meaning; it is a facilitator of meaning, a conduit, a means to an end. So, if we boil these down, we have 'intent' and 'sense'. In the process however there is always something lost in translation. No medium is perfect. We've moved on a long way from the cylinders people used to record on, through 78s, LPs, cassette tapes, CDs but even the best quality recording is a poor substitute for sitting in the front row of the audience listening to the band play Dixie. If anything we've moved a step backwards because in the good ol' days that's all there was, live performance.

We all know the story, The Emperor's New Clothes, so I won't bore you with it, and I assume that most of you, at least my readers-of-a-certain-age, will know what a secret decoder ring is.

'Decoder ring' poems are fine up to a point. My wife writes them all the time, usually about me and I never get them. Of course, when she tells me what the poem is about it's obvious but no one else would have a clue to the poem's 'true' meaning. That does not mean the poem is necessarily meaningless to them. They will impose their own meaning on it. Our kneejerk reaction to things is to look for meaning even where there is none. Is it the wrong meaning? Well, it might not be the 'perfect' solution to the problem (because a 'decoder ring' poem is a puzzle to be worked out) but that doesn't mean it's not a viable solution. A spanner is a tool designed for a specific purpose but how many of you out there other than me have used it in place of a hammer or have used it as the handle of a lever? It is not a perfect hammer or handle but it may well be adequate. In a 'decoder ring' poem we have what is actually expressed which may perfectly fit the author's intent but only when the right person(s) read the poem.

Now, an 'emperor's new clothes' poem is another thing entirely. It is where you are presented with an arrangement of words on a page and are told, "This is a poem – make of it what you will," whereupon you are left to your own devices. Now, you can look stupid and say, "I don't get this," or you can hold you hands up and go, "This is simply wonderful!" to cover your embarrassment. I think too many of us are unwilling to play the role of the wee boy who shouts out, "Hey, the emperor's got no clothes on," for fear of ridicule. We assume that the poem has a solution.

I sat down and drafted this post after reading a post by Dick Jones who quoted Simon Armitage, who I have to admit I don't know from Adam. That said, I do agree with what he had to say about poetry:

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.

I think the answer is all to do with percentages. No one, I don't care who they are, can write a poem where every reader will understand and feel exactly what the writer intended. There is always a trade-off. What is acceptable to one reader will not be to another but when the author is doing as little at 10% of the work and the reader 90% then I think we have to ask questions. In the case of some of the pieces on those sites, all I can say about the authors is that they've provided the words but, at the great Eric Morecambe would have said, "not necessarily in the right order."

Which brings me to the term 'experimental poetry' a one-size-fits-all expression which can be used to excuse the author no matter what, if I might quote Stephen Fry here, "arse dribble" is served up to us in the name of poetry. I have no problem with poets experimenting. I encourage it. I do it myself. I think it is essential. In the best scientific tradition that is how we learn; we have a crack at it and see what happens. One of my favourite poems of all time is an experiment, 'The Locust Tree in Flower', by William Carlos Williams:

The Locust Tree In Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, when I first read this poem and I'd read nothing like it in my life. It was the very first poem by Williams that I encountered and it was accompanied by a lengthy essay by the Scots poet, Tom Leonard, whom I have blogged about before. In his essay In Praise of Abstraction: Moving Beyond Concrete Imagery, Ravi Shankar (no, the other one), says this:

It presumes too much: that the author has distilled some essence of the locust tree that other language could not adequately convey; that the reader, through contemplating those thirteen words, is able to fill in the blanks and reproduce the kind of feeling that Williams had when he wrote the poem; that subjectivity can, in any real sense, be circumvented, even in a haiku-like verse form.

Williams is oft quoted as saying, "no ideas but in things," and I think this is a good example of that edict and yet I'm puzzled why he felt the need to condense this poem from its original form, which appears on the previous page in my collection of his poetry.

The Locust Tree In Flower
[First Version]

Among
the leaves
bright

green
of wrist-thick
tree

and old
stiff broken
branch

ferncool
swaying
loosely strung—

come May
again
white blossom

clusters
hide
to spill

their sweet
almost
unnoticed

down
and quickly
fall

It, of course, is interesting on its own merits – take, for example, in inclusion of the made-up-word 'ferncool' – and yet Williams felt the need to prune away at this until there is almost nothing left. It was months later before I read this earlier version by which time I had fully absorbed the revised poem and even had a crack at a couple in a similar style.

Does Williams's experiment work? It did for me and yet the poem sits alone in his canon. I wonder why he never felt the need to repeat the experiment. Because it failed? Because it succeeded? Who knows? What I hate is a rubber stamp being slapped on any experimental work that basically exempts the creator of the work from any criticism: "Ah, but you see, it's an experimental piece." Experiments fail more times than they succeed. Hockney, the artist, used to get rightly pissed when people raided his bins for paintings and drawings he'd thrown out. They used to see the stuff as genuine Hockney. Well, he couldn't really argue because he'd done the work. It was simply that he decided the pieces were inferior. So, he started putting dirty great crosses through the art and they still raided his bins for the stuff and sold it.

Here's an old poem of mine:

darkpoem

I know.
I know that!
I know that she is.
I know that she is there.
I know that she is there for me
and I am coming.


25 July 1989

I'll do what everyone else does and not tell you a damn thing about it. You can decide if it's an 'experimental', 'emperor's new clothes' or 'decoder ring' poem.

I've had a few e-mail exchanges recently on the subject of meaning. I think there is a tendency on our parts to over think things. Ani Smith pointed me to a blog, well more of a rant really, by a guy called Blake Butler where he…well, rants frankly, about the nature of meaning. He cites the example of a guy going into a store and meeting a woman: what does that mean? The fact is that it could mean a lot of things. The bottom line is that we don't have enough information to accurately determine or assign a meaning to it. So we extrapolate, we invent, we start to do the writer's job for him and make up our own story.

Is that so bad? Well, that brings us back to our percentages again. I would think most readers enjoy being a part of the process, they expect it and look forward to it; others prefer everything spelled out with Dickensian precision – he was getting paid by the word remember. I do expect a writer to tell me what I need to know. They don't have to be blatant about it. People who enjoy crime novels enjoy searching for clues whilst avoiding the MacGuffins and the red herrings. And, if all the i's aren't dotted and the t's aren't crossed at the end it isn't always the end of the world.

The main difference between prose and poetry in this regard is the ratio. With prose we are used to things being spelled out. With poetry we come to the piece expecting to be asked to do a bit more work. Everyone is different. Personally I like a poem that resonates after one has finished it. I want to get the gist of it then and there but I also appreciate it when there are bits for me to chew on afterwards, unanswered questions if you like. It's the same reason I like photographs. There's an antique shop in the west end I sometimes visit and they have a box of these "instant relatives" as Carrie likes to call them.

Another question Blake Butler asked was: "Why can't a bird made into a pillow just be a bird pillow?" It's a good question. Or as Freud might have put it: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," although there is no evidence that he actually said that. Metaphor and symbolism are at the core of poetic writing. People who don't like their meanings to spill over out the words their reading should probably steer clear of them. "Why can't you just say what you mean?" is another good question. Sometimes I do, sometimes however it's easier to write about one thing when you're really talking about something else. That's nothing unique to poetry. I had a girlfriend once who used to let me know she was menstruating by using the colourful euphemism: "The painter's arrived." We use picturesque language all the time. We very rarely call a spade a spade.

One last poem before I move on:

The By-Pass

There being no time
and having no place else
I hid what I had to say
in the words,
just out of sight –
unless you were looking.


28 August 1989

which brings us back to our original definitions. Remember there are two:

1. What is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated.
2. The end, purpose or significance of something.

This poem is about communication. The narrator – okay it's me – needed to say something but he is afraid to state his case plainly so he says what he has to say in the subtext of a conversation, bypassing the top-level meaning. My meaning was there but only if you looked for it. It's something we Brits are experts at. The art of innuendo goes back years. In most cases the inference is a sexual one but it can be a romantic one too. For the record, this conversation-within-a-conversation took place on a by-pass. That's what gave me the idea. So there.

But what is the purpose of the poem? Ah, well, I gave it to the – okay it was woman – some time after but without any explanation as to what it was about. It was my way of saying, "Look, what I said to you in the car wasn't what I was actually saying." If she cottoned on she didn't let on. That's what it meant then. What it means now, to me, it reminds me of that time and with hindsight reminds me that I was right to be circumspect. Ah well. You can make it mean what you will.

One last thing, on the far edges of both poetry and prose is surrealism. It is a word that is overused and used incorrectly most of the time. It has superseded 'unreal' as the generic description for odd art and writing but I think that subject deserves a complete post to itself, not that I know a lot about it.