The Way Poems Mean

 

There are two ways to say this.

You can say that, reading a poem, you use the object, the words, their sounds, their appearance on the page or screen (or in the air if you’re listening, if listening is a form of reading), to create meaning. That meaning exists in your consciousness and nowhere else in the universe. Only God, in voyeur mode, has any access to it other than you. Or you can say the poem uses you to create meaning. The poem does not “have” a meaning. The poem is just an object, physical or aural. It has no more meaning than a rock or twig. But like a rock or twig it can become a meaning, or, more specifically, it can be the material from which meaning is created. If you don’t like the idea here of creating meaning, I could say that the rock or the poem is the object via which meaning accrues in your consciousness. There is something in the middle here between actively creating, like God, ex nihilo and passively receiving, like a Calvinist, salvation. You can’t be entirely passive. You can’t be entirely active, or you would need the object (or work in a language). Any object can become meaningful, can become no longer, for you in your mind, just a rock, or a thing. This second way of thinking is closer to the truth than the first, I think.

But this is how a poem (or any intentionally made human object) differs from a rock. The poem transmits, imperfectly, a meaning that was formerly in the consciousness of the poet.

It’s useful to think through the simplistic communications model we all learned at some point in school. Meaning transferred from one consciousness to another via language like the voice through a telephone wire, starting whole, ending whole.

The poet creates in words; the words manifest the poet’s intention. This is what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, or comes as close as I can, close enough for you, when you read it to share my intention or meaning. Or experience. It would be beside the point to quibble about that vocabulary here. The point is this: rocks are different from poems in that rocks don’t sit in streams so that they can become metaphors, let alone metaphors tied to a specific meaning. But the poet turns the rock in the stream into a metaphor, seeing a possibility of meaning that the poet can use to make a poem, to transmit to your consciousness.

I understand the inadequacy of the model. But the point I hope is clear: that meaning exists not in the rock, not in the poem, but in the mind of the reader who reads the poem or interprets the rock. The difference is that the poem has behind its creating an intention to mean that the rock does not, and that intention informs the reading, making the poem more than sound or the imitation of sound, and print, and visual object. Meaning does not exist in the poem, it does not reside there. Meaning exists in the consciousness of the reader and only during the act of reading or thinking about the poem. Only in the moment of active consciousness. It fades like the light of an old TV screen until or unless it is turned back on.

That’s step one. There are now two ways to take this thought, two roads we might travel from this point. The first is the road of how limited this notion of mind is. It’s the road to the after effects of the processing of meaning, the road of how the poem comes not merely from the conscious attempt to embody fully-conscious meaning on the part of the poet and how the processed meaning in the reader seeps down into the body of the reader, of how the poem is processed not like a math equation (though I suspect math equations are processed more like poems than we usually think, especially good ones, that math equations are also poems) but like nutrients: stomach : brain :: body : psyche.

That road is pretty well trampled. I won’t go any further down it now.

The second road is more interesting to me today. It is the one that understands that this meaning, which I now need to broaden from that inadequate concept into the concept of experience, of which meaning is a major part, in the consciousness of the reader, existing only now, when consciousness is on guard and alert, always uses, as its meaning-producing tools, the circumstances of the reading, as understood by the reader. In other words I’m reading the poem today, in this context, this class, this leisure, within my highly flawed notion of what poems are and what language is and what meaning is and what interpretation is and what poems are for and what they do. And all these things both enable and interfere with my reading, with my experience, with my attempt to convert the artifact into an experience.  

So the better the model I have for how poems work and what situation I’m in when I read, the better, the richer, the more rewarding, more unimpeded will be my experience not just of poems but of everything, every human artifact, every natural object—like air through the vocal cords, the unimpeded vowel, the partly blocked consonants.  

The now of understanding. So let’s return to this fact. The meaning of a poem exists only in the consciousness of the reader. It is important to note here that the poet, the writer, is, as far as interpretation goes, just another reader; this is exactly true; the reader and the writer are on the same side of the poem; there is literally no difference. If one reader is different from another, if one reader can become, in fact must become, different from herself over successive readings, or even from beginning to end of a single reading, if indeed this process of reading is the process of becoming different, then the poet differs from the reader in exactly the same way that one reader differs from another or one reader differs from herself over time.

The meaning goes away when it is no longer present in consciousness, when I am no longer thinking about it. But the having-read, the experience of the meaning, the memory of the experience, does not go away. Where it goes cannot be determined beforehand. Am I overstating the case? Possibly. There is the possibility of forgetting, of utterly losing not just in the mind but in the body, in the consciousness and the unconscious, the experience. This is a corollary of any experience. I may learn what poison ivy is and then become wary of the plant and then, having perhaps moved to where the plant doesn’t grow, forget what it looks like, utterly lose my wariness of it and absently touch it when I return for a summer. And I may even at that point still not be aware that I had ever learned to identify the plant or that I have ever felt the itch of it. Losing the effect of a poem in the body so utterly may be possible, losing it beyond the zero, deeper than any dream or hypnotism could recover because it’s just no longer there.  But it’s as unlikely as that. If the body ever knew it, the body is likely to retain some vestige of it, like a forgotten language.

The now of meaning. The most productive, satisfying (oddly truest even) way of approaching a poem is to treat it as a potential experience. And then as an experience. Don’t search for a meaning. Have an experience. Meaning will be part of that experience. Analysis may come later; analysis will tell you why you had that experience of the poem, you in particular, at that moment of your life, on that day, in that context in which you read the poem; sanity requires that your reading not be entirely your own. A community readers will have experiences of the poem that overlap with yours. But analysis comes later, if it comes at all. We don’t have to read poems in order to analyze them. And even if we do, experience and analysis are two distinct activities.

I have in the back of my mind still the experience I imagine we all have of reading at least some poems, or even some part of all poems, particularly of difficult poems, the experience I have with any number of poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Simic and once had with poems that now seem to me without mystery, the works of Keats for example. I can’t have this experience when, despite concerted effort, the words just wash over my mind as sounds or as words unconnected to the other words in their sentence. Likely, the words are trying to do something in this context that these words have never done before. I have to come up with a new way of processing these words in order to make sense of the poem (to “make sense” is both to create meaning and to have an experience). I struggle with a poem that may or may not want me to struggle.

Meaning happens now. In my easy chair, picking up a book of poems I may have lying around, reading because I am in a mood to read, I can struggle with the poem, or I can turn the page or I can close the book for now or forever. No meaning happened for me and the experience I had was the experience of not knowing. I am guaranteed to forget the poem I tried to read. I probably won’t forget the experience of not understanding it, the experience that may lead me to give up on poetry or to take a class that teaches me how to read poems. In that class, if I want to succeed, I don’t have that luxury. This is a different reading context. And now I have to bring to bear all I think I know about poems and language and meaning (and school and everything else that for me at this moment might impinge on the process, on the thing I am trying to do: read a fucking poem).

So I ask myself, why am I trying to read this poem? I have so many overlapping and nonoverlapping answers. To prove I’m smart. To see if I can do it. To have the experience others have reported that you have when you read a poem; to find out what that experience is, to see if I can have it. To expand my mind, myself. To understand poetry better. And on and on.

If those things are interfering with my experience of this poem, I should put them aside. Read the poem. If I’m in a college course on how to read poems, I bring my confusion to the class and seek help. If I’m alone in my comfy chair I do whatever I need to do. If I don’t close the book, if I don’t give up on poetry, I get out of my chair and go to reference works or talk to people who like this stuff and ask them what their experience of this poem is. I read critics. I join poetry societies. I keep reading the poem. Or I read a different poem. The only goal I need to have is the goal of feeling satisfied with my experience of the poem.

Readers tend to become satisfied in one of two ways. They either use all texts to confirm their preconceptions, rejecting any that don’t serve that function, or they use or allow the new text, the poem, but also (though it’s a greater challenge) the rock in the stream to extend their being (mind, consciousness, self). They become more, closer to their potential, if that is something they have. More of who a person can be.