Very interesting dialectic on this subject.  Having some kind of
determination of meaning is part of the pay-off for readers, then.  I do
think so, too, even though I guess I go to a lot of trouble to resist
letting its presence determine the entire show as it were.

Then, especially near your conclusion, where you consider the everyday
example of (choices in) dressing/clothing for the day: the question seems to
be moving toward the bugbear of intention, thus further questions that are
resonant in terms of agency (a significant matter as far as I am concerned,
tho I have heard many argue and simply conclude it is non-existant), as
well.

Thanks.

Best,

Chris Murray
http://texfiles.blogspot.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 12/9/2003 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: Another 50 words

Thanks Doug, Christine.

When I was seven or eight there was a contest run by - I think - the
Listener for adults and children to compose 50-word prose "mini-sagas".
You
could win a wordprocessor (write more words!) or some cash (go
shopping!). I
wrote a few and entered them into the contest. Didn't win anything,
although
I thought they totally rocked (I was well into Ray Bradbury at the time
-
the Martian Chronicles - so they were sci-fi-themed and somewhat
portentous
in tone).

Already in words 51-100 there is a sense of conscious direction - the
chain
of associations and substitutions doesn't break or go off at sudden
tangents, and remains legible as such: as a chain, an ordered sequence.
An
egg-yolk (even on stilts) is a plausible symbolic substitute for an eye,
via
"vile jelly" and a pungent phrase of UK spin-meister Alastair Campbell's
about "bollocks on stilts" (meaning presumably preposterously elevated
nonsense). Bollocks (little balls, as hillocks are little hills) and
eyes
have a similar place in the male body's idea of itself, as in the joke
"why
do women rub their eyes when they wake up in the morning? - because they
don't have balls to scratch". A pitcher of warm milk is again an eye, or
the
white of one. Supporting structures are phrases like "beams of eros",
which
have a clear conventional connotation for anyone who has read Sidney. So
a
reader who can "do" symbolism and literary intertextuality probably
won't
get too lost here.

Even word-choices driven by phonetic re-ordering and substitution -
"vulcan"
for "cloven", etc. - are still drawn into the wake of made meaning.
There is
a structuredness (again, a deliberateness, a directedness) about each
sequence of phonetic transformations - "terraces", "satyriasis", "starry
praxis" - which buffers (or "baffles") their capacity for surprise.

But then, what does one want? Pure randomness? "Schizophrenia"?
Avant-garde
poetry, of the kind I still doubt I'm quite up to writing, is often
driven
by the need to engage rigorously with the making of meaning, to think or
experience itself as poeisis (Silliman keeps coming back to the
distinction
between this poeisis or process and the fetish of the "well-wrought
urn"; I
must say that well-wrought urns are still rather my thing, my fate
even).
That engagement isn't an abandonment of meaning, or a pure contestation
of
meaning; not necessarily because it doesn't want to be but because the
forces that make meaning don't just happen in the poem, or in the poet.

If I can't, personally, write poetry that I find personally unreadable,
this
isn't just because of a trick of solipsism whereby it's impossible for
me to
outsmart or outdumb myself. Rather, it's because the way I've been
trained
to read makes "readability" a foregone conclusion. If it's a text, we
(think
about who in particular) can make it mean something. Same argument as
the
one I always used to have with people about whether it was possible to
put
on one's clothes of a morning without "meaning" to communicate something
of
one's "dress sense", tribal affiliations or "personal style" in the
process.
I tended to argue that while we might *happen* to communicate something,
we
need not mean to; and that the onlooker's presumption that he or she is
the
recipient of a *communication*, as such, is one that might reasonably be
challenged.

Dominic