CONTENT

The words speak for themselves or do they

Wherever there are words there's cóntent
What is the subject of the poem
Are you cóntent with what the words say

Writing is not talking
Poems are not freight cars
What are you getting at

I do not understand your poem's form
Some say form is extension of cóntent
The other way round for me seems just as likely

Are the words the cóntent
Many say the meaning is the cóntent
Do they mean meaning or meanings

What about the poems
Where one word has led to another
And the meaning is enacted by perceivers

And the other kind of poem
Where the poet has one thing to say
And says it

No wonder there are poetry wars

Some poems are made by invented procedures
The poet faithfully carries out
Natural as a referee

Other poems seem to come
Directly from the mind of the poet
What was in the mind's what's on the page

Many poems come to be
Between the mind and the mouth and the page
Or both in the mind and the mouth and on the page

Many poets are partisans
Only one way of writing is right
Others are wrong

For other poets one way of writing
Is right for making some poems
Other ways for other poems

Some want only what they mean to say
To be conveyed
To readers & hearers

Others welcome many
Among a multitude of meanings
But not all of them

A very few let the poems
Mean whatever they mean
To whomever they reach

They are cóntent
With the meanings that come to be
As the words are seen or heard

Many believe one kind of meaning
Is far more important than others
And deplore the absence of that kind

The catchword is privilege
Some privilege political meanings
Others religion or morality or the real

And a few poets privilege private meanings
Ones that are theirs and noone else's
That never would have come to be without them

Some write poems
Only to get such a privileged meaning
Across

Some want poems to cause actions
Others seek changes in consciousness
Many want themselves to come across

And a few desire chiefly
That the poems come to be
More than makers they are midwives

The coming-to-be of the poems
That each poem becomes itself
Cóntents the midwife post

But that contentment never lasts
So poets'midwifery
Proliferates new poems

And soon the poems of all the kinds of poets
May proliferate and interpenetrate
Throughout our space and time

Will this end the poetry wars




Jackson MacLow

New York: 20-30 April, 2-4 May 1996


* published first in St Marks Poetry Project "The World" # 52 (?)




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