Try as one might there’s no getting away from meaning! Unless perhaps you’re Kurt Schwitters, but then you’ll be channelling cosmic babble from Ursa Major.

Poems generally want to play with meanings. Of course pigments and notes don’t (except perhaps to a synaesthetic) signify anything in themselves, and words do, so that’s also part, if you like, of the palette of language as medium. But then colours, notes, and words when combined in particular ways begin to signify differently, and make meanings as well as patterns. Poetry is often the most pattern-making of the verbal arts.  Unlike painting and music, only poetry can be paraphrased (because it operates in the same medium) but the futility of paraphrasing any good poem helps us see it has an oblique or estranging or transforming attitude towards the received meanings and perhaps ideologies embedded in words. Pure or impure that’s one reason why it’s an art.

 

(This isn’t an attempt at aesthetic philosophy, just a few notes.)

Jamie