Doug Barbour asked, in response to my proposal that poetry
cannot "sometimes" contain meaning, but must, in fact, either
*always* contain it or *never* contain it, said,
>I have to ask everyone, what means 'contains'?
When I wrote the post, I meant "contain" not in the sense of
holding back or obstructing, but in the banal sense of a receptacle
bearing its contents. Meaning would *always* be "contained" in
poems if one assumes a Romantic notion of meaning, or even a
later New Critical one; meaning would *never* be "contained" in
poems if one assumes a structuralist notion of meaning in the
sense of language being a system of differences with no positive
terms, or even a later, late Wittgensteinian notion. In the former,
meaning inheres, and is present prior to the reader or speaker; in
the latter, meaning is constructed via complex negotiations of
social and cultural rules. That's a pedestrian reduction of issues
that are ho-hum to everyone here by now, which is not to say that
the issue has been decided by anyone anywhere, of course (thank
goodness).
But when Doug B. asked what is meant by "contains," it made me
think: Maybe both those senses are unsatisfactory, and that it *is*,
actually, more interesting to think of a poem's relationship to
meaning in the sense of "holding back or obstructing," the text
considered as a kind of gauze or net against which meaning
gathers, clots, arranges and disarranges itself according to rather
random cultural forces and flows? Here's an analogy: I fish for trout
in small streams, and sometimes I put a little net attached to two
sticks into the current for a minute or two to see what insects wash
into it. I'm wondering if a poem could be thought of in that way-- as
a little language-net inserted at a particular point in the
semiotic/culture stream (the little net is a collection of empty black
symbols on a page that "mean" nothing of themselves), and the
moment the little net is inserted at that particular juncture in the
turbulence, many strange, different things begin to accrete there.
For this to happen, of course, there must be a fisherperson to
insert the net, and this is where and why meaning in poetry seems
to me to be an either/or question, where *never* and *always* take
turns, oscillating in and out, depending on (it sounds obvious to
say it, but it's not the conventional view) *whether or not someone
is there*, putting something net-like into the flow. I think what I'm
suggesting goes to what Alison was saying in a recent post where
she commented on what I'd initially said to Chris: I understood her
to say that meaning is brought forth or configured by embodied
minds in interaction with a world that minds are always and already
embedded within, a view phenomenological in spirit, even quantum,
at least in its broad principles, and one that I sympathize with. But
that view, far from providing answers, just makes "meaning" and its
containers more mysterious in the end.
Kind of babbling here, to the best of my current ability.
Kent
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