>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.
>
But I like it, Kent
so long as the person(s) there include the reader, adding or deleting
'meaning' as s/he goes along the river bank, or even dips a toe, or whole
body in, to check the net?
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Shakespeare
Drag yr mouldy old bones
Up these stairs & tell me
What you died of,
I think
I've got it
Too.
Sharon Thesen
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