8 February 2016
A postscript on this train of thought on understanding the content of poetry (the caboose, I suppose) before I head home after weeks away from the office and face my inbox.
When I was in high school, in Norman, Oklahoma, I worked on the school newspaper. I wrote a humor column, but also worked on typing and layout and printing headlines (which in 1981 involved an honest-to-God darkroom) and whatever else needed to be done. Another contributor to the paper was our poetry editor, Archie.
Archie’s job was to select poems from student submissions, so as to highlight the creativity of NHS students. Unfortunately, since nobody from the student body actually submitted any poems, the poetry page basically highlighted the creativity of Archie. Archie’s poetic muse was whichever one inspires very short free verse lyrics that appear to have been created by playing “Poetic Word Boggle” while drunk. Archie frequently complained that no one else submitted any poems, but his own inspiration never let him down, and there was always a poetry section.
Anyway, one day, hanging around the newspaper workroom, several of us decided to put together some poetic submissions for Archie. Collecting random words from whatever we could see without going to the bother of moving from our chairs, we wrote them out in the studiously erratic line lengths and random indentations that are the marks of adolescent free verse and submitted them under the name “Joy Gibson” – a friend of mine from a previous high school, which was a very long way from Norman. I recall only one line, the poetic gem Paper towels on a chalkboard.
Over the course of that year, “Joy” submitted quite a bit of random-word poetry, all of which was printed. Archie grew almost frantic, trying to find out who this kindred spirit might be. I think he was half in love with her. Sorry, Joy. And sorry, Archie. It was a stupid and cruel prank that I hope you never discovered. Your silly but harmless attempts to craft an identity out of what your romanticized idea of poetry were no more ridiculous than any of our stumbling adolescent attempts to invent ourselves. That was the year I wore a chocolate brown beret every single day, after all.
But our prank does raise one more issue as I think about the relationship of a poem to its conceptual content. There does have to be something there. It may be obscure – very often it is – but there should be some meaning, and it should be to some degree accessible to someone other than the poet. The things submitted by “Joy Gibson” weren’t poetry because they contained no meaning at all, not even to those who put the words on the paper. Archie’s poems were either not poetry at all or were very bad poetry because whatever they meant to him, that meaning was inaccessible to everyone else. I assume that they did hold some meaning to Archie, but whatever key it was that connected the random phrases of Archie’s verse, that key was held only by Archie, who never shared. Certainly nothing in his poetry itself betrayed any hint of it.
I have in this series of reflections compared reading poetry well to meeting a new person. We encounter the person, we may or may not connect at once on the surface, but we sense that there is something more there. Often we feel that hidden something is worth getting to know, and so we begin an acquaintance that may become a friendship. Other times, what we sense beneath the surface repels us rather than attracts us. If so, then we do not pursue the relationship. But whether we are interested or not, something is there. The same is true for poetry, with one difference: whereas there is always more than meets the eye with people, One can’t say that for poems. Some, indeed many, are completely vacuous and devoid of content. If this is the case, if there is no hint of anything beyond random bits of sound and diction arranged on a page, then like the “Joy Gibson” submissions, it is not poetry but something dressed up to look like it.
Now I am aware that there are those who would argue strenuously that the meaning of the poem is whatever the reader finds there, regardless of any meanings the poet might have intended – that in fact, poetic intentions are completely irrelevant, because all that matters is what the reader imagines he or she discovers. “Found poetry” is the deepest sort of poetry, set free from the constraints of ideology and the tyranny of conceptual meaning. Under this critical philosophy, I am wrong: there does not have to be any original meaning in the poem at all. As I say, I have heard all this. But I don’t think we need to take these critic theorists seriously, inasmuch as they already take themselves quite seriously enough. I recommend that they gather together in a (preferably soundproofed) room to read the laundering instructions on each other’s clothes until they are transfigured in a blinding flash of aesthetic superiority.
But for the rest of us, reading a poem actually is about discovering meaning – just the kind of meaning that we find in relationships, not the sort one seeks from a textbook. It does take time and work, and sometimes it may not be worth it.

But here’s the thing . . . sometimes it is.