Juxtaposing text

Juxtaposition happens in all texts, but sometimes the lack of continuity is more extreme than usual. At its purest (in a translated oriental poem, perhaps) we might be offered 2 one-word sentences. Assumptions readers might make to connect the words include

• Equality (or analogy)
• Opposition (disjoint options)
• Sequence (temporal - perhaps one turns into the other)

When we come to a fracture in a longer text (between paragraphs, chapters, etc) we still try to make a connection between the parts. The way we do this will vary according to the type of text we're reading, but typically I suspect we first assume that the text is jumping ahead in time, leaving a gap that will be filled in later. Then perhaps we might think it's a flashback, or a parallel storyline that will be revisited. Only as a last resort do we concede that there may be no causal connection or character continuity.

One of the features of conventional text is that writers have to present things sequentially even if they happen simultaneously or independently. In such situations where narrative breaks down, the terms Montage and Collage become useful. Both describe a non-hierarchical way of incorporating diverse fragments producing a multicentred work. Montage more often concerns assembly using things that have already been "created". Collage is more often used when material of different types is used together and when there's no particular common theme. Gregory Ulmer described collage as "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century". This may be because it cuts across the long-cherished Aristotelian notion of organic unity, where each component of a work is a necessary part of a whole. Max Ernst claimed that "Collage is a hypersensitive and rigorously exact instrument, a seismograph capable of registering the exact potentialities of human welfare in every epoch".

In relation to poetry, David Antin remarked "for better or worse, 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset". With collage in particular, use is made of the difference between the source/material of the fragment and the meaning in the context of the whole - the observer is expected to bob up and down between surface and depth. Flexibility along this dimension is more characteristic of poetry reading than prose reading.

There are likely to be connections between parts, but they may be more to do with surface than meaning - leitmotifs without a plot. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" there's a common theme. In "The Waste Land" the links are more tenuous. In other works fragments are only related in that they each mention a red dress, or an accordian, or have someone shouting "Damn". These latter relationships can seem gratuitious, leading to "washing line" pieces (where the only point of the connection is to have somewhere to hang the pieces from) but this is to devalue the surface, which in collage is more relevant than usual. Also such connections make the lack of causal connection more palatable. Sometimes there are traces of a narrative thread in a few of the fragments. There's no narrative impetus or suspense though. Some consider "thematic interplay" the poor man's "conflict and dynamism", a "compare and contrast" task that requires too much from the reader and masks the authorial persona.

The idea of a decentralised network of ideas has been described by Deleuze and Guattari ('rhizomes') but of course goes back much further than that, beyond Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" - "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" (Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25, p.9). Parataxis replaces syntaxis - "the dethronement of language and logic forms part of an essentially mystical attitude towards the basis of reality as being too complex and at the same time too unified, too much of one piece, to be validly expressed by the analytical means of orderly syntax and conceptual thought" (Martin Esslin, "The Theatre of the Absurd", 1962.)

On a small scale, juxtaposing can happen on a line and can be read as an implicit (though perhaps surreal) simile. "In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", "Statutes of Liberty" (Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74). More generally, "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time ... modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" (David Lodge, "The Art of Fiction", p.82)

On a larger scale, sentences can come alternately from 2 fields - in 'The naming of parts' for example, the reported speech and internal thought alternate. 'Moby Dick' and 'USA' (Dos Passos) inserted non-fictional fragments. Found text can be inserted randomly into a poem, or fragments of different kinds of poems (rhymed and free-form) can be interspliced using a variation of Burroughs' cut-ups technique. Bakhtin's carnival and polymorphism can come into play too.

See Also

• Collage and post-collage (Pierre Joris)
• The Collage Poetry Mail Group - from the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction (IMCAC)

The Emperor has no clothes

A generous retelling ...

Arts progress somewhat like fashion. There are eternal verities around which variations develop. Some changes are introduced by new technology, affecting content (Science Fiction) or means (oil paints). Others are inspired by rediscoveries or by observations from other cultures. Yet others are brought about by anticipation, extrapolating from "interesting" contemporary work, fumbling ahead in the dark. A sequence of small steps may lead to a conscious break with the past, producing a trend, a school, or even an Age.

Trends come around again, lapping those slower to change. Problems can arise when the two camps can compare their works. If there's little difference what was the point of all that effort? Does the artistic journey (which is exterior to the work) matter? Clearly it does to many - people care about the authenticity of the work, and a painting made using the artist's blood will be viewed differently to one using brown paint. Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" describes another example.

If the new work resembles the old but in some way seems less good (realistic but less detailed; formalist poetry but fewer sound effects, etc), the comparisons are more awkward still. Even in evolution there's no pressure towards complexity - changes can as often simplify: features atrophying, development arrested (a sketch accepted as a finished work). Is the new art older but wiser in some way? Maybe it is more sophisticated. A work of art requires an audience which the journey can create. The sum of a sequence of tweaks and reactions to previous works might not just make a new work of art possible but may make a pre-existing item into art.

The Emperor's parade was a mistake though, forcing the premature collision of two viewpoints - a Turner Prize without a PR machine. The masses may at first respect authority, but eventually they'll resent seeing their money spent in ways they don't understand. In such situations the artists' peers may offer no support, seizing an opportunity for selfish advancement.

The fable fits most closely with Minimalism. Yury Lotman wrote that "Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system". Poetry's gone through phases of selective minimalism, being shorn of various poeticisms and conspicuous craftsmanship. Random and procedural works (N+7 etc) in particular are met with responses like "I could have done that" (and if it's Found Poetry maybe they have indeed "done that"). Unless observers have been on the journey they won't understand - the Emperor should have educated his public.

The tailors who stitched the Emperor up were good at filling in grant forms; they were the performance artists of their time, creating a situationist stunt. But the Emperor wasn't merely a fashion victim - he thought he'd spent his money "quite well"; he was hoping to use the material to produce performance metrics to discern who was ignorant and incompetent. Only the failures would see him naked - he was prepared to accept that minor humiliation for a higher cause. The public were in fear of losing if not their heads then at least face, but at least they showed an interest in the arts. A child with nothing to lose, who could only see things as they are, symbolised another type of artist.

Those who come off worst out of the story are the administrators, the fawning staff who feared losing their jobs. No doubt they had wives and children to support. A more cunning advisor might have taken the Emperor to one side saying - "You and I can see the the fine cloth of course, but how will we know if others are just pretending that they can see? Let's devise a test, and try it out on those tailors first". A blind test perhaps. A contest with anonymous entries. Can real art survive such a trial? If people produce variations on a Mondrian piece (swapping colours around, say) they might be accused of lacking originality, but are the variations any more worthy of respect if Mondrian produces them? In the rarified world of high art, or Oxbridge entrance interviews, discussing marginal/charlatan works is one of the best ways to identify talent. That boy in the street deserves one of the Emperor's finest ice-creams.

Word Association

Let's play a word association game. Feather?
    Bird
Another word?
    Light

The odds are that early associations will be reacting more to the represented object than the word. Later responses might allude to phrases ("ton" might be given as an answer - as in "a ton of feathers"). In some contexts we might get "leather" (association by rhyme). But we're unlikely to get "feat" (by truncation) or "father" (a letter deleted) even if the original word is presented visually.

Let's consider another word - "Moth". Answers might be

• Real World - "butterfly", "night", "wing"
• Conceptual - "insect"
• Intertextual - "tiger" (as in "Tiger moth plane")
• Rhyme - "Goth" (with semantic support)
• Visual - "Mother"

But "mother" is unlikely, even though it's the only other word I know that begins "moth". And "mouth" or "month", though only a letter away, are unlikely answers. In this trajectory of associations there's a descent from the Real World to Concept (Mind) through to language - first Oral associations (Ear) then the Written word (Eye).

The ordering of associations will depend on the context - if you're solving cryptic crosswords the outcomes might be different. Some poetry assumes this hierarchy of associations - casual readers will easy follow the train of thought. However I think some poets expect the words in their poems to set off associations in a hierarchy different to the one I'm suggesting as conventional, the "Real World" allusions demoted in preference to sound or intertextuality. This can happen outside of the poetry context - for example in the UK the word "bangers" is most likely to elicit the answer "mash" not because sausages ("bangers") are usually eaten with mashed potato but because the word "bangers" is most often met in the phrase "bangers and mash". Phrases like "bangers and mash" are part of the world just as moths and night are, but phrases like "Tomorrow and tomorrow" belong more to the page. It's links like this that some poem revel in.

Rankings of associations can change over time. My suspicion is that in a poetry context the rhyming linkage is less important than it used to be, replaced by receptivity to sound constellations, changes of tone, and contemporary references. Perhaps sound in general is a less significant ingredient of poetry nowadays.

Poetic Requirements

What are the ingredients for a poetic experience? As a minimum one needs a text and a reader. Let's suppose (somewhat fancifully) that some texts are intrinsically more poetic than others. Let's also suppose that readers approach texts in various ways - they read a repair manual differently to the way they read a self-proclaimed poem. These options lead to the following possibilities. I've added examples of each scenerio to make things clearer.

		Poetic Text?
		Yes	No
Poetic Reading?	Yes	"Do Not Go Gentle"	found poetry
	No	Pop lyrics?	repair manual

To increase the poetic effect of a text, you can make the text more poetic, or you can make the reader adopt a more poetic approach. The latter option is not to be underestimated - if you make your text look like a poem, readers are more likely to treat it as such. They may read into your poem things you didn't put there, but at least they'll see more of what you meant them to see. The downside is that it risks accusations of quackery if the text fails to match the expectations.

But of course there's more to it than having a text and a reader - the 2 need to get together under suitable conditions. In Acumen 54 (Jan 2006) Judy Gahagan wrote "the once unique poetry habitat is a threatened one", a metaphor which can be extended. When a species' habitat shrinks, a few things are likely to happen

• populations become isolated - the performance poets, the academics, the comedians become isolated from each other and develop independently. Some species require large contiguous areas.
• evolutionary pressures change - species survival depends increasingly on its ability to copy with marginal situations and isolation
• artificial habitats are created - zoos help species survive, but also lead to cannibalism, inbreeding, loss of parental and eating skills, etc. Poetry magazines can have side-effects too.

Poets may be in control of their text, and have some control over how the reader will approach the piece. It's rather harder to affect the environmental conditions, but the effort maybe be worthwhile. In the long run it may even be necessary.

Broken mirrors, flattened hierarchies

One model of personality proposes that a mental chairperson is in control, calling upon specialist sub-modules to fill in the details. An alternative suggested by Dening et al is that the chairperson is just another sub-module - a spokesperson or facililator - the various sub-modules able to initiate events and determine how decisions are to be made. This makes a personality more akin to a society where the status quo might be overturned by mass-revolt, media pressure or terrorism.

Poetry (moreso than prose) can be seen to exhibit both traits. Sometimes a presiding unified voice (if not of the poet then at least of a persona) marshals the imagery, but it's been suggested that "poetic effect [is] the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures." [1]. This effect can be achieved by having many secondary meanings and by disrupting the usually foregrounded vehicles of sense (syntax, meaning, etc), making cracks so that the secondary effects can bubble up.

Secondary effects may develop a net of interconnections - leitmotifs. The idea of a decentralised network of ideas has been described by Deleuze and Guattari ('rhizomes') but of course goes back much further than that - "The governing principle of much Persian poetry is circular rather than linear; rather than a logically sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken centre" [2]. Montage and Collage are non-hierarchical ways of incorporating diverse fragments producing a multicentred work, as are list poems. Such poems aren't understood clause by clause but retrospectively

• "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'" [3]
• "Modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" [4]

Poetry as compared with prose tends to foreground sound. Forms have evolved which optimally use sound to disrupt syntax - "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer" [5]. Sound is only one of many features that can work this way - disruption can be visual, tonal, or a consequence of voice and mood shifts. In disrupted poems (as in societies) there may be an advertised hierarchical structure, but it's provisional and may exist more to aid the initial reading phase than to model the underlying conceptual structure. It may even be there to distract attention from where the real power resides.

Here's the last stanza from David Hart's "Then in the twentieth century" which came 2nd in the UK's 2002 National Poetry Competition.

Men quarrelled about scrolls found in pots near the Dead Sea, the library
at Norwich burned down, milk was pasteurised by law, I have four children,
all adult now, small islands became uninhabited, Harpo never spoke on film.

Sound isn't used as a disrupter. The line-breaks are unobtrusive too, especially given the previous stanzas which habituate us to their use. One might have expected a punch-line but there's no primary narrative, no explanation or explicit emotion. Phrases' spatial proximity suggests that there are connections. Sequence suggests causation. 6 main statements are connected by neutral commas, so we need to determine the structure ourselves - first local, provisional associations. Some connections are more straightforward than others, and some connections may not exist, though readers aren't to know. The scrolls tie in with the library (re-discovery/destruction of the past), and the "small islands" are something to do with the children. Milk (though it may relate to children) and Harpo don't fit in these constellations but illustrate the poem's wider themes - natural, everyday milk subject to bureaucratic law and modern technology; individuals having no voice in recorded history, though academic quarrels are preserved.

Only at the end of this piece can readers decide upon organisational principles. The visual layout and punctuation provide few clues, and the order of clauses is more designed to accentuate local juxtaposition than clarify global structure. Readers need to suspend interpretation longer and work harder.

Notes

1. "Relevance", D.Sperber and D.Wilson, Blackwell, 1986, p.222
2. Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25, p.9
3. "The Art of Fiction", Lodge, p.82
4. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature", J. Frank, Sewanee Review, 1945
5. John Constable, PN Review 159, V31.1 (2004), p.40.

Literary Depth

Layers in literature

Texts can be seen as having layers. From low to high these layers comprise

1. The physical medium - atoms, molecules, chemicals (screen/paper). Note that these can change while level 2 remains the same (or at least irrelevantly different) to the reader, just as chessplayers rarely care whether the pieces are resin or wood.
2. Letters - fonts, color and the quality of the handwriting can matter
3. Units of meaning - words, phrases, sentences or lines. In a piece like Finnegan's Wake the letter->word phase is non-trivial
4. Interpretation - which in turn is multi-level

Reading through layers

Upper layers can have emergent features absent from lower ones (and vice versa). For example

• Emotions only exist at higher levels
• A story full of jokes can be sad

Interpretation is not a straightforward progression from lowest to highest level. A higher level interpretation can provoke a re-interpretation of a lower level. Often the lower levels (the choice of font, color, etc) is soon ignored. But lower levels can show through. Some examples:

1. If in a hand-written letter one reads "this is written with my blood", the physical medium becomes significant again.
2. When reading handwriting one might reinterpret letters after having failed to deduce a satisfactory meaning.
3. "Janet likes John" is a simple enough sentence. The interpretation of "Janet likes John" is slightly different.
4. "love's sore return" - The letters painlessly form into words that in turn combine to form a sentence. When appended by "(4)" and seen as a cryptic crossword clue however, words are broken down into letters, and the meaning of the apostrophe changes.
5. "Flower: exploding star in retreat" - An imagist poem? No, another clue. An exploding star is a nova, which reversed spells the solution Avon - something that flows and hence is a 'flower'. In this case we need to regress to level 2 back to letters. The sound and meaning of 'flower' changes

This situation might better be described in terms of processes rather than layers, with feedback between the processes.

In this document I'll stick with layers for the sake of argument.

Layer confusion

The layers are not always clearly distinguished.

• Cryptic crossword clues conflate the layers
• Phrases like "love is a four letter world" make readers change depth
• Finnegan's Wake exhibits layer instability, as do poems like 'What's in a Homophone' (Josephine Abbott, Staple 25) which begins

  How can I bare it?
  My idle,
  My bridle partner
  Left me last weak
  For a made.
  
  What a waist
  Of ours
  And ours.
  

When the boundaries between layers are crossed by characters or other textual elements we have 'metalepsis ' - a term first used by Gérard Genette. In Coleman Dowell's novel "Island People" a low level framed story becomes the top level, taking over the narrative, creating a kind of Mobius band.

Compressing layers

Sometimes, especially during reading, the concept of layers is ignored; layers are merged together. This is also done in Cartography, in painting (perspective), and in Photoshop (to save storage space). It's often done with a particular aim in mind, fixing from a particular viewpoint. The disadvantage is that the process is irreversable and makes alternative interpretations difficult. During reading some people resist the movement between layers. They become stuck in a layer, trying to read Finnegan's Wake as if it were a poorly spelt straight story. They lose the possibility of seeing how the 2 movements (forwards and backwards; up and down) interact. It's as if an archaeologist ignored the depth artifacts were found in.

Time

We haven't yet mentioned the reader-time component. Within a layer each new element can suggest meanings or eliminate possibilities (for example, consider the effect of each new fact in a whodunit). There can be an association with other phrases in the same layer or with elements in other layers. E.g.

• 2 ambiguous phrases taken together can produces an unambiguous result. Juxtaposing...
• 2 non-surreal phrases taken together can produces a surreal result.

Reading often doesn't proceed linearly through the text. Even in prose there's typically 10% of saccades (eye-movements) backwards. In poetry this percentage is likely to be higher. In particular ambiguity and confusion will provoke backtracking. The amount of backtracking needed will influence the reading strategy. Options include

• serial processing (if readers pick the wrong alternative they backtrack to the last fork)
• parallel processing (keeping all options open)
• minimal commitment (choosing an option but accepting that the chosen option is provisional)

Chapter-ends and poetic line-breaks tend to force a decision/resolution. The sentence above in the 'layer confusion' section works better with line-breaks

love is
a four letter
world

Rather than just using the emergent meaning one can have a richer reading experience by retaining the lower-level meaning too, letting it show through, leaving that dimension open for traversal. End-rhymes force an awareness of the lower level of sound, though it's only one of many poetic effects that do this. In general, the path through the text is less linear for the poetry reader than for the prose reader. The following graphs illustrate the idealised differences one might expect to find.

Prose which forces a poetry-like reading strategy might encounter reader-resistance, reminding the reader of the extra dimension.

See also

Hofstadter's strange loops, tangled hierarchies, and hierarchy violation.

Padel, McGuickian and I

Here's the first of 4 stanzas from "The Butterfly Farm" by Medbh McGuickian.

The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead: Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash, Its passion for water to uncloud

The poem is discussed in Ruth Padel's "52 ways of looking at a poem" whose description of McGuickian's poetry makes it sound rather like mine. I can see resemblances in the way that we use unstated analogies to bind images together - I've written

Critics wind up their gramophones for icing cakes, lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush

But I've rather turned away from this style of writing. In poetry it's easy for the meaning of words to ramify. What's harder is selectively amplifying some meanings and muffling others. This is done by the control of context. Take as an example the isolated word "flower". It could mean many things though the reader may need to be provoked into thinking of many. In the context of a crossword, "flower (4)" would limit the options - "rose", "iris", etc. In a more cryptic crossword "flower for golfers (4)" would mean "Tees" (a flower in crossword clues can mean 'something that flows').

We perform this 'disambiguation by context' during normal conversation. In more artificial situations we gain satisfaction by finding the answer. A poem often has to provide its own context. This poem's title (significant in setting the context) and first stanza provokes several interpretations in readers but little resolution or integration.

• A "butterfly farm" is not often like a farm where animals are bred to be killed; they're more like zoos.
• Perhaps the 1st line means "if they show a film of a butterfly, they don't have a live specimen". Or perhaps a film forms on a butterfly's dead body.
• "Its" at the start of the 2nd line might refer back to the film (a silent movie?) or to the butterfly (dead therefore silent). One might translate the 2nd line in isolation as "going through a carwash one feels enclosed in the green furry rollers, whose noise blanks out other noises. One comes out feeling reborn as if from a cocoon". "green" can mean "rotting" or "life-giving". A cocoon denotes the death of the caterpilar and birth of the butterfly - transformation. Padel sees "carwash" as a symbol of the modern world, but this doesn't combine well with the rest of the poem.
• Even Padel avoids saying anything about line 3. What does "Its" refer to now? the carwash? When water cleans it "unclouds". When rain falls it "unclouds". But where's the passion?

I can see some similarities and differences between our structuring methods. Some of my preferences have changed over the years, generally in ways that (for better or worse) assist the first-time reader.

• Like McGuickian I don't feel that the context needs to be provided before (or even near to) the tricky line - but I'd try to provide context somewhere.
• Like her (and unlike crossword compilers), I don't think that all meanings except one should be eliminated, but I'd try to deal with the 'transformation' loose end because it's a theme that I think readers might try to pursue.
• I like trying to force together 2 images. In this poem's later stanzas the idea of stylised sex-roles in Japanese tea houses is introduced. The theme could be summarised thus - "Precious butterflies (painted ladies, etc) bred for collectors in hot-houses are like geisha's in Japanese tea houses". Nowadays this is how I might well begin such a piece, helping first time readers.
• I'd also reconsider the format. The form of the poem further contributes to the impression that the poet is distracting the reader unhelpfully - why the line-breaks? Unlike the sonnet form this form is not a constraint. Nothing stops her making the lines 2cm longer or making the stanzas 4 lines long. Attentive readers will seek reasons for the author's decisions, try to read meaning into each line-break.

Padel has helped me understand this kind of poetry better, but her unconditional acceptance of the poem glosses over too many questionable features. Rather than explain what difficult lines mean I'd like her to say why the lines were made so difficult in the first place!

Literary Order and Chaos

Literary Order

The idea that in a masterpiece everything contributes to the whole can be traced back through Hegel's principle of 'organic unity' to Aristotle's theory of tragedy. For Coleridge, "organic unity" was the manifestation of a poet's powers of synthesising. It was Baumgarten (1714-62, his Aesthetica was written in Latin) who coined the term 'perfectible beauty' according to which the beauty of an artwork or natural object corresponds to the degree of its organization or integration. In the ideal case no elements of an object should appear arbitrary, accidental, or irrational - it's a microcosm of the greater 'totality'.

With order and harmony comes unity and a way to distinguish what "belongs" from what doesn't. Workshop criticism of short stories and poetry is often harsh on the apparently inconsequential - anything not contributing to the main theme is easily dismissed as not belonging. But the need for 'perfectible beauty' is open to challenge, just as erstwhile requirements for symmetry or circles were. Order brings unity but also predictability and claustrophobia; items appearing in the first paragraph of a short story doomed to reappear sooner or later.

It was from such predictability that surrealism reacted. When editing "Le Chien Andalou", Dali and Bunuel removed anything that resembled a logical connection. Dada went further, introducing randomness. Since then, people have experimented with paper cut-ups and computer generated work, and the Oulipo school have invented arbitrary rules to generate new texts from old.

Others have escaped by foregrounding performance or improvisation. Without going as far as randomness, they have adopted the more relaxed, inclusive and baggy approach of Laurence Sterne or the New York school, producing mosaics of interesting fragments and loose ends. Beginning their work from life they retain some of its untidiness in dialog and plot, leaving the work open; a transcript of a process rather than unified and closed project.

Variation and Control

Order can be maintained on a large scale while allowing local variation and surprise. The idea of establishing a norm from which one can profitably deviate also goes back to the Greeks. Expectation can be thwarted by: delaying the expected feature (Ogden Nash's long lines delaying the final rhyme); omitting it entirely (calling a non-sonnet a sonnet); or providing an alternative to the expected feature (a pararhyme). It can be a large or small scale phenomenon: a phonetically or semantically unexpected word; deviations from meter; deviations from the expectation of the genre - (killing the hero in scene one; a whodunit that's never solved). As in jazz, the norm can be established in a brief introduction or, if the norm is sufficiently well known, the title alone can be a sufficient allusion, the variations played against an absent melody as a parody might counterpoint the original absent text.

Once the author has signalled the form, the knowing reader will notice (and seek purpose in) variations. Writers may want to exploit the dynamics of anticipation/surprise and tension/relaxation. Some norms have a built-in expectation of variation. If the author exceeds the expected bounds, the reader may accept the work as an extension of the form but more likely the reader, upset by the authors breaking of the reader/author contract, will reject the work.

Martindale suggests that once a literary style has become established writers must work harder to create novelty that will attract and hold the attention of readers; they do so by shifting increasingly to the use of primary process thought in their writing. The stylistic climate for writers and readers may differ in important respects, so writer and reader perceptions of novelty may not coincide.

The readers' expectations will modify as they read. For example, they may initially expect a happy ending. If later a happy ending is too strongly prefigured, the reader may expect a twist in the tail. If finally there is no closure they may feel tricked rather than surprised. Too many failed predictions may result in the reader not trying to anticipate. To discourage this passivity, the writer may adopt a strong form (a whodunit) or use plot crises and line-breaks to force premature interpretations. Adumbration can be used to lull the reader into a false sense of security.

Examples

• "Accordion Crimes" (E.Annie Proulx) has various techniques exploiting expectation. In each chapter we are expecting the appearance of a crime and an accordian. The timing of their appearance varies. Subsections have titles, some of which raise suspense. Also sometimes we hear mention of an event pages before we are given the details.
• "Homeric Simile" by Oscar Mandel (Prairie Schooner, Summer 1995) begins
        Like a dog and his master
  and ends 15 lines later with
        So mankind (you fill in the rest)
  leaving the simile incomplete.

References

• John Briggs and F. David Peat - The Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness
• Baumgart, Hermann - Handbuch der poetik: eine kritisch-historische darstellung der theorie der dichtkunst Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1887
• Coleridge, S, "Biographia Literaria, Ch. 13.
• Martindale, C. (1975) - Romantic progression: The psychology of literary history. New York:Halsted Press.
• Smith, C.P., "Pattern and Variation in Poetry", 1932
• Wimsatt, W.K., "When is Variation Elegant", 1954
• Brown, C.S., "Theme and Variations as a Literary Form", YCGL 27, 1978

The Scale of Meaning

A look at some of the issues that confront poetry readers when they search for meaning

Meaning

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what about a poem's meaning?

One school of thought assumes that poets have a clear vision in their heads which they should translate as clearly as possible into words so that the reader can share this vision. This is the "Signal Processing" idea of communication, where writers aim to give the reader no freedom and ideally the medium should be transparent.

Contrast the "Signal Processing" idea with what happens when composing music. I suspect that Mahler didn't have feelings which he translated into sound so that listeners could translate them back - he thought directly in music. I'm sure many poets think directly in words too.

Further along the scale are Rorschach ink-blots. What people see in these shapes might well have nothing to do with what (if anything) was in the mind of the creator.

So where in this spectrum running from inkblots to textbooks does poetry stand? When Arnold said that "all art aspires to the condition of music" I think he meant that poetry, like music, should strive to be untranslatable, and that it needn't have overt messages and "meanings" - it shouldn't be inkblots or "Signal Processing". Rimbaud amongst others tried writing such poetry, but I don't think it's the only valid kind. Indeed, I think within a single poem different strategies can be at work, some lines providing information and some being more open-ended. For instance Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" mixes lyricism with a lesson

   This is the safety-catch, which is always released
   With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
   See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
   If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
   Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
   Any of them using their finger.

Communicating

Of course something may be meaningful to someone without being a conscious communication - an overheard sigh or a souvenir, for example - but many people assume that poetry should aim to communicate, and are disappointed when the conventions of communicating are broken. After all, isn't it the writer's duty to make texts as clear for readers as possible?

Texts differ in the amount of effort the writer expends on helping the reader. The way textbooks impart meaning isn't so applicable to poetry. To me, poetry is something to do with the idea that the means of expression is part of the meaning, that language can't be transparent. Paul Valery said that "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", a sentiment which I largely agree with.

In expressionism I think that authors concentrate on the author->words phase, unwilling to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of clear communicating. It's not just in the arts where this situation arises. In maths too people writing proofs sometimes prefer a short, elegant treatment (foregrounding the beauty of the objects described) rather than adopting a more wordy approach. It's hard enough saying what you mean without fussing about whether every reader will understand.

Even in situations where the poet is conveying information (describing an event or emotion), there are good reasons for not being like a textbook. Just as a good (or Socratic) teacher might encourage pupils to think for themselves and learn by guided exploration, so the poet might try to tease readers into the poem, ambushing them. Sometimes even descriptive poems work by springing surprises or challenging convention. A poem might be a lobster pot - an unadorned object that entices then restrains a delicacy, constructed from materials to which anyone has access. Just as a pretty picture need not be of pretty things so Frost, for example, can make poetry out of banal conversation. Or a poem might be a sounding board - when the the reader's mind is strummed, it reinforcing some ideas, and damps out others. Using these techniques doesn't show a lack of interest in communicating, rather they show a realisation of the need to maintain readers' interest.

But what does it mean?

Whether or not the author has things to say, whether or not an effort was made to help the reader, the final product is a poem usually unaccompanied by the poet. In signal processing the receiver extracts the original message from the signal, getting rid of the noise and interference. For the poetry reader however, the words cannot be eliminated to leave pure meaning; the 'noise' is part of the meaning. Should the reader even try to retrieve a 'text-book' meaning? I think so, but only as a first option. Reading a poem isn't just a matter of recovering what the poet meant. Indeed the phrase "intentional fallacy" was coined by Wimsatt and Beardsley to describe the fallacy of determining the meaning or evaluating the achievement of a work of art in terms of the author's intentions. Poets are not always best placed to assess or even understand their own poems. If we find a poem funny, but the poet meant it to be taken seriously the poem's still funny - it's the text that we should take notice of rather than the poet. After all it might be a found poem or computer-generated. And besides, if you've found a meaning, how do you know there aren't more? Minsky suggests that something "seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent its different perspectives and different associations ... In other words, we can 'think' about it ... if we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all. That is why the seekers of the "real" meanings never find them. This holds true especially for words like 'understand'."

There are so many types of understanding and theories of meaning that critics tend to avoid the terms altogether. Before one starts using the term "meaning" one needs to establish that it is appropriate. It's tempting to think that because the constituent words of a poem can convey textbook meaning, phrases do. I don't believe it. Phrases from Naming of Parts may sound as if they're from an army text-book but in the context of a poem their purpose isn't informative - the phrases have lost their text-book meaning. What kinds of things can have meaning? Damasio for example believes that emotions can create meaning. Others believe music can have meaning. A garden spade has a purpose but not a meaning, though it doesn't make much sense to says it's meaningless - it's not a code or a symbol. The same applies, it could be claimed, for a piece of music or poetry. It doesn't need to have meaning to be beautiful. Looking for meaning may be looking for the wrong thing - perhaps we should look for purpose or beauty.

Whose Fault?

Some say that meaning's created by the poet, others that it's constructed by the reader (the poet's intentions being irrelevant), others that the text is a product of the society and so society generates and consumes meaning, the poet being a mere conduit. How hard should we try to find meaning which might not be there?

Here are the steps I go through

• Is there a textbook meaning? - I first see if there's a clear narrative, argument or punchline. Sometimes I can't see one initially but my expectations are raised by parts of the poem. It may just be a matter of providing the connecting material. Sometimes giving up the search for a unified viewpoint helps to make the poem work.
• Is there some knowledge I lack? - Sometimes allusions are clearly signposted, sometimes (perhaps unfairly) they're not. Sometimes there are particulars that don't really matter - the "bluetit" may not have particular significance, any little bird might do, so just generalise!
• Am I missing the context, the big picture? - The piece may be ironic or an allegory even if this isn't stated in the text, or the text may come from another culture or era.
• Am I reading it the wrong way? - Some poems have lots of twists and surprises, but unless you keep trying to guess the next word or line you won't appreciate the fun. And some poems have to be read out loud.

If these fail I try to analyse where meaning is breaking down. I go back to basics and build up. Are there words I don't understand? Is each sentence ok?

Sometimes (but only after having gone through the above options) I decide that the poem does something for me (it has, as Minsky suggested, many ways of being looked at), but all I can say about it is point out patterns or make the kind of comments that wine tasters make.

Other times I blame the author. Some authors can't even express simple things clearly. I suspect some people are drawn to poetry workshops because they are poor, frustrated communicators. Other poets don't care whether they're read or not, and I suspect others are hoaxers. And of course there are the "so-what" poems, poems which have a clear meaning but nothing worth saying.

Sometimes one option is to ask the poet! When someone asks of one of my poems "What does it mean?" I think the questioner usually means "Say it in another way". Sometimes I can, but more often I can only comment on parts of the poem, providing (as anyone else might, though I'm in a favoured position) references etc.

The sort of poem I like to write looks like an inkblot but the more that people look at it the more they come to the same conclusion about what the poem does. The readers think they're free, that they've been creative, but in fact the poet has been guiding and manipulating. Instead of specifying a path that must be followed, the poem designs a space to be explored, a theme park with various amusements. The reader is encouraged to explore and is assumed to be experienced at finding their way around.

If, as I said earlier, the poets' views don't matter then why do we invite the poet to speak at our workshops? Well, we're not a poetry appreciation group, we're writers. We can learn from each others' experiences of writing poetry, and discover more ways of looking at poetry. I find it interesting to hear how a poem developed, and how what a poet writes can differ so much from what a reader reads. But hearing what the poet says doesn't help me with the poem - unless the poem doesn't work unaided - in which case it's an unsuccessful poem.

Ingarden and the Sense of Resolution

Roman Ingarden [Ing73] developed Aristotle's concept that a literary work of art has at least 4 layers

1. sound
2. sense (meaning of propositions)
3. schematized aspects (which occur in a definite sequence correlated with sentences)
4. represented objectivities (based, unlike real world things, on limited verifiable information)

Furthermore he thought the work composed of an infinite number of Unbestimmtheiststellen (indetermination spots). Individual concretizations (readings) only partly remove these places of indeterminacy, so that different concretizations remained possible. Ingarden's work was phenomenologically based, with few poetry examples. He assumed [Ing73, p.40] that "the literary work is conceived as a purely intentional product of the subjective, creative processes of its author." Since then other literary approaches have found favour and experimental psychologists have studied the reading process more deeply. Although they seldom use poetry texts, much of their work concentrates on elements that are common in poetry - semantic/syntactic ambiguity - and are especially relevant to how layers 3 and 4 affect the transition from layer 1 to layer 2. With this new evidence we might now be better placed to determine how a poem's meaning is resolved, what the resolution and scale of the derived meaning is, and how the layers interact.

Resolving Local Ambiguity

Not all texts pose readers problems. The "more 'purely lyric' the poem is, the less - roughly speaking - is the effective determination of whatever is positively stated in the text" [Ing73, p.52]. When ambiguities occur they can be at the word level (homographs, like "wait for me at the bank"), the phrase (oxymorons can make a phrase irreduceable), anaphoric (where "it" might refer to more than one thing), etc. Whole sentences can be spiked with (perhaps retrospective) irony. Whenever the readers are presented with such choices, expectation (statistically, contextually or syntactically primed) guides them to a solution. Interpretations are preferred that match their knowledge of the world, or refer to something earlier in the text. But even these criteria often aren't enough to discount all the alternatives. Theories describing readers strategies fall into the following categories

• Serial Processing ("Garden Path" theories) - one meaning is computed. If it turns out to be wrong, the reader has to come all the way back.
• Parallel Processing ("Many Meanings" theories) - the reader is momentarily aware of many meanings, but chooses one straight away.
• Minimal Commitment -
  • multiple meanings are computed.
  • the context is used to prioritise one.
  • if ambiguity isn't clarified by the end of the clause, a meaning is selected, and added to the context.
  • if a wrong choice is made, the surface structure of the last case is retrieved.

The strategy chosen depends on the type of text (the chance of ambiguity) and also on the flexibility of the reader. Hybrid models have been developed suggesting that parallel processing is used until the load becomes too great, after which serial processing is used. See D. Michell's article [Ger94, p.375] or [Cla77, p. 82] for further details.

Combination

Once the little local troubles have been resolved there's a tendency to seek a single meaning from these multiple atoms, penetrating from layer 3 to layer 4 of Ingarden's schema. The presented objects are constructed from non-contiguous material, so that there's scope for the uncovering of new contradictions at this stage. The process is rarely cumulative. The whole can have properties denied the parts - a surreal poem can be made of non-surreal sentences; a story full of jokes can be sad. The emergent tone of the whole can in turn affect the interpretation of the parts. Much current psychological research investigates to what extent higher level semantic representations constrain the activity of lower processes. In literature the overall tone doesn't always dominate: a final line can reveal the irony of the whole; one disruptive pun can wreck a serious piece. I'll draw on some analogies from mathematics to discuss various approaches to integration.

• Line of Best Fit - Scattered points on a graph (showing population each year, for example) are joined up to show the relation. Especially if the data is unreliable, the line going through all points will be haphazard. It's common to assume that the graph should be straight or should be a simple curve. Once the type of line is established, a line which best fits the data is drawn. Extreme points are ignored.
  This corresponds to the situation where the meaning of individual elements is restricted by, and secondary to, the overall tone or meaning. Things that "don't fit" are put down to bad writing, missed allusions, etc.
• Diophantine equations - An equation with many unknown variables (2x + xy + 3y = 24, for example) can have very many solutions. If some restriction on the values is imposed (that the values be positive whole numbers, for instance), then the number of solutions drops. In this case there are 2 solutions: x=2, y=4; and x=3, y=3. The infinite continuum of answers has been reduced to a discrete set.
  If finding the value of the unknowns is considered analogous to finding the meaning of a phrase, then this corresponds to situations where restricting the type of meaning that the components can have makes finding a single overall meaning possible. The title of a poem or the genre of a story (whether it's science fiction or not) can often exert restrictions.
• Simultaneous Equations - Consider 2x + 3y =16 and 5x - 2y = 2. Each alone admits of many solutions. If they constrain each other, if a solution must be found that satisfies both equations at once, then the only answer is x=2, y=4.
  Here the requirement that components work together (rather than any intrinsic limitation on the constituent parts) restrains the problem. In She served doubles. He smashed into the net. the sentences restrain each other.
• Unreal solutions - Any of the above equations can have no real solutions. Consider x² + 1 = 0. The only way to provide a solution is to go beyond real numbers in the complex/imaginary plane, to extend the range of answers that can be considered meaningful. "love's sore return" might be considered to have little meaning until the new kinds of meanings needed by crosswords are considered.

For Ingarden the work's integrity depends on there being a "solution" to these equations "The formal unity of the work derives from the essential inner-connectedness (sic) of these four strata". [Mcc85, p.11] and "attributes of aesthetic value appear in each [of these layers], the combination of which produces a harmony of many qualities" [Mcc85, p.46].

Delay and Disruption

Time and sequence figure in Ingarden's designs. He thought that works were both multi-layered and multiphase, having an ordered sequence of parts; a "peculiar quasi-temporal extension". He wrote that "The individual objects are not only enriched by new attributes, ... They are also constantly entering into new connections and relations with other objectivities of the portrayed world and are freed from those relationships which had previously been binding" [Ing73, p46]. This refers to changes in the population and interaction in the 4th layer. He seems not only to have a bottom-up approach to textual comprehension, but he also undervalues the problem of lower level processing. Disruption can happen at lower levels, disrupting a reader's linear progression through the text. Even when reading normal texts, about 10% of saccades (eye motions) are backwards [Ger94, p.58]. When bigger structures than words are involved, and readers have invested more time in parsing them, then reversals can be upsetting. Two sentenses with similar surface structure can have very different parse trees

Have the policemen whom you saw arrived?

Have the policemen whom you saw dismissed. [Mar80]

or

Computers can't wreck a nice beach

Computers can't recognise speech

Realisation of this at level 2 requires structural regeneration and consequent level 1 backtracking. Mistaken bridging inferences (the reader mistaking the writer's implicit assumptions) can be more disruptive still. In general, the higher the layer in which the incongruity is discovered, the larger the backtracking required - in a whodunnit a new piece of evidence may cause us to re-evaluate a scene, tempting us to flip back through the pages.

When reading poetry (moreso than when reading prose), we are prepared to delay interpretation or make re-interpretations. Our eyes move more hesitantly too, making longer fixations, shorter jumps and more backward jumps. We may maintain a number of interpretations in mind simultaneously until a checkpoint (maybe a question or a linebreak) triggers a resolution. An analogy can be made here with quantum physics. Mathematically, the position of a particle is determined by a probability function - one cannot be certain of its position until a measurement takes place. It's a matter of interpretation whether the probability function describes the likelihood of a particle being in a particular place (say, 5% likely to be in a box), or whether the wave/particle is partly there (5% of it is in the box). When a measurement is made, the probability function is said to collapse, and we detect a particle. In a similar way, we can try to force meaning out of a text, but this process gives only one of what could have been many possible outcomes. Only after many reading/experiments can one expect statistcal significance.

An over-hasty collapse of the probabilities into a single meaning may be engineered by the writer. The lines

 his work is good
 for nothing

would lose their suprise value were they a single line. I suspect that readers of modern literature are used to resisting premature resolution

Modern Texts

Some pieces are not constructed hierarchically, or even linearly. Level 2 (meaning) is too crumbly to support any higher stuctures. The pyramid is flattened; wordplay and character development compete on a level playing field. Resolution, if it is felt necessary, is deferred until the end without the build up of pre-Modernist tension. "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time...modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" [Fra45]. Expectation-based disambiguation is unavailable. Local sub-elements can't be solved first. The text is a single quantum system whose components, like the notes of a melody, cannot be usefully studied in isolation.

Though Ingarden's theory works well enough for technical documents, it doesn't well model situations like those above where interaction between layers is two-way or where (in pieces by ee cummings, for example) layers effectively overlap. Even at the level of letter identification, the layer model become clumsy. When readers see a round capital letter they look down to the bottom right corner because the higher processing layers know that the letter could be an O or a Q. This confusion of perceptual layers is a sign that the work lacks intrinsic layers. In descriptions of Ingarden's work there is some confusion over the role of the upper layers, partly because as the theory developed, definitions became more fuzzy. Ingarden viewed cognition as "composed of heterogeneous but closely connected processes" [Mcc85, p.11]. Psychological research has shown that these processes perform effectively only when they can accept feedback. He also considered the outside world (including texts, presumably) to be irrelevant to the work's structure [Mcc85, p.12], which is more true of lyric poetry than postmodern pieces. We are left with the impression that Ingarden's theories work best on a small subset of texts beyond which many 20th century works lie.

References

[Cla77] "Psychology and Language", Clark, H. H., and Clark, E.V., HBJ, 1977

[Fra45] "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" J. Frank, Sewanee Review, 1945

[Ger94] "Handbook of Psycholinguistics", M.A. Gernsbacher (ed), Academic Press, 1994

[Ing73] "The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art", Roman Ingarden (trans R.A. Crowley and K.R. Olsen), Illinois, 1973

[Mar80] "A theory of syntactic recognition", Marcus, MIT Press, 1980.

[Mcc85] "Selected Papers in Aesthetics/Roman Ingarden", P.J. McCormick, The Catholic University of America Press, 1985.

Not so Difficult Poems

First there is a mountain
then there is no mountain
then there is.

An academic criticised this as being at best nonsense. In fact it's a reference to an old Chinese text (by Lao Tzu?), pointing out that if you analyse something, you may lose sight of the original object, but later, the object returns richer than before. However, what the text doesn't point out is that before you study a piece you need to realise it is difficult and that it's worth the effort. The critic found these words from a Donovan song difficult because they're deceptive - neither the context nor the content give the readers any hint that work is required. This demonstrates one of the many types of difficulty prevalent today, but not the most difficult to deal with. It's just a matter of finding the "missing key".

Reasons

Why are there more difficult poems around nowadays? There are many legitimate reasons

• There's an increasing use of irony, collage and fragmentation, not just in poetry but in all the arts. Art reflecting life?
• Poets are trying to move poetry away from prose and pop-songs.
• Allusions are less likely to be understood (they're drawn from more domains, and readers no longer know the Bible and Shakepeare).
• More "subjects" are dealt with, and there are more ways of dealing with them. Maybe the work is unclear because the subject is unclear - its an accurate image of a fuzzy scene.
• Readers have come to expect certain things from "Poetry" (the meaning of life or least a summarisable meaning) and when they can't find it, they think they've "missed" something.
• Poets are writing for fellow poets (there are lots of them around!) rather than the public at large and assume that the reader knows about poetry.
• Poets are writing for the academics who think that "If it's easy, it's not poetry". If all poetry were easy, many academics would be out of a job.
• Poets think that it's good for the reader to have to spend more time with a poem.

Or maybe there's more self-indulgent and badly-written poetry around nowadays.

The readers' perspective

As the original example shows, readers can make a poem difficult by lacking the necessary knowledge or approaching it in an inappropriate way.

• Knowledge - The idea of introducing intellectual material into a poem is hardly new - John Donne did it, and Darwin's father (along with many others of the time) chose verse as the medium for expressing scientific concepts. But the rise of the short lyric poem has suppressed these other kinds of verse, so we're not used to poems that draw on many other domains of knowledge. Nowadays there are more specialist areas of knowledge, not least of which the area of literary theory, but I think that as long as the poem makes clear the kind of knowledge necessary, it can't really be considered difficult.
  I try to read poetry with my various faculties engaged - heart, ear and mind together. I think reading with the heart first and the mind later is like having a joke explained to you after you've missed the point - the joke might seem clever but ineffective.
• Aesthetics - Some poetry is difficult because it depends on the reader appreciating different types of poetry. It's possible to develop an interest in new styles, but it takes time, and it isn't always easy.
  I try to familiarise myself with various types of poetry, but there are some types that I don't have much time for (the same applies to various modern art movements). In practise I sometimes dismiss a poem merely because of its genre; being good of its type isn't enough to make it good.

I'm often suspicious of difficult poetry. I think some of it masks banality, or is used to make the poets look deeper or cleverer than they are (see "The Poetry Circus" for much more about this "Emperor's New Clothes" angle on modern poetry). I distrust people who write difficult poetry if they also have trouble writing simply about simple things. Some people have communication problems (which sometimes is the very reason they turn to writing poetry).

I've also grown to be suspicious of simple poetry! Keats' "Truth is beauty, beauty truth; that is all ye know in life, and all ye need to know." has been used as an example of simple, powerful poetry. But I'm told that if you read his letters it's easy to believe that Keats was being ironic. He certainly knew that some of his contemporaries would have interpreted it as such.

The writers' perspective

How should you present a difficult poem? Should you somehow warn readers what you expect? Should you use footnotes or explain allusions within the poem? What assumptions is it fair to make about the readers' knowledge? Should you try to add a more approachable aspect to your poem in order to win the readers' confidence, make them like (or at least want to re-read) the piece? Who are you writing for?

The answers to these questions depend to how reader-centred you are as a writer. My views are that

• Too many concessions to the first-time reader can make poems verbose. I'm not going to put things like "Mars, the Roman god of war" in my poems.
• When I've tried to be tactful by adding an easy plot/surface to a difficult poem, readers have sometimes assumed that there's nothing but the tactful part.
• I think that any piece with enough contextual clues for the reader to "solve" the poem can't be considered obscure. I also think that it's reasonable to assume that readers of my poems will be familiar with various types of poems.

Examples

Closure
The Gaulling gowned Emperors of Lit Crit
Herd classed canonfodder by degrees o'er
...

It should be obvious to the reader that this poem is "intellectual". The poet has kindly dropped lots of hints about the section of the library the reader should go to.

Anagram Homage
...
Is a pen neutral? I
peer (Italian sun!)
at plain ruin, see
in alien pasture
a supernal tie-in.
...

Each line's an anagram of the poem's final line - "Pauline Stainer", a sometimes obscure poet! I think this is clever, and again the poet has helped the reader.

Word Games
When you understand that a river is a flower
You have begun. Friday, of course, is a man
...
(Implement satisfied consumer demand,
but not in time (3,4))
...

Once you grasp that the poem uses ideas from cryptic crosswords, this poem isn't difficult either.

Re-evaluation
After a short illness, a sudden thaw worse than a storm,
sonnets tumbling from the trees, spinning to slow their fall.

The formally indispensable hero survives,
sky's orchestration left to apprentices.
...

This one's more problematic. The sentences are well formed and the clauses each make sense, more or less, but what's it all about? What knowledge would help the reader understand it better? This poem requires a shift from mainstream aesthetic values.

The poems are by Tim Love, Bill Turner, U.A. Fanthorpe and Tim Love again.

References

• "The Poetry Circus", Stanton A. Coblentz, Hawthorn Books, 1967
• "Obscurity in Current Poetry", Eddie Wainwright, Envoi 112 (an attempt to separate out obscurity, difficulty and complexity)
• Obscurity from Sol 30
• "Benign Obscurity in Poetry", Donald Justice, New Criterion V15:6, Feb 1997, p.70-76.
• "The Uses of Obscurity", A. White, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981
• "It Ain't Easy: Conformity, Culture and Complexity", Wayne Burrows, Thumbscrew 11, p.34.

Obscurity

The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. - Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 1917.

Why are some poems 'difficult'? There are many reasons, lack of control or concern by the writer amongst them. Here I'd like to concentrate on some of the more legitimate reasons for obscurity, borrowing some ideas from maths and the visual arts.

Though poetry may aspire to music, it shares many inherent problems with painting. The discovery of perspective in the middle ages provided a rigorous method of transforming 3 dimensions into 2. We have little difficulty in restoring the lost dimension ourselves. In poetry the loss is more extreme and the restoration more problematic. A poem is, after all, just a long line of characters concertina'd to fit onto the page, a one dimensional thread that began as an idea. in time and space. Whenever dimensions are collapsed there's a risk that information will be lost or distorted. In fact, there's a topological theorem (The "Flower Pressing Theorem") which states that 2 effects are likely

• some points which were close become separated
• previously distinct points become superimposed

These traits (discontinuity and ambiguity) become more pronounced the more dimensions that are compressed, and modern poetry in particular is susceptible. How does it compensate?

Each kind of representation engenders new artforms and new ways of thinking. Flat patches of paint have interactions missing from the objects they represent. When thought is put into language, the characteristics of the medium, (rhyme, meter, etc) are emphasised by some wordsmiths, just as Matisse, for example, flattened the picture space to emphasise shape and colour until representationalism was all but lost. Look at Picasso's Les Damoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica and you will see flatness and depth on the very same canvas, making the observer's mind change its "focal depth" as it roams. With poetry the shifts aren't so clearly signposted. In The Waste Land attention switches between the symbolic, the declamatory, the prosaic and the oracular so quickly that anyone with conceptual astigmatism is unlikely to get the most from the poem. Some words, like some paintings, aren't meant to be "seen through"; trying will end in bewilderment. Language is not a window upon reality, but stained glass at best, with a glory and interest of its own. Indeed, philosophers like Barthes go further, saying that the lucidity of language is a delusion borne of familiarity.

Cartographers have made a science of compressing dimensions. There's not much of a problem if only a small area is being mapped; one can translate the height dimension into colour or contour. The trouble begins when a "big" subject like the globe is being tackled. Mercator's projection preserves compass directions but not areas, so that the scale varies wildly across a map; 'Equivalent projections' preserve relative size but only by distorting directions. Most projections are compromises. Cartographers are lucky though; at least they can resort to building a model globe. Poets cannot simply "scale down" what they experience. They can only ever make squashed representations.

Even if obscurity and ambiguity were avoidable, they are still useful to the poet. Music is hardly ever representational. Poetry can struggle against it by exploiting obscurity - the more difficult the poem, the less likely is it to be read linearly; the reader is forced to backtrace, to keep the whole poem in mind at once. Discontinuity and sudden switches dislocate the flow, forcing the reader to find other relationships between the parts than linearity, adding depth so that the shapes formed in the mind by the poem aren't restricted by the order the components are presented in. We can roam over the text as one might a painting.

However, the conventions (because that is all they are) that help us restore solidity to a painting can be played upon. Escher's etchings frustrate our expectations, unsettling us with flat images of worlds that cannot exist in just 3 dimensions. Similarly some poems resist interpretation as representations of our familiar surroundings, making new shapes inside us that could not be produced other than by words, and the elbow room to subvert the analogy between the world and words is greater than painters have. As a final example from the visual arts, look at any stereogram. It contains an image if you focus beyond the page. Striking when you see it (and, like some poetry, infuriating if you can't and others can), but the depth can only exist if the surface remains "obscure".

Obscurity may sometimes shield the charlatan but without it we might lose a valuable opportunity to transcend words, a loss we can't afford.