I’ve been interested lately in being wrong. And in changing my mind—and in catching my mind as it’s in the very act of erring, or shifting, or turning, and in following that act. Which, in a poem, amounts to asking the reader to think something, then to un-think it, and then to replace the first thought with another. Except that you can’t unthink something. Even if a given thought is overridden, at least a shadow of the original thought remains, so that you end up layering additions and retractions.
This particular piece, “Paper Boats,” turns on the recognition of an error, but also plays with revision in an additional way in that it involves deep history and the way that our cultural values change and, in turn, change history itself because we re-view it through a contemporary lens. There’s nothing new in that idea, but this story, told in passing by a friend, refreshed my acute sense of history as a constant series of revisions and reconstructions, underscoring the fact that there’s no such thing as “history”—it’s all just “his story.” The story also intrigued me because of the striking image at its center—the series of lighted paper boats heading off across the water. It was an image that I didn’t feel I was done with, even though the poem was done. But admitting the error allowed me to write a different version of it—and keep both. The approach can also lead to a serial development that resembles an unfolding, in which something simple and straight-forward opens to reveal another thing, perhaps equally simple and straight-forward, but with the seriality putting the emphasis on the act of opening.
Through working on this and other series, I’ve realized that there are so many ways of being wrong and/or changing your mind—there’s “the tweaking revision” along the lines of But no, that’s not quite right…; “the doubting revision” as in Am I remembering that correctly?; “the rephrasing revision”: Let me put that another way…; “the new evidence revision”: And yet I’ve recently learned…; “the alternative revision”: Or perhaps it’s that… and, tailor made for poetry, “the revising revision”: Maybe that last line should have been… Self-correction turns out to be an extremely rich mine.
Everything on this list is an instance of ambiguity—a demonstration of the innate instability, the ultimate indeterminacy, of meaning, and in each of these cases, meaning is destabilized by addition + subtraction—a dance of one-step-back, two-steps-forward—at times giving ambiguity a quality of jaunty defiance. For so many poets throughout the centuries, ambiguity has been a principal mode of putting language to flight, of launching it off beyond its strictures and limitations. I, along with countless others, have argued that this is precisely poetry’s mandate—to move language continually beyond itself, pushing its boundaries ever outward. And I deeply believe it—but can ambiguity do it? Is ambiguity, in fact, neurologically possible?
According to current understandings in neuroscience, the brain cannot think two things simultaneously (picture Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit—though it wasn’t really Wittgenstein’s; it was actually Jastrow’s, though it turns out that Jastrow got it from…) But it’s a good, concrete example; as you look at the image, you feel yourself shifting between the duck and the rabbit, and, apparently, it’s neurologically impossible to see them both at the same time. This goes not only for what we can see, but also for what we can think. Which means that the main claims that poets (again, I too) make for ambiguity and its ability to create simultaneously multiple meanings are wrong. For details on the neuroscience of ambiguity and on neuroaesthetics, search Semir Zeki Ambiguity and Semir Zeki Neuroaesthetics—he’s one of the leading researchers in the field.
All reality aside, and not being a neuroscientist, I am, of course, tempted to indulge in wild speculation. For instance, perhaps the phrases that poets call ambiguous, those that seem multi-dimensional, that seem to multiply the dimensions of the daily world, allowing us to think all sorts of things simultaneously, can trigger a response in the brain similar to the one that the duck/rabbit image does. Perhaps, though we can’t entertain multiple meanings all at once, we can, nonetheless have the illusion of doing so by shifting extremely rapidly between the two. And perhaps that rapid shifting is, in itself, stimulating and engaging, or becomes engaging, and even pleasurable, with repeated practice, which might be one reason that the appreciation of poetry is often an acquired taste, or an acquired skill.
To go back to my recent interest in being wrong; it’s not only a matter of the poetic possibilities of multiplicity, but also one that touches on an important element of contemporary political and social life. Increasingly, in our political discourse, changing your mind or revising your views, not to mention admitting that you were wrong, is inexcusable. It’s seen as morally and mentally weak. And while it could be said that never admitting error has always been part of the politician’s stance to some degree, that degree has increased dramatically in the past 25 years. George W. Bush gave it a nice boost with his approach to compromise. In the course of many policy discussions, he slid the word “compromise” from its definition as an agreement achieved through give and take to its definition as a betrayal one’s core values and principles so completely that the first definition—the one essential to peaceful governance—was entirely overridden. Bush, by reducing the complexities and multiple definitions of this one word, shed doubt on any word’s ability to mean more than one thing. Furthermore, though it might not have been his conscious intention, it was a move toward establishing the precedent that it’s up to “the government” to determine and to limit the definitions of our words.
In our current brutally aggressive political atmosphere, more and more words are being similarly restricted, redrafted, co-opted, or simply hijacked. A prominent economic news magazine published a few examples in mid-July: “The Democratic Party is ‘not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization,’ says Stephen Miller… A terrorist is not, as the dictionary says, someone who uses violence for political or ideological ends. The label can be applied to peaceful protestors … An invasion can mean drug-smuggling or even foreigners crossing the border to clean hotel rooms.” (1) All these examples not only redefine the word, but also narrow it, reducing or eliminating its nuances and associative fields. Poetry, on the other hand, throughout its history (throughout her story), has always taken the opposite approach—poetry puts limited definitions to the test by suggesting expansions through ambiguity, pun, and figurative language; it leads readers to the outer edges of a word’s recognized meanings and then allows them to overflow.
Note:
1. “Game of phonies,” book review of Regime Change by M. Haberman and J. Swan, The Economist, July 11-17, 2026, p. 76.
