I recently had the wild experience of suddenly understanding a poem I had written eight years earlier. That sentence is less paradoxical than it might first sound.
I (almost) never start from an idea or the idea of an emotion (“I’m now going to write about how much I love my wife”). I am sparked into poetry by some mental image of a banal landscape or by strings of words that seem interesting. I then just follow along, trying to see what sounds “right.” I all-too-rarely have a sense of what the poem is about (its theme) or what it says about what it’s about (its standpoint).
This approach to my work might seem odd to a lot of people who understand poetry as a coded message, a map that leads to the poet’s hidden treasure. We tend to think of successful communication as the relatively painless transmission of some pre-existing content that is consciously accessible to both the sender and the receiver. (You don’t want to free-associate when you are testifying before Congress or trying to ace an exam.) And this makes sense. We usually encounter poetry in well-choreographed situations, most often in the classroom (where we discuss the grammar of the work and the definitions of its words). Or we hear it recited at weddings and funerals, circumstances in which we look for affirmations of joy or the balm of consolation. So, yes. More-or-less literal meaning matters. Useful messages matter. But they’re not the whole ballgame. Poetry is not failed communication.
I would argue, following the German philosopher Wolfram Hogrebe, that “we know more than we know.” This catchy phrase can boil down to the less sexy argument that our knowledge doesn’t just consist of conscious claims about reality. I might know that e=mc2, but I also know from a number of preconscious signs that you mean to do me harm or that my toe is bothering me. Another way of putting this is that we know a lot of things before we are conscious of them. Some of those things will never rise to consciousness. We will know them and will experience them without our knowing that we know or experience them.
It all comes down to the fact that consciousness is overrated.
Now, I am not about to raise a loud halloo for the unconscious or to celebrate the irrational as the gateway to a higher plane. Rather, I am arguing against a foreshortened notion of knowledge and communication. We communicate more than we communicate and not all our communication is immediately available to us. Communication is more than the quick and easy transfer of knowledge bites. Consequently, there is more to poetry than repackaging a pre-existing thought. Poetry does not (necessarily) consist of tarting up something that you could say another way. It is not just a matter of fancy language and similes.
I have in mind something like what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittenstein has in mind when he asks if you know the point you want to make before you make it. Well, in some cases we are sure of our point before we express it. But there are other cases. Sometimes we want to follow a mood. Sometimes we want to describe a landscape. Sometimes we try to turn a physical gesture (a shrug of the shoulders, perhaps) into language, etc.
In reference to these situations, Wittgenstein asks:
Now if it were asked, “Do you have the thought before finding the expression?”, what would one have to reply? And what to the question “What did the thought, as it existed before its expression, consist in?” (Philosophical Investigations, no. 335)
In other words, when you are writing from a mood, in the middle of experiencing that mood, are you setting out propositions in pretty language or are you doing something different?
I will hide behind Wittgenstein and answer: you are doing something different. You are not paraphrasing pre-digested information. Something else is going on.
You could argue, in fact, that poetry still exists, not as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”—that is, as the handmaid to the truth. Rather, it has its own niche and its own ends. It pursues those ends in its particularly strenuous attempt at finding the right words.
When is a word is “right?” It depends on the situation: on the rules of language of your period and of the poetry of your period; on your particular position when writing and revising the poem. It depends on the peculiarities of your sole self as well as on all the other historical curbs on your absolute freedom.
Markus Gabriel, Hogrebe’s younger colleague at the University of Bonn, has suggested that poetry is the incubator of thought (which he defines as a true/false proposition). He says that it establishes new sets of relations that need to be thought of and thought through. That is, poetry can and does serve as an important conduit for what we do not yet know and cannot yet argue about.
How could I disagree with him? You don’t have to know what a poem “means” for it to have meaning (in a rather strict sense of that word). What you write can easily precede anyone’s understanding of it. This holds true for both readers and writers. In this way, poetry can turn poets into the perplexed first readers of their work.
