So our topic in class this week was Readers & Subjects. Last week we focused on whether or not the author really mattered, and this week the spotlight was aimed at the reader. If the author doesn't determine the meaning of his work, who does? Certainly not the reader. If the reader created the meaning on their own, we would never know who was right or wrong.
On Thursday we focused a lot on William Carlos Williams's poem, "This is just to say." I have to admit that the first time I read it I laughed out loud. I thought that it couldn't possibly be a poem. There was no rhyming, no structure; and as we pointed out in class there was no meter or thesis/antithesis like a sonnet would have. So...what made it a poem? I'll get to that in a second. First, I got really interested in what really does make a poem a poem and I found this mini-lecture by Charles Bernstein on Google Video that I thought fit in a bit with what we were talking about:
Bernstein says that timing is what makes a poem a poem. Now, I'm not sure if he meant the same timing that I am thinking of, but time is what I was going to talk about. If the reader isn't creating a work's 'right' meaning, and the author isn't as well, who is? Society. Me and you, essays, critics, newspaper articles, reviews. All of these things influence what we think is the 'right' meaning of something. "This is just to say" could have been considered a horrible poem in another time. The words aren't extraordinary, nothing rhymes, and there is no solid meter. What, then, made it a poem? Our fascination with it did. Like Steve said in class, Williams is messing with our heads. It's a poem because we treat it like a poem, not because it fits any of this time's standards.
It's like what Stanley Fish said: The reader makes the meaning...but the meaning makes the reader. When a reader creates a meaning for a poem, for example, that meaning was already instilled in them by their past and by society today. When Fish's class took six names and turned them all into religious symbols, they thought they were reading a poem and so they approached it the way they were taught to.
Time. That's the key word. Whether a meaning has "stood the test of time," or whether it's affected by the society in this day in time, it's still time.
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So much circular logic! Ha, I hate not having something definite to tell me what a poem is. Anyways...
ReplyDeleteThat video was great; I kinda agree with it, too. Timing does influence a rhyme scheme and gets people to pay attention to certain lines or syllables and all of that, and when put into application with 'This is Just to Say" it really does mess with our heads and gets us to think about a deeper context, or in this case, lack there of.
As for laughing when you first read the poem, I did too. I had a more crude thing to say about it, but we'll leave that out of these comments :]
Or maybe it's all in the wrist... or ON the wrist.
ReplyDeleteSo, what does he mean by timing? I think he's kind of full of crap, and I think I heard this joke when I was a kid. You ask somebody "what makes a joke funny?" And right as they start to answer, you interrupt them and say, "the timing."
So, you left your blog with a question but without any attempt at an answer. In my blog on Alexander's poem, I suggested that the timing was important, but by timing, I meant the occassion. And one could say that the definition of a poem depends on the historical time, since the kind of poetry written by modernist poets such as Williams would not have been considered poetry just a couple of decades earlier. So, for Fish, these considerations are all part of the intepretive community, but....