Inspired by Abstract Poetry...

In my previous blog post, I spoke of "the nexus of narrative and lyric." This is something I've been pondering for years, in my own work as a poet and in my work as a teacher of poetry. Every time I say to myself or to a class, "This is a narrative poem" or "This is a lyric poem," it feels wrong, or at best incomplete. In the poems I write and the ones I choose to teach, there's always imagery and description and the sense of a moment being explored and maybe even dissected—the qualities of lyric. And there's always a story there, sometimes a fully-fledged narrative and sometimes an implied backstory or subtext that the poet invites (dares?) the reader to perceive. As readers, we cannot help but perceive—or create for ourselves—the story. A story. One or more of many possible stories.

This helps me understand asemic writing and my own experiments with abstract poetry. There's a story here—there are many possible stories here. "We thing with"—a fragment of text that is "readable" (to speakers of English) yet without inherent grammatical meaning or context, plus what looks like "writing" but is unreadable because it's abstract. A few images recognizable to any human being, yet themselves somehow removed from context, from the "grammar" of imagery.

In his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher Alva Noe writes that the "art" of art lies "in what we can't see, or in what the piece affords as a possibility for discovery." As I type that, I think of my students who ask some variation of, "Did the poet intend that image to symbolize ______?" Does the artist know—can the artist know—all the possible meanings her/his work will hold for viewers/readers? Can we perceive ahead of time (before our visual artwork is seen by others, or before our words are read by others, or before our music is heard by others) all the possible meanings? Can we mean everything, or do we always mean more than we ourselves know?

Whew. It seems story is a multifaceted and spontaneous thing. Story as a state of being. Story as a state of perceiving...