Comments on: On the Intentional Fallacy

By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:51:11 +0000

Michael – “By the ghost of Frank O’Hara” I was not seeking any apology.
Heck, even though I have often done things I later wish I hadn’t,
I one day simply decided I no longer believed in apologies.
You should read some of the negative things I have written about myself.
The brain doctors I’ve conversed with about me think I’m fine; but
I see myself as one who’s a bit unhinged, a Prufrock type, and so on and so on.
The challenge is to always act in such ways that make it impossible to later feel:
Darn, I wish I hadn’t done that. Yah, easier said than done, as they say.
One poet blogger told me last year that he thought the sometimes heated
arguments in comment streams between those who care about the topic
being discussed are good events rather than bad ones, and that neither I
nor a blog owner should be bothered by such. Freedom of speech.
I don’t know. Guess I had better stop. Am sensing the ghost of Frank O
is standing behind me, and’s about to bop me.
Fear not, however, about my ceasing to comment.
Best to you,
Brian
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:28:43 +0000

Brian – Please don’t keep your thoughts to yourself, on anyone’s account. I apologize for the tone of my comments, & hope to continue reading yours. It’s a wonderful thing, to have these conversations among people who actually care about poetry & its place in the world.
Best,
mr
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By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:39:31 +0000

I read certain posts and comments
mainly because I want to learn.
So perhaps I should keep my thoughts to myself,
but here I didn’t.
Therefore, yes, thank you: everyone.
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By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:12:57 +0000

Ms. or Mr. Onward,
The distinction between “categorical intention” and “semantic intention” is indeed useful and germane. Thanks!
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By: onward

onward — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:11:46 +0000

If anyone actually IS interested in reading in the most current debates around intention and interpretation of works of art (including poems), the book to look at is Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, which usefully synthesizes recent accounts and offers its own.
You might also might take a look at Jerrold Levinson’s generally appreciative but also critical review of same, which defends the distinction (crucial for this discussion) between categorical intentions (intentions to make a particular kind of thing) and semantic ones. On Levinson’s account, categorical intentions are logically prior to semantic intentions: the categorical intention to make a poem (as opposed to a history, say) determines in advance that the meaning of the poem will not simply be identical with the meaning of its sentences, and provides directions (embedded in the history of the genre) that guide readers toward the particular ways in which non-sentential meaning are formulated and (thus) can be read.
The point here isn’t to shame people who haven’t “done the reading.” The point is that these are debates that have been conducted in systematic ways (and are ongoing), and so pointing to Barthes or Foucault is likely to be a way of confirming what we would like to think, rather than a way of thinking.
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By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:55:11 +0000

Michael,
if you want to converse with people who are not experts in your field, it is bad manners to upbraid them for not becoming experts in your field before conversing with you.
Your answer to Brian amounts to: Why are you talking to me when you haven’t read the same books that I have? You didn’t actually say anything intelligible or useful to him.
Do you “intend” to come off as a person with bad manners?
I don’t find the equation of intention and meaning, as presented by you, at all useful. It seems to entail a redefinition of “intention,” and your presentation of it seems internally self-contradicting. You seem to allow that some poets “intend” readers to generate their own meanings from their writings. How could the “intention” and the “meaning” then be the same? I believe you that you believe that intention and meaning are the same in this case too, but it makes no sense to me. You seem to be insisting on redefining common-coin vocabulary and putting them into specialized slots, and then getting huffy that not everybody recognizes the slots!
A lot of academics in the humanities seem to specialize in these para-neologisms. When people get huffy that the whole world hasn’t adopted their subtle, apparently nonsensical redefinitions . . . well, sir, good luck!
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By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:08:41 +0000

Bobby,
That Derrida quote is right on the money, and the reading — not misreading — of the Canto is terrific.
I would add in defense of your reading that Pound partially recanted the Cantos in the last finished Canto, Canto CXVI, with the phrase, “my errors and wrecks lie about me.” Earlier in the same Canto (as you know), he had mentioned, “Muss., wrecked for an error.” Echoing the same words, we can imagine that Pound perceived his error to have been Fascism (though he still admired Muss.), including anti-Semitism. He also explicitly recanted his anti-Semitism in an interview with Allen Ginsberg around the same time, which indicates that Pound may have included anti-Semitism in his own vision of his errors.
Michael,
Are you excluding the possibility of unconscious intentions in poetry? That would seem counter not only to “the rules of poetry,” but to “the rules of language”! Not to mention human behavior!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:44:08 +0000

P.S. And if you want readers to interpret their poem in “their own way,” then that is your intention. And if you want your aleatory poem to make a statement of anti-intentionalism, then that’s a form of intention too. That Brian thinks his closing example actually illustrates anything about intention is indicative of how ill-read in the subject most people are. Everyone thinks up all these counterexamples, as if they prove something, without bothering to discover all the times identical counterexamples have been proposed and refuted. And that’s fine. But it’s a strange way to carry on an argument. As for Arthur’s comment that theory should be abandoned because it’s not useful to poets, I can’t imagine thinking that the study and analysis of literature matters only insofar as it is of use to poets. As if no one could be interested in it for its own sake, or as if only poets are its intended audience. Or as if only poets matter. I write poetry too, we all do. But of all the possible reasons for believing the enterprise of critical theory should be abandoned, I can’t think of many that attend less closely to what purposes the enterprise was rather nobly trying to serve.
OK, OK, I swear by the ghost of Frank O’Hara that this is my last post in this thread. Jay-Z and Michael Jordan are poor role models for the blog comment stream retiree.
Best,
mr
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By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:25:53 +0000

If you’re going to bring aleatoric procedures, or indeterminacy, into the mix, a la Cage, then it’s important to be very clear what is intended and what isn’t. The problem of intention here is about WHAT is intended, and how intention is both protected and subverted.
What Cage intends in a piece like “Indterminacy” or “Variations IV” is to remove his own taste from the process of performance and composition. (His own ego-based choices about what he likes and doesn’t like.) But this isn’t random composition, or true chance. It is also a process of allowing the surprising and unexpected (in terms of sound but also silence, and non-sonic events) into the time-frame of the composition and performance. The end result of that is to open the ears, to open the time-frame to possibilities neither planned or intended by the composer. Cage delighted in listening to performances of his work wherein he could be surprised.
Something I’ve found that almost all lit-crit writers get completely wrong about Cage, perhaps from not having read his books or actually performed his compositions, is that it isn’t really all about chance. The performer isn’t making random sounds at all. The performance events have been pre-determined, following strict rules, which are intended (yes, intention) by the composer to be followed strictly once they have been laid out.
Once the decisions are made during the process of preparing the performance, they are meant to be followed precisely and accurately. It is not really up to the performer to make changes “on the fly” in many pieces, but to follow the rules.
Cage often expressed dissatisfaction with performances wherein the performers took “chance” to mean that they could do anything they wanted to. But they misunderstood that they did not actually have complete license to do whatever they wanted—because, bluntly, the whole point was to remove personal taste from the creation of the music, including the performer’s personal taste as much as the composer. This creates a level playing field in which sonic events are as value-neutral as possible, without typical ideas of meaning and intention in play.
So, in fact, Cage’s intention in his music was NOT to remove meaning, but to allow new meaning that Cage himself had not intended, but was there to be found.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:59:56 +0000

But, Bobby, that’s clearly a misreading of the poem, no? An interesting one, but no one’s denying that creative misreadings are possible. It’s just that you can’t say that’s what the poem means; as you say, it’s “reading in the light of.”
And computer-generated poems don’t trouble the intentional thesis because there clearly has been intentionality in their programming. The programming is intentional, but of course the computer doesn’t “mean” anything by its lines: the intention was to have them generate something randomly. Likewise, MacLow’s or Cage’s aleatory practices realize poems whose interpretations are clearly derivable by intention: it’s just that, in their case, the intention was to produce a poem by chance, & they didn’t “mean” anything in particular, because they didn’t know what lines would be produced beforehand. Not “meaning” anything in particular is a form of meaning, one that you must intend.
Anyway, no fair ambushing me here. Let’s talk this over over coffee or something. Cuz now I’m really Audi, from this thread at least.
Best,
mr
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By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:29:44 +0000

Almost always I find I agree with Arhur Durkee/ as when he asserts “. . . theory . . .
always should be descriptive. . . .” even though it is likely/ most never will
support that assertion; and so I believe
a maker’s materials can
generate an aesthetic which governs their use in specific instances, and yet
also believe a stated or unstated predetermined aesthetic can govern how
a maker uses materials; and that, therefore, an exceptional work of art
can be produced both intentionally and unintentionally, though the latter
relies more on intuition than on logic. But neither approach cancels
the other–not among humans anyway. After all, humans are fallible.
About poem-making, Paul Valéry said: “A poem is never finished,
it is only abandoned.”
Both what’s intended and not intended persist; and because
change pervades human experience and because every observer
sees/feels what’s observed differently, there is no final way to know
the fullness of either. This doesn’t mean making an effort to more
fully appreciate an artifact is without value.
As to meaning and intention:
from my point of view
they are not the same.
Say I make it known to you:
“I intend to close this door.”
Say your response is: “Why?”
If I do not answer your question, you can
only guess at what my closing this door means.
Brian
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By: Bobby

Bobby — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:59:29 +0000

Michael,
Here’s an example for you of “a reading of a poem which he or she thinks is the right reading but also thinks is not a reading the poet intended,” one I actually used last year in a class:
“Canto LXXIII” is one of the poems that Pound wrote in Italian during WWII. The poem speaks in the voice of a Dante-like person waking in “the black air,” i.e. in Hell. He meets the spirit of Guido Cavalcanti, who denounces Roosevelt and Churchill and Eden as “bastards and small Jews / Gluttons and liars all.” Cavalcanti goes on to tell the story of a Rimini girl who, we’re told, had been raped by Allied soldiers and who days later led a troop of Canadian soldiers into a minefield that blew them all up, herself included. The poem ends “But what girls! / what girls, / what boys, / wear black!”
On any standard reading of this poem–intentionalist, biographical, whatever–you have to say that this is a poem that is a bit of propaganda for the Fascist regime. (Incidentally, the story of the Rimini girl had been published in the Corriere della Sera during the war and was a complete fabrication.) There is no hook in the poem that would allow one to argue that Pound was somehow being ironic–he meant what he said about Roosevelt and Churchill and [Anthony] Eden.
And yet readers familiar with Dante’s Inferno–and I know you’re one of them–may remember that the spirits whom Dante meets in hell do not always tell the truth–many of them don’t. In fact most of them don’t understand what landed them in Hell and so they end up, by way of a kind of compulsion complex, repeating the things that caused their downfall. Thus Francesca appeals to Dante in the name of love, thus Ulysses defends his decision to sail to the South Pole in the name of virtue and knowledge. (John Freccero talks about this in an essay called “Infernal Irony.”)
Read in the light of this knowledge about the Inferno, Pound’s poem takes on a new, more interesting cast. Pound’s Cavalcanti sounds a lot like Dante’s damned, and so one can come to interpret the poem as damning itself. I suggest “the poem” as the agent here because we know what Pound intended for the poem (and we know that he never read the Inferno a la Freccero). Call it cosmic irony if you want, or Pound’s unconscious, or whatever, but to my mind there’s no doubt that the “right” way to read the poem is something other than the “intended” way.
(And lest this kick over another hornet’s nest of fury about Pound and fascism, let me add posthaste that my students had no difficulty holding in their brain these facts: that “Canto LXXIII” was written as a piece of Fascist propaganda, and that reading the poem in another way than Pound intended does not cancel or absolve or excuse the first fact.)
All of which is to say that for me the problem with Michaels and Knapp’s argument is that while they give good reasons why a consideration of intention is necessary to the interpretation of literature, they don’t give good reasons why it should be sufficient. Me, I’m with Derrida–there goes the other hornet’s nest–when he says that in his view of interpretation, “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances.” (This is the thing that Searle seemed never able to wrap his head around.) Considering the author’s intention should be a part of criticism; I just don’t believe it should be the only part.
Bobby
P.S. I also think you let yourself off the hook too easily by calling computer-generated poems trivialities, especially when the question is intentionalism. (To my mind they give the lie to the beach marking example.) But I’ll save that rant for another day.
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By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 04:30:07 +0000

Dear Henry,
I enjoy your contributions too. But I didn’t bring up anything. I merely tried to clarify what had already been brought up. Take it or leave it. Does that, in turn, justify the vague aggression of your tone?
For instance: “Your concept of literary theory seems oddly positivist : these issues have been dealt with authoritatively in “the literature”; Science advanceth, and faltereth not; all these questions have been resolved; nothing is at stake. . . the Meaning = Intention Theory of Poetry, which you’ve been urging upon us, sarcastically, on the basis of sheer Authority.”—and so on and so forth with distorted paraphrases and scare quotes. See: I can call out condescension too. Shall we have another round?
You accuse me of being jaded and sarcastic yet you ask me to argue with you about an article that, so far as I can tell, you haven’t bothered to read. That’s fine. The truth is I’m not at all upset that you or anyone else here could wake up tomorrow doubting the central claims of “Against Theory.” Sorry if you want or expect more in the way of dispute.
B
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By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:02:39 +0000

“If we are right, then the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided & should be abandoned.”
And yet some continue to propose theory after theory. Ah well.
The bottom line here—and this is another arena in which I find myself in frequent argument with the formalists and other -ists of every stripe, not excluding the LangPoets—is that theory is and always should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, It comes after the fact. If theory is used to dictate art-making it becomes just another ideology. Theory is useful as reporting—noting trends, noting tendencies, patterns, analyzing content as though data-mining. But theory is useless for telling me how to do what I do as a poet, and even worse for telling me why I do it. (Or why I should be doing it.)
After a point, literary critical theory *should* be abandoned. Because it’s fun, it’s a nice hobby or game, but it actually doesn’t help one as a poet.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:03:26 +0000

Boyd,
I enjoy & appreciate your & Michael’s contributions to this topic. However, this kind of jaded tone which you employ – “I love the Age of Theory!” – it’s over 25 yrs old! etc. – “it’s technical, & it’s available” – etc. – this condescension, as John put it -
it seems a bit of a rhetorical ploy on your part, since it was you two in particular, not Reginald, not me, who brought up these ancient academic source texts (Knapp/Michaels). Yes, Reginald’s “intentional Fallacy” is even older – but he provided some context, some evidence as to how these sources are still relevant. You & Michael imply that simple age & technicality add weight to your arguments. However, issues we’re bandying about have plagued writers & poets since the time of Plato if not before.
Certainly, it sounds, on the face of it, as though “Against Theory” offers a rich & challenging perspective. But just because an argument has been made (in “the literature”, no less) which equates meaning with intent, and just because it was done 25 yrs ago, is not such a powerful argument in itself. (Reginald already pointed this out.)
Knapp/Michael’s project to dismantle Theory wouldn’t necessarily dissipate the conundrums – the pragmatics – of poetic composition per se. For about 20 yrs or so I’ve been fulminating against theory myself, since I consider poetry’s philosophical “false friends”, from Heidegger to Derrida et al., to be using poetry for their own ends, and debasing it in the process. But global Theory is one thing; the contradictions of intention, impulse & artistic impersonality are well-nigh irreducible, & have been with us since a long time before the advent of de Man.
But you see “nothing at stake”. Your concept of literary theory seems oddly positivist : these issues have been dealt with authoritatively in “the literature”; Science advanceth, and faltereth not; all these questions have been resolved; nothing is at stake. . . sorry, but I think Reginald, John & others have offered some pretty substantial challenges to the Meaning = Intention Theory of Poetry, which you’ve been urging upon us, sarcastically, on the basis of sheer Authority.
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By: john

john — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:35:48 +0000

Michael,
sorry if the comparison offended. I intended no disrespect; I thought Gore stumbled rhetorically at that moment too, but I put a lot of energy into trying to persuade Nader-leaners to vote for him.
department of picking nits: go back and check it out. the first two words of your very first comment on this thread are, “Ah, Reginald.”
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:03:49 +0000

One last (I promise) quick note to Arthur: “Against Theory” is called “Against Theory” for a reason. It is that the authors are arguing against theory: “If we are right, then the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided & should be abandoned.” The obvious countercharge is that they are actually producing their own theory, but their main point stands: theory is grounded in the attempt to solve problems that are in fact not real, due to a failure “to recognize the fundamental inseparability of the elements involved.” The debate over the relation between intention & meaning, for instance, is not a debate a theory can resolve, because there is actually no debate. The terms are inseparable. It is as quixotic to insist that interpretation can only be arrived at through appeal to intention as to deny that intention plays any role in meaning. For intention & meaning are, for reasons rehearsed above by me & Boyd, the same thing. It follows that literature does not stand in need of a theory of interpretation.
Best,
mr
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:16:04 +0000

Well, the sigh was really along the lines of mild exasperation, since in the comment thread that started all of this, I had already brought Knapp/Michaels into the discussion, & I just found it rather, shall we say, remiss of Reginald to write an entire post on intentionality in which he continued to ignore the central statement on the matter since the New Criticism.
But enough. Knapp/Michaels is available for those who are interested. I will say only that Foucault & Barthes (actually two extremely different essays, addressing very different conceptions of the author-function) & in particular de Man are also exhaustively dealt with in the relevant literature. One point I would like to clarify is that I don’t actually think Knapp/Michaels are completely correct, I don’t think they wipe the floor with de Man, I don’t think Wimsatt/Beardsley or Foucault are full of it. It’s that I think they are all worth reading & arguing about, & throughout this exchange my central contention has been that reading one side of an academic/artistic debate will get you about as far as Buffalo, after which you’ll need to hail a cab.
This is, however, the first time I have been compared to Al Gore, & I sincerely hope it will be the last — it’s a sure sign that I’ve overstayed my welcome.
Best to all & sundry, no matter our disagreements,
mr
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By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:15:30 +0000

There’s my intention, if any, when writing the poem. (Most of the time, I operate on instinct, and have no idea what I’m doing till later.) (Side note: That this seriously annoys poets who are more purely intentional with their poems, and demand that the poem do what they want it to, is another discussion.)
Then there’s the intention, if any, a reader reads into the poem. What they think the poem was intended to do, what it’s about, why it matters.
The latter may or not not overlap with the former. I find fuzzy-set theory to be useful here: You don’t always know what are the full contents of the set, but you know where it’s boundaries are, and you have a sense of where sets overlap and combine.
Honestly, I find math theory to be a lot more useful in discussions about creativity than I do 95 percent of literary-critical theory. Lit-crit theory is just so disconnected from concrete reality, most of the time. (Perhaps a function of academia’s general disconnect from reality.)
The truth is, none of this matters a whit. Not even what I think. If the poem doesn’t connect with the reader, viscerally and intellectually, in their guts and in their mind, then it’s all moot, because it’s not a poem that has succeeded in what poetry does. (Which IS more than mere communication. But what that “more” is remains open to debate.)
The poem has to stand or fall on its own merit—which is the one arena in which the text is all that matters, as the New Critics postulated. This is where they were correct, even if nowhere else: if the poem isn’t a stand-alone work of art, no amount of theory matters, or will save it. The poet’s biography cannot save the poem, if the poem is just bad—and this is where the fallacy of intent in political poetry is always mistaken, because even if one agrees with the poem’s political message (intent?) there’s no saving it if it’s just a bad poem.
Intent never guarantees quality, ever.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:58:04 +0000

Francisco, thank you for your thoughts about the Thom Gunn anecdote, which strengthen my feeling that I had seen a living example of a poem’s reception – with the poet actually present!
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By: Jonathan David Jackson

Jonathan David Jackson — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:59:28 +0000

Dear Reginald,
This open note is my way of recognizing the deep importance of your contributions and to wish you continued wonder, wellness, and even wile! One of the best tools of survivors is beguilement and by beguilement I mostly mean cunning). But the connotation of trickery is warranted too (more on this later). I am a survivor and, in the best meaning of the word, you are too. My reflections here may shift the ground a little under the debates that you and other discussants raise.
My deepest artistic engagements with texts and with other media never involve generalizations about what should be aesthetically. I am suspicious of social and theoretical absolutes. I see great credence in your views about the fallacies of authorial intentions. When I teach introductory poetry and fiction courses (as I have off and on since 1994) I encourage my students to examine the structures, style, grammar, syntax, and diction of the text itself–its internal work–rather than imposing meanings that ignore the text’s formulations.
At the same time, having read the commentaries collected in the University of Chicago Press’ classic Against Theory (by Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels et al) and many other related debates, I also see the importance of arguments to the contrary. Moreover, I see a need to trouble the very notion of “intention” and “meaning” in ways that haven’t yet been touched upon in this particular conversation.
Rather than only being interested in textual meanings, I am also interested in what I’ll call (for lack of better descriptors) subtextual meanings, subtextual intentions, and intentional trickery. Artistic survivors often usesubtextual meanings, subtextual intentions, and intentional trickery to aim toward, engineer, and effect transformations in their work that address the ways in which their place within the writing and reading public is marginal or socially suspect.
The subject matter of some of my creative writing (working class people; abused people; people involved in illicit acts like prostitution may be so outside of the lived experienced of some poetry writers and readers that they simply do not have any access to the range of meanings and intentions that may be evident in the work’s formulations on the page.
In a way that is different than a consciously experimental writer who is aware of the difficulty or possible unintelligibility of her or his invention, I too am concerned that the experiential ground of my subjects and structures challenge theoretical absolutes about how we should think about form, intention and meaning.
There are stated intentions that are helpful as I engage texts. Those intentions are when an author speaks about the decisions of mind that lead or led to her or his formal and structural choices.
I have had students who say that it is their intention to write in a way that aligns them with what they think is an au courant literary trend and my question to them is always this: What does the individual poem or series of poems need? I say, Rather than choosing a school as a means to develop a reputation for yourself, interrogate the reputation of the poem itself as you wrestle it out of you.
Then there is another class of intentions and meanings that involve the politics of address in some poems. To talk about this class of intentions and meanings I have to refer to some of my poems and to my creative process. WARNINGS: People who are indecorous enough to have a blanket, absolute, unalterable problem with rhyme and non-free verse prosody in all poems should stop reading now. People who are opposed to poems about illicit practices of prostitution and drug use in which Tiny (and not I) was involved should stop reading now.
When I was much, much younger I had a friend who everyone called Tiny. Besides her name only these few points by way of description may be necessary:

née Ronny Shelton
1965-1992
Seamstress, gender illusionist, thief, hustler.
5’4, pneumatic, long, soft, brittle wooly hair.
Clipped, hushed cadence.
Always questioning.
Reefer, PCP, heroin, crack, coke powder.
Virus, hospice, fire, smoke.

Around 1996 I started writing a series of elegiac epistle-poems addressed directly to Tiny (poems-as-letters). Tiny was literally haunting me—appearing to me in sweaty dreams; nagging me each time I heard that another old acquaintance had passed away of AIDS. Most of all, her way of speaking–her phrasing and the way she spoke in seemingly endless contradictions and paradoxes, interminable language of the streets–would appear in my ear in sonic flashes.
So I started talking back to her in poems like this one, poems that reveal memories of a kind of life that one only knows about if you lived it as Tiny and I (to a lesser extent) did. But, the life lived is, as you aptly put it, an objectification that I tried to work for in the broken, fractured metrical scheme of the poem–a broken scheme that owes itself to the survivor-speak or the trickster-speak of so many of the working class or outsider environments that I have experienced firsthand.
Murile’s at the fire escape.
Smoke gives her wings.
Hanging, flying—she’ll try
anything. Winnie’s got Boat,
says, It whores your emotions:
Glam one minute then
you’re having an abortion.
This is where you go
to count money: long pink
halls, half-mannequins,
the old Hecht’s department store
pigeon droppings and hairpins
and a roof where you all make fire.
Winnie says you’re rich without
money, full without food,
and cops on the stroll? No new
news—wigs like helmets, like they
do any good. You have friends
but don’t trust them, liquor
but no food. Can you count
without fingers? Is the money
always good? Winnie’s man-name
is Herman. Murile’s is Sam.
You? Shoot—were you ever
a man? Then Murile: What’s
the matter, Tiny? And at first
you don’t answer. You’re cold,
yet afire—alert, but drunk on gin.
Then you are screaming, I love
you. I hate you, over and over again.
~
I aim for the problem of sub-meanings and sub-intentions to play themselves out on multiple levels: biographical narrative and the inherent fiction that comes with configuring the life of a beloved; gender; poverty and the conundrum poised in the expression “rich without money/full without food”; and the way contradictory, paradoxical communication arises from these problems…I have wondered whether the particularity of the experiences invoked in the poem may be mitigated if I talk more about my process, and indeed, my intentions…and I do have intentions even though they have evolved and shifted as I have brought these poems to the page.
These same problems are raised in this poem, also elegiacally addressed to Tiny:
Did you see
somebody clock her? Did you hear
somebody spook her? When he found what she was
did he try to undo her? Did the glint of the knife
light the alley-parked car? Did anybody see
her in the Brass Rail bar?
Will you turn again tonight?
Will anything sell? When it starts to rain
will the sky drop hail? Must you watch around corners—
go left not right? Will you still split
the walk until it is light
then 6 AM: hit the diner—chatty girls:
stains on your skirts, loose heels, flat curls:
burns under wigs where your hair was shorn—did anybody
hate Winnie? Where did she go wrong?
Anymore coffee?
Anybody heading
home?
~
The life that Tiny led was one of continual subtextual meanings and willful trickery. I am all-too aware that most people are hostile (just plain old hostile) and I must speak in a way that depends on my resilience, my hard-skinned-ness, my cunning and my trickery. I must write to Tiny in a way that she would understand–even using rhyme and fractured meter–while setting up other intelligible avenues for other readers. The very fact that Tiny is dead and I am addressing the departed is a trick in and of itself. This last poem, also addressed to Tiny after her death, continues the problems that I describe here:
You were the first person
who did not tell me I was ugly,
head cocked like a sparrow
in the stairwell of the library
where you taught me how
to rob old glassy eyed men—
the kind that hunt children—
the kind who give big money.
Books are found where harm
resides and children are grackles
in a belfry when the high chime
rents. Take half-love, you said,
cause it never comes full.
Then all your lessons rush back:
Stay small. Stay a color. Stay
a canary. Stay a scent. Hide
your feelings. Every feeling.
Hide your money. Every cent.
~
I think, Reginald, that absolute theoretical pronouncements are problematic. The all-too human problems of finding meaning from our work and the work of others is far too volatile for complete, dogmatic certainty about the way every poem should be read or every poet’s or reader’s aims should be understood.
We live in a terribly, terribly socially stratified world—stratified in still deeply divisive ways. Sometimes it is a matter of the surface indicators that seem to mark us—our color or the partner who we love or from whom we find sexual pleasure. Sometimes that stratification is even more ridiculous, a measure of the hatred and annoyance that people feel against poets who have the nerve to deploy rhyme in their poems or poets who have the nerve to write narratives in their poems (or poets who do the opposite, if there is such a definitive opposite).
In the face of these complex stratifications and divisions I learn more when I encounter people speaking directly about the individual poems that spring out of them or the specific poems and specific poetic processes that beset them in their reading lives. I would have NEVER learned to value the inventions of Language poets and many other experimentalists (and I use this label advisedly) if I did not read their own explanations of their intentions in their prose theories and commentaries.
Sometimes we need to hear intentions declared even while we know that such statements of aim and method are hardly to be taken as the be-all/end-all of our reading of poems. When these statements of aim and method come from those outside of some establishment or another they have the potential to make us all more generous readers and writers.
I do think that generosity is an experience worthy of us all.
In celebration of you!
Jonathan David Jackson
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By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:53:32 +0000

Dear Michael,
Well, you know what they say about a stopped clock. (I’m not sure which one of us is the clock.) But, in view of our past disagreements, I doubt we’ll be in this position again any time soon.
Dear Henry,
It’s probably not accurate to lump us together as part of the Boyd/Michael/Joseph complex. If you want to call the argument something, you should really say Knapp/Michaels (that is, Steven and Walter Benn), since the argument is theirs. It’s a technical piece, it’s been contested, and it’s over twenty-five years old. (The essays that Reginald refers to above, from Barthes and Foucault, are even older. I feel as though I’m in a new kind of VH1 episode: “I love the age of theory!”) If you want to take a look at the literature, it’s there for you. I have no interest in persuading anyone on this thread, since I see little or nothing at stake. And while I take your point about fractured intention and ambiguity, Knapp and Michaels address similar arguments made by Paul de Man. Actually, de Man made a career talking about problems of intention and reference. I’m sorta fond of his famous Archie Bunker example from “Semiology and Rhetoric.”
cheers,
B
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By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:36:48 +0000

Two notes, the first for Henry Gould. I just wanted to point out that in other posts (responding to earlier Reginald posts) I broadened the idea of “intention” to include unconscious intentions. In no way do I consider writing poetry to be a matter of “complete control”; it is an exploration, a process through which one discovers what one feels and thinks. Of course unconscious elements find their way into the poem, and these can make the poem feel absolutely right and mysterious to the author.
The second comment is for Matt. I lost too much money at craps in my youth to be interested in dropping by your place on Wednesdays. Pickup Sticks Saturday sounds like a blast, though….
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By: john

john — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:15:59 +0000

Language has a tendency to exceed intention.
Therefore, intention is only ever partial.
Poetry might be defined as a linguistic experience that hopes to exceed authorial intention.
* * *
A poem doesn’t “mean,” it provides an occasion for an experience.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Its meaning is part of the experience, but only part.
I can surmise that the author of “Deck the Halls” intended to simulate and stimulate an experience of merriment with the line, “Fa la la la la, la la la la.” That experience cannot be boiled down (“reduced”) to a meaning. Its success or failure has to do with the conjunction — or lack thereof — between the author’s experience desire/repertoire and the receptor’s.
The same is true of denotative language. Every word has a host (“heavenly”?) of associations and etymological root-ball clinging to it. The tricky slicky slippery part of this is — everybody’s host of associations is different. (“As a professional linguist it is my belief that everybody speaks their own language” — Jack Spicer, poet and linguist, paraphrased from memory.)
I agree with Henry that there’s a thin film between Michael and Reginald’s positions. I think Boyd’s diagnosis as to how such a conflamma resulted from such a filmy disagreement is right on. But Michael’s rhetoric lapse helped fan the flames. I believe him when he says that he intended no disrespect, but surely he is aware that beginning a conversation with a sigh — “Ah, Reginald” — occurs in a culture where sighing connotes condescension, however affectionate and generally respectful the sigher may feel toward the sigh-ee. The language — “ah” — exceeded Michael’s (conscious?) intention. (Al Gore got seriously nailed for sighing in those debates 8 years ago.) The condescension may have resulted from Michael’s feeling that his professional turf was being encroached upon. He’s presumably still reading and is free to answer. And — the slippery part — maybe in his cultural experience, sighing does *not* connote condescension. But surely he’s come across examples where sighing is condescending?
It’s those connotations — tone of voice, allusion, incommensurate experience — that vex questions of intention. Reginald and Michael seem to agree here.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:05:27 +0000

p.s. I wasn’t very precise in the last paragraph of my previous comment.
What I was trying to say was that the argument of Boyd/Michael/Joseph, which I would summarize as MEANING = INTENTION, gets a little bit fractured if the actual source or location of intent is rendered ambiguous. And if one accepts the notion that true poetry can emerge even from a poet who is, to some extent, improvising – adapting to the direction which the poem itself seems to be taking, following the poem’s own gravitation or inertia – then both meaning and intention become more like a shifting magnetic force-field, than something fixed & denotative.
“Who am I? Not an upright stone mason,
Not one who raises roof beams, not a mariner:
A double dealer am I, with a double soul.
I am night’s friend, I am day’s vanguard soldier.”
(O. Mandelstam)
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By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:10:47 +0000

“As a writer, I cannot imagine anything justifying my own poetic efforts except the extent to which the language on the page expresses my intention. Without intention, writing is an empty game, an intellectual form of craps or pickup sticks.”
First of all, Mr. Hutchison, there’s no need for hostility toward craps or pickup sticks. Both have provided me with hours upon hours of wholesome, fulfilling entertainment. As a matter of fact, I host weekly tournaments for each game in my living room–”Wednesday Craps Night” and “Pickup Sticks Saturday”. We have lots of fun. (“We” being myself and a few of my shirts on hangers, draped over chairs to simulate friends.)
Besides, is there really such a thing as unintentional writing? Even if you’re just copying a page from the phone book, it’s your conscious decision to do that, right? It’s not as if you “intended” to brush your teeth, but accidentally copied a page from the phone book instead. No one says, “Whoops, I wrote something. Darn it, I meant to polish my Etruscan vase, but instead I applied ink to paper in the shape of letters and words.” Nobody says, “Oh jeez, look what I did–instead of driving to my local adult bookstore to price-compare French ticklers, I stayed home and allowed my fingers to apply pressure to the keys on my computer keyboard while Microsoft Word happened to be open. Consarn it all! What have I done?!”
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:58:29 +0000

Funny, I started out by criticizing Reginald’s recap of the “Intentional Fallacy”. But the more I read Michael, Boyd & Joseph, the more sceptical I become of their alternatives.
According to Reginald’s I.F., the supposed intentions of the author are irrelevant to the understanding of the poem. Meanings inhere in the work itself, or they are beside the point.
According to Michael & Boyd, the poem’s meaning & the author’s intention are perforce identical. To interrpet meaning is to interpret intention.
The actual difference between these positions appears to be a very thin film indeed. In both, we go to the poem, not the author, for the object of our interpretive pursuit.
The question becomes one of agency. To what extent is the poet in command of his or her materials? When we try to understand or appreciate a poem, is it necessary to go beyond “what does this mean?”, and ask, “what is the poetr trying to say?”
It seems to me that this issue would arise only if and when the reader is stymied : when there is some resistance or block in the poem’s transmission and reception. We are resisting full appreciation of a poem – we begin to question the author’s intent. I would think most of us are familiar with this situation. Why would this happen?
Let’s suppose three factors : 1) the poet’s compositional intentions; 2) the verbal medium (the language); and 3) the compositional process.
As I see it, the poet, in writing a poem, starts with #1, and enters into a sort of contract or interaction with #2 and 3. According to Joseph, this contract is one of complete control. Writing poetry is an attempt to fulfill my intentions. If chance or other factors enter in, it becomes merely a trivial game (“pick-up sticks”).
My own view (based on experience also) is a little different. The poet is a blind bumbler, a dreamer, a person supremely negative-capable. The intentions may be vague, the command of the medium uneven at best. Yet the poem comes off. How? Because the intention, though seemingly confused, is actually correct – and the compositional process itself comes to the rescue. This is Taoism, perhaps; negative capability; Hart Crane’s notion of composition; the Muse. (Perhaps the intention was simply to sing, and this is the poem’s ultimate meaning too.)
When a poem fails to win us over, usually the intention was trivial (be it ever-so-supposedly serious). Because the intention was trivial, the Muse never comes to the rescue. The poem is a belabored, awkward jumble, or a glib piece of facile sleight-of-hand – in the end, we remain unmoved.
So it seems to me that Michael’s and Boyd’s presentation of poetic meaning is rather reductive. There is indeed something which sets the production of poetic meaning and effect apart from standard language usage. Poetry is not so transparently interpretable as they suggest, since the “intention” of the work is not easy to define (we assume we know the author’s intention – yet the work’s ambiguous obscurity suggests that we do not.). There is no direct path from the art-work to its “meaning”. Just as the poem’s origin is rather unaccountable, its meanings are elusive, open.
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By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:14:30 +0000

On the question of the author-function and its significance (in both senses) to the reading and meaning (the interpretation) of the text, I direct readers’ attention to Michel Foucault’s essay “What Is An Author?” and Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.” Though both are too sweeping and over-insistent on their points, they cut through much of the verbiage that has been expended in this discussion on the importance of authorial intention.
I may write another blog post on these essays. On the other hand, who knows what I’ll do?
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By: Francisco Aragón

Francisco Aragón — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:25:53 +0000

Regarding the Thom Gunn anectdote, which I enjoyed reading.
I can’t imagine he made that comment with anything approaching irritation. The person I studied with at UC Berkeley in the mid 80s was a generous teacher who never took himself or the “business of poetry” too seriously. He was both a refreshing and matter-of-fact presence in the classroom. My inclination is to believe that he was genuinely interested and, perhaps, both flattered and amused at by the various readings his poem was eliciting.
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By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:11:41 +0000

What if a maker of poems produces and keeps a text which remains mysterious to that maker
even though by the act of keeping it/ that maker assents to whatever intentions can be found
in it? Last year, during most of which I was 66, I produced a greater variety of texts than I had
in any prior year because I was allowing my unconsious to freely birth possible poems. But I
want to enter this waste-of-time conversation–and it may well be a waste of time–by sharing
some quotes before I proceed.
-
The first four are from Reginald’s post:
“One writes because one wants to produce something separate from oneself.”
However messed with, a language construct is an artifact.
As to how separate that artifact is from its maker/ depends.
It could be antithetical to its maker.
“The work of art is, in part, an objectification of intention, and to the extent that the
intention is objectified, it’s no longer the author’s.”
“. . . I trust the poem’s intentions more than my own. . . .”
So do I, usually.
“However important his or her intention may be for the writer
(it may be the whole reason he or she wrote the poem),
that doesn’t mean that it’s important for a reader.
-
Stanley Kunitz: “The poem comes in the form of a blessing.”
-
John Ashbery: “But we don’t know anything.”
-
Many have said that poems attempt to reveal that which is unsayable.
-
The following can be searched out at the audensociety.org by going to the archives
and clicking on Newsletter 17 (Auden on “Tradition and Experiment”), a WEVD
University of the Air “The World of Books” interview by William Kennedy
hosted by Vernon Brooks on December 24, 1951:
Auden: “. . . E. M. Forster quoted a lady as saying
‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say.’”
Auden: “Obviously, in one sense, every poem, if it’s any good, is a unique object.
In that sense it is always an experiment and I can’t imagine writing without imagining
that one is trying to solve a particular problem. . . . I cannot imagine why you should
want to do it otherwise.”
Auden: “. . . you have to think about making something as well as you can and
in that is contained things which on the whole you think are important to say,
or you believe to be true. You cannot really think about other people. I mean
you produce this child and let it go out into the world
and if it is popular, it is.”
-
Okay. It may be a fault in me, but I do not have a definable style.
And here he is: the Fool. Sign in please. Brian A. J. Salchert
-
So, Brian, why are you here?
-
I don’t understand what you mean by “here”; but this is the
“What’s My Problem?” program, isn’t it?
-
Yes. Are you a poet?
-
Uuuhh–
-
Have a seat.
-
If you give me an axe or a saw I will gladly halve one.
-
Oh! so you’re a pundit.
-
Could be. I used to be “the ghost in the dumpster” but one day when I was not in
the dumpster, someone took the dumpster away.
- – - End of skit – - -
One of the poems I wrote last year is plain and formal, but its first four lines
came as they are into my consciousness. The title this poem has remained
hidden until after the poem was completed. To me it is a multiple-I poem,
with one possible I being a bird, a second being another person, a third
being me, and a fourth (which came somewhile later) being God. Most
readers, I suspect, will consider it trash; but I have kept it because it is
mysterious to me.
“To Those I Am One With”

I am a thing
of wish and wing
very few know,
and fewer care to;
yet I am here
in trees and seas
very few know,
and fewer care to.
It does not matter
what I say, or which way,
very few know,
and fewer care to.
And so I abide,
in a light of night
very few know,
and fewer care to;
and ever I shall: still,
from house and hill,
where very few know,
and fewer care to.

2007-04-10
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