More About My Struggle With Poetry

So, on Thursday night, I was listening to someone read a poem about a rocket disaster (don’t ask me the reason, it’s too complex).  The poem began with some beautiful imagery about the preparations for launch, then switched, two-thirds of the way through,  to some very factual sentences reporting the disintegrating situation that led to all the astronauts burning to death.

I didn’t get it.  But as I looked around, I was about the only one not moved by the ending.  I left shaking my head and wondering why I had again failed to see the point.

Then, this morning, running round our local reservoir in a vain attempt to maintain some kind of fitness, I had a revelation.  The way this is supposed to work is that you read the opening of the poem and are so dazzled by the imagery that it sets up the unbreakable impression that the language is all supposed to be read as metaphoric.  This assumption about the language’s intention is supposed to carry forward (I like to visualise it as a riderless bicycle staying upright by the gyroscopic effect; it needs no more metaphoric impulse to keep it up), so that when you hit the part where there are only facts, your imagination works even harder to generate the imagery you assume is intended.   Hence, the shocked faces of all my fellow listeners, while I was sitting there shrugging my shoulders in confusion as NASA’s finest burned to a crisp.

“Yeah, OK, but so what?” you might say.  But, you see, that was a clue to my problem.  I spotted the change in language and immediately interpreted it as a change in intention.  Effectively, I stopped trying to ‘imagine’ as soon as I was fed factual sentences.  The poem’s effect depends on you interpreting the whole of the piece as if it has one intention, rather than trying to pick the intention from each sentence.  This says something to me about the nature of my own psyche.

Students of linguistics and semiotics will understand that people (readers and listeners) interpret language through a strange ‘Russian Doll’ structure: words within phrases within sentences within sections within a whole text.   Yes, a word may have a meaning, but put the same word in a different phrase and it conveys something different, put the same phrase in a different sentence or the same sentence in a different paragraph and that outer wrapping changes the detailed meaning of the component within.  (To reuse an example I first mentioned in What Decides Genre- Part Two, ‘It is raining’ means something different on a weather report than when I’m lecturing the kids about going out without a coat;  even though the words are exactly the same, in the latter case, it means ‘don’t be an idiot, put your coat on.’)

It seems, therefore, that I am guilty of paying too little attention to the whole of a text, when interpreting its parts.  This would make sense, because although I am generally unappreciative of poetry, I am very good at picking out detailed nuance changes as soon as an author strays in style, theme or point of view.  Perhaps it’s just that the balance of my perception tends towards detail rather than the blanket overview that such poetry requires.

On Thursday night, that switch in the language hit me like a brick wall.  The riderless bicycle had no momentum to carry on.  I invented not a single image in last third of the poem.  I was, as it were, a NASA bureaucrat reading the pathology report.  Mea culpa.