432. Ontology and poetry
Stephen Dobyns proposed that in poetry ‘the word is always less than the thing it is to represent’.[i] That is true, I think, but so is the reverse: a word is more than the thing it is to represent. But first, let me confirm what Dobyns claimed.
Let me use ‘chair’ for an example (as I did in earlier discussions of meaning). The word may be intended to refer to a specific chair, and indeed, as Dobyns claimed, that object carries associations that go far beyond what a chair usually means.
Dobyns also proposed that poems cannot be paraphrased, i.e. not all its meanings can be specified.[ii] That also is true, but that applies to all objects.
The claim that objects in general cannot be paraphrased is proposed in ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ (3O).[iii] An object has an inside, of what it consists of (its physical or linguistic composition), of ‘what is in it’. It also has an outside, of ‘what it is in’. That includes its phenomenology, i.e. how it presents itself and is experienced, all its actual or possible uses, what it means to people observing or handling it, or reading it, in case of a poem.
For a chair it would be how it is to sit on or in it, how it is to carry around, where to buy it, etc. Especially this phenomenology is impossible to completely enumerate, since it includes an unending variety of actual and possible experience.
Let me now turn to the opposite of Dobyn’s claim: a word is more than the object it is intended to refer to.
Here, as before, I make use of Frege’s distinction, in the theory of meaning, between reference, what a word refers to, and sense, how a thing is identified ‘as’ something, how reference is established. This sense carries a range of associations, arising from past experience with different chairs, and this is partly shared with other people, in common experience, and partly personal, due to experience along one’s particular path of life. That range of associations goes far beyond the specific chair that is at issue in any specific reference.
Sense concerns the process of identification, reference is its outcome.
Another of Frege’s views is that ‘the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words in it’. That is true, but here also, the reverse is true as well: the meaning of a word depends on its context, i.e. the sentence, and the action context, it is in, here the poem as a whole.
This connects with another proposition by Dobyns, that a poem should be an event on the page instead of referring to something off the page.[iv] The poem is a process of identification, sense making, where the words create the meaning of the poem but also, vice versa, the poem affects the meanings of the words.
But does that not happen everywhere in language? What is special about poetry? Usually, language is discursive, i.e. representing some state of affairs in the world, reporting on something off the page, as Dobyns said. Poems shift meanings, produce new ones, as argued in the preceding item in this blog. They do not report on the wold but are forms of worldmaking. But does not science produce new meanings, new worlds, as well? So how is poetry different from science? Science is engaged more in reference, phenomena, propositions about the world. Poetry is engaged more in sense making, shifting sense or creating new sense, new associations of words.
Back to ontology. Do poems exist, then? Are they objects in the world? A poem does have an inside, of words, with syntax, grammar, meter, sound and rhyme that order them and shape their meanings. Its outside, its phenomenology, is special in that it not only includes what it means to people, how it is read and understood, but also affects meaning elsewhere, beyond the poem, adding to repertoires of sense by which people look at the world, or shifting them.
[i] Stephen Dobyns, 2011, Next word, better word; The craft of writing
poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, p. 2.
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