Poetry and Meaning

For a very long time I wrote a lot of very bad poetry. I knew it was bad but it was all I could do. At least it was poetry — that much I knew — but I didn't know why it wasn't good. There were metaphors, similies, aliteration, onomatapoeia. There was even meaning. Actually there was a lot of meaning.

When you look at any great work of art there is usually a pretty simple message behind it. Take Picasso's 1937 painting Guernica for example, Picasso wasn't saying anything new. But he made people sit up and go, "Hey, war's bad." Okay, I'm reducing a masterpiece to its lowest common denominator but, at the end of the day, that's pretty much the message.

The reason the painting works is that it allows people to discover that fundamental truth anew. It is unlikely that anyone will come to look on Guernica and not already realise that war is bad but the painting infuses the expression with meaning. It is no longer something abstract. It has become personal.

Meaning is very similar to value. The expression, "I love you," means that I love you. It couldn't be clearer but at the same time those three words are probably the most misunderstood in the world. What do I mean when I say that I love you? I love my wife, my sister, my daughter, my cat, my country and the soundtrack to The Hours. Surely I don't love them all in the same way.

This became the focus of my writing by especially of my poetry, it being the most concentrated form. It was what I saw in Larkin's 1955 poem, Mr Bleaney:

Mr Bleaney

'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags —
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits - what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

In many ways it is the most unpoetic of poems. Even its rhymes are in awkward places so that when you read it properly you hardly notice them. The poem itself is one giant metaphor and — and this is the point that struck me more than anything else — it leaves it up to the reader to provide his own meaning. This was something I had never even realised that I was doing, that it was a fundamental part of reading, that the meanings in the books I had read growing up had been supplied by me and not the author.

Meaning, of course, is not the same as the truth which is invariably linked to the facts. Meaning is something we bestow upon something; we decide its significance often quite arbitrarily. It has a lot to do with need, what we need something to mean. So we read in-between the lines. Sometimes we don't even see the lines.

This brings us to intent. If Picasso simply wanted to record his reaction to the massacre at Guernica then he could have rattled off a sketch and stuck it in a drawer. He could have done as many as he needed to get it out of his system. What he chose to do was allow the public to see what he had painted and let them make of it what they would. His own comments about the interpretation of the work are interesting:

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

Picasso here points out that as well as being the artist, he is also a viewer and, irrespective of intent, the painting, once completed, was capable of having its own effect on him.

Meaning lies firmly within the remit of the person looking at the painting or reading the book. Just because you don't "get it" doesn't always mean it's a "bad" work, it could be you're a "bad" viewer or reader. Or if not "bad" perhaps just not ready for that particular piece of work. I first encountered Beckett when I was nineteen and I knew what I was being confronted with was genius but I wasn't ready at nineteen to fully appreciate that genius.

I first read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was sixteen. and I've made a point of reading it every ten years or so since. The book hasn't changed, in fact I still own the copy I bought brand new for 35p all those years ago, but I have.

By the late nineties I had found my voice and understood my role in the writer / reader relationship enough to be able to write this poem:

Reader Please Supply Meaning

Writers are all liars. We all are.
But at least they are honest liars.

They write down those necessary lies,
the kind that move men to leaps of faith
or excuse us when we fail to jump.

In the end it doesn't matter that
they let us down in the cruellest ways.


August 18th 1996

Of course it doesn't matter how great any work is if the subject matter is of no interest to the viewer but the world is a big enough place to accommodate all kinds. The hard thing is marrying them up. I don't get opera and I've tried, I can't stomach Guinness — it's a cup of coffee beside me in the painting — and I honestly start to nod off if I have to read a poem of more than a dozen or so lines but that doesn't make me a "bad" person; there is so much I do like that I'll never have enough time to properly experience it all.