Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

I don't think anyone argued over how writing was formed, just the relevance. Whether you agonized for years over a poem while your mother was dying of cancer or found the words floating in your alphabet soup won't change the definition of the words. Ahhhh, ready-mades.

The implication seems to be that the definition of words is what constitutes the meaning of a poem. This can't be true, for where the organic use of language is concerned, words don't have merely certain and fixed meanings. Consider that the use of language, poetry included, was something that came prior to the invention of the dictionary.

I've read you variously write about "controlled ambiguity." The idea is intriguing, because I agree that it is a virtue of a poet not only to be able to write ambiguously, but to do so with a certain self-conscious precision. What this implies, however, is that as poets, we work with meaning as much as words. But where does meaning, in this instance, come from?

Here's one possibility: we revise. We imagine, we think, we write; what ends up on the page or screen, for the first go, is almost always garbled, distorted, unintelligible. Our revisions take the work into directions we would have scarcely anticipated. An untold number of horizons and possibilities, hidden worlds of meaning are opened up and closed off as we variously read, re-read, snip and edit our own work. It is this very amalgamted process, wherein there is a unification of the conscious and unconscious aspects of our mental lives, that interests me in the study of writers and writing.

This is why I can't side with any kind of simple new criticism, with its intentional fallacies and so-forth. And this is why I'm pressing you, and anyone else, to tell me what it means for a work to "stand on its own." I agree that certain writing does just this, in some sense, but just how this is so is by no means an easy thing to say.