Understanding and Ownership

About a month ago I picked up a book in the clearance aisle of a Christian bookstore that intrigued me, called The First Drop of Rain. The book is a sort of essayistic commentary on T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland.  It’s formatted almost like a devotional with a series of short sections followed by some questions meant to provoke thought or discussion.

 In the first section the author brings up an interesting thought that has been on my mind ever since I cracked the first page.  She writes, “A professor once told me that nothing can belong to us, even our own experience, unless we understand it. I watch my life with my eyes.  I touch it with my fingers.  My mind considers and my heart longs. Across the landscape of my interior, truth coalesces and I begin to understand.  As I write my stories, I begin to understand.”  Then she asks, is it true?  Can something belong to us if we don’t understand it? 

This came to mind today during a writing seminar I attended.  Poet John Gallaher visited Malone University to talk to some students about “The New Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry.” He discussed the tendency of modern poetry to deal with more spiritual themes, even if they aren’t entirely overt.  

He also addressed the issue of poetry in which the meaning is difficult to grasp.  Specifically, we mentioned the anthology American Hybrid, which I have been leafing through somewhat disinterestedly for a poetry class.  I find myself reading passages like the following, and wondering “What on Earth could this writer have meant?”

[Insatiability by Cal Bedient]

For every angel
                                a preposition.
You call,
                swarm guitar string longitudes,
o air flame shining relations
                                                wandering contemporary.

Steeple white clapboard “to”
                spikes enormity Iowa blue-
as the moon is a clasp for night.

“Of,””with” –moments like rain,
when what rises from the river is not only river.

Lightning never lay me bare to bed

                She sat atop him as if he were everything,
                but not to her-

tablespoon of sugar in water.

Spaces be cream
                or exaggerated like raspberries,
red hustlers.

                                Roots that tug to be “up,”
                                “inside,”
                                                will never find a bride

We’re oyster spit, yet the sea
opens before us the white swan of the wounded.

I have had no understanding of these poems, no interest in them, and therefore no ownership of them.  I felt justified in this sentiment until Gallaher explained that poetry ought not to be about the intended meaning, but about the meaning that the reader derives for himself. He put it like this: “You don’t buy a car for the person that made it to drive it.”  It’s all about what it means to you.  Often in modern poetry there is a sort of vagueness to the words.  Gallaher suggested that this space between ideas allows us to fill in our own ideas and emotions, and ultimately to assign our own meaning. 

In this case, the quest for understanding is what inhibits ownership.  If I allow myself to stop demanding exactness from the work, and of myself, my experience is much different.  In rereading the previously confusing poem above, the mystery in the words begins to draw me in.  Allowing the poem to lead you can evoke emotions and rich images that are more satisfying than any concrete truth.