Being & Rhyme:
The Ontology of Poetry

1. A poem presents a problem of perception.

Consider the image to the left.

2. A poem presents a problem of phenomenology.

Does a poem exist on its own merit, an object independent of people to encounter it? Or is it a chemical released when a synapse fires and transmitted to the right hemisphere where it stimulates a response?

Was "Ode to Joy" merely an byproduct of Beethoven's overstimulated endorphins? Did "Skunk Hour" ferment in a brain derived of seritonin?

Where does the meaning go? Is it stored in text files in the left brain, contained in a binary collection of electrons charged either on or off? What if one of those electrons spins off into orbit, out of the left brain altogether, changing a word from +-++-+---+-++ to +-++-+--+-++ or, worse still, to +-++-+---+-+?

3. A poem presents a problem of quantification.

How can the worth of a poem be measured? Is there a scale by which we weigh the merit of its words — these words worth 500, those others worth only one? Do symbols count more than metaphors and metaphors more than images?

Do active verbs count more than copulas? Or is that a fiction? Do we then total the poems on a calculator, or run them through a spreadsheet. Would we have to handicap larger poems who might edge out a haiku with three 500 hundred metaphors with 51 metaphors that weigh 30?

Should we wire a reader to a machine and graph her responses to different poems on charts and lay them over each other to see how they performed?

What if another subject reacts differently to each poem? Does that mean we average their responses? How would we determine the size of a reliable sample? And how do we control for extraneous emotional content the readers bring with them to the poem?

4. A poem presents a problem in physics.

Do better poems travel faster through neurons? Are they super-conductive? Less likely to be bogged down by the resistance of interpretation?

How are poems transmitted? Do they release essential electrons and jump orbit, traveling at speeds that will penetrate the bone matter in our skulls and somehow blossom into parallel realities in parallel brains?

Or is a poem like a tacheon, boring its way into our dimly remembered pasts and releasing images back into our futures?

Poetry is time travel, something we do every day with no satisfactory explanation to account for it.

5. A poem presents a problem in metaphysics.

To a logician X = X.

To a physicist X = X if, and only if, X truly = X.

To an empiricist, if X has always equaled X in the past, it will most likely do so now, at least until we find an example where it does not.

To the Chinese X = 4, an imperfect number, although X used to = 5.

To most poets X = a very dry experience, best avoided altogether.

Wallace Stevens taught us that each instance of X contains a rich and unprecedented moment to be savored like a French Pinot Noir with your lover during an autumn evening in the New England countryside.

This unfortunately, raises only further questions. For instance, is the experience of drinking Pinot the same as the poem which evokes the experience? Put more simply: is X equal to the Pinot or the poem?

Poets scoff at the rigid X, preferring to embrace the more ambiguous metaphor. Perhaps this is fair. For most of the century, philosophers snubbed their noses at metaphor, believing it flaccid and imprecise. They even accused metaphors of being "poetry and nonsense."

Nonsense, of course, is the primordial matter of the universe. How appropriate that nonsense and metaphor work so well together.

6. Do poems exists between dimensions?

The precision of physics and metaphysics crumbled into chaos when I was in graduate school in the early eighties. We believed that relativity and quantum mechanics would give way to a universal theory of everything. The Mandelbrot bug emerged instead. We lost track of the rigid separation between one, two and three dimensions and replaced them with fractal dimensions, entities that took shape between dimensions - neither line nor square, neither square nor cube, but something in between - ambiguous, like a metaphor; tangible like a poem.

7. Being and Signification

The sound of purring
signifies nothing more
than the pleasure
of my cat.

(originally published in Feeding the Crow, Susan Bright, ed., Plain View Press, 1999)

This page was last updated on 03/02/2001

Being & Rhyme: The Ontology of Poetry