Regarding my poems “Grace” and more recently “Buddha Nature,” a few friends have asked, some jokingly, some more seriously: “What do they mean?” Let me begin by offering a few relevant quotes.
A poem should not mean/But be.
---Archibald MacLeish
We think be feeling. What is there to know?
---Theodore Roethke
Tell the Truth but tell it slant-
Success in Circuit lies
--- Emily Dickinson
…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
--- John Keats
Now, if you have to explain a joke, it is never funny and something similar is true when explaining a poem.
(And yet, here I write.)
All good poetry is artful and evocative. For me the important question is: What does the artful poem evoke? In my view, the weakest poems evoke simple sentiment. Better poems artfully evoke meaningful insights into the human predicament, both personal and collective. But the best poems, again, in my view, artfully evoke, what I would call, the art of ambiguity. This artful ambiguity evokes, for me, an almost sacred space of apprehension within which the illusion of the self, the illusion of meaning, even, is momentarily suspended, allowing for, what I suspect Zen would call, transmission; that is, a spontaneous, non-verbal, intuitive insight into the utter preposterousness and inexplicability of existence (an abyss into which we must heartily laugh out loud!) Artful ambiguity need not strive to communicate anything—the artfully ambiguous poem becomes a kind of linguistic object, a “thing in itself” a little (or large) machine made of words, rich in interpretation, that (if we work with it) opens the mind to a more original state, a state beyond the need to make sense of things. Artful ambiguity allows us to apprehend without our having to reason out any meaning, regardless of how subtle, or sophisticated, regardless of how buried in subtext. Artful ambiguity makes us apprehend, not anything in particular other than, perhaps, at the poem’s best, apprehension, itself.
Let me add that artful ambiguity has been around for centuries, if not longer, from the Mona Lisa’s oh so subtle smile to the most outrageous Dada. And artfully ambiguous poems can be found in any issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Or how about this lovely haiku?
Although the wind
blows terribly here
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
--- Izumi
So, nothing new here.
Of course, there are poems that aspire to artful ambiguity that are neither artful nor ambiguous---only confusing. And my poems may be only confusing. If so, so be it.
A Jack Nicholson said in the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
But I tried, didn't I? Goddamn it, at least I did that.
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