Sunday Afternoon Thoughts: Poetry and Naturalness

In metaphysics and philosophy of language, one of the many important topics is naturalness. This is the focus of David Lewis’s paper “New Work for a Theory of Universals,” and plenty of others since. In short, the theory of naturalness proposes that there are more and less natural ways of dividing up the world and our goal should be to find the most natural way of doing things. To quote Plato, our best theories should seek to “carve nature at its joints.” Why do we divide animals into the classes we do (fish, birds, reptiles, etc.) rather than classifying them by color? Naturalness. Some deny that natural kinds exist. I’m not here to have that argument. Rather, what’s important is that naturalness is a large part of the background of our lives.

The ordering of things in a grocery store is based on product, not on brand name. We assume all the time that there are better and worse ways of organizing things. More and less natural ways of doing so. Sure, some organizing is practical rather than metaphysical such as organizing your boxes of tea by size or your coats by frequency of use. But so many other things seem to rely on metaphysical underpinnings. For example, the way books are organized in a library. We take it for granted that there are different kinds of books. Loosely speaking, there are books that are true and books that aren’t. Not only this, but we would generally agree that a novel by Hemingway, a bread cookbook, and Plato’s Phaedrus aren’t of the same type. They seem to be metaphysically (or fundamentally) different. Libraries are built on such organizing principles. Hence why philosophy books, cookbooks, and geological surveys aren’t found all on the same shelf. Because we take it that they are fundamentally different we divide them according to those differences. That is, we try to divide them in the way that is most natural.

(Granted, some things bend these rules such as books that are blends of poetry and fiction or novels that are mostly but not fully non-fiction, and those are more difficult to place. But even so, those only seem hard to classify because we assume that the classifications are correct and that we should be finding a way to fit such works into those classifications. Figuring out how to place a hybrid work of fiction and poetry into a library is only difficult when there is a distinction made between poetry and fiction. If no distinction exists, then there aren’t any borderline cases. But of course, if no distinctions are made, you end up with Jack Prelutsky next to Douglas Preston, which seems like a much worse way to order things.)

Cool. So naturalness seems pretty reasonable (even if not everyone buys it). And for the sake of the rest of this, let’s just assume naturalness exists — that nature does have joints and that language and theories try to carve at them. What does that have to do with poetry?

Poetry seems to be one of the few things in this world that doesn’t care so much about naturalness. It certainly cares some. Language and the successfulness of conversation/communication relies heavily on naturalness. When we have instances of vagueness, we revert to assuming the most natural reading is correct. For example, pronoun vagueness. One of the most common examples in philosophy of language used to talk about this is the sentence “The dog bit the woman, so she hit her.” Technically, these pronouns don’t clearly refer. Even so, the most natural reading of this sentence is that it means that the woman hit the dog, which is what we would assume in conversation. However, due to the vagueness of the pronouns, the sentence can also mean that the dog hit the woman. We bring a lot to bear in conversations regarding vagueness. Largely, these are functions of context.

If a friend asks you to bring spinach dip to a party and asks you upon your arrival, “Did you bring it?”, you assume that ‘it’ refers to the spinach dip because that is the most natural referent for the word. However, outside of that context, or denying naturalness, the word could refer to just about anything. Another example from the philosophy of language (regarding implicit quantifiers) is the friend who asks you to check the fridge for a beer. Looking in the fridge and finding no beer, you call back, “There’s no beer!” The natural way of understanding that sentence, and, thus, the way that we would usually understand it, is that there is no beer in the fridge. Technically, however, there are no explicit quantifiers, so the sentence could also express the proposition that there is no beer at all. Not just none in the fridge, but none in the entire universe. Clearly, that’s not the most natural way of understanding the sentence.

But poetry isn’t such a stickler for the rules. (And the same could be said for a number of other arts too — abstract art and surrealism certainly seem to break some of the rules of naturalness, for example.) We see this all over. In a brilliant essay called “Moving Means, Meaning Moves,” Heather McHugh discusses at length the many possible meanings of the final two lines of William Carlos Williams’s “The Right of Way.” The lines say, “I saw a girl with one leg / over the rail of a balcony.” McHugh comes up with four possible meanings for those lines. Generally speaking, when we hear a sentence, we entertain one meaning of it. Two at the most. We assume the most natural meaning is correct and move on. But poetry requires that we stop, that we consider more meanings.

The beauty of considering more meanings is that we throw naturalness out of the window. Not entirely. Maybe we keep the baby, but we certainly throw out the bathwater.

I want to look at a couple examples of how this naturalness is torqued and/or tossed out in some smaller pieces and individual lines before seeing how it applies to an entire poem,

Another poem that McHugh talks about in that essay is Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station.” “Filling Station” ends with the line “Somebody loves us all.” What I was struck by reading that line is its double meaning. It, like so many sentences, has a natural meaning which we are first struck by, but also a second shadowy meaning lurking behind that. The most natural reading takes the word ‘somebody’ to refer to one particular person/being that loves each and every single one of ‘us’ (whatever we take that term to include — be it all people or all people and all things). So, in slightly more complex terms, we understand the sentence to be saying that ‘there is some being, x, such that x loves every y.’ However, this sentence can also be understood another way such that it means that we are all loved by somebody, though not necessarily the same somebody. In following the form above, the sentence would then mean that ‘for every person/being, y, there is some person/being, x, that loves it.’ In the second, it is not necessarily the same person/being that is doing all the loving. Everyone is still loved, but maybe not all by the same person/being.

In conversation, we would naturally assume the first meaning and reject the second meaning. But poetry invites us to think differently about language. To allow the second meaning in, naturalness be damned. This is part of what makes poetry as complex as it is. Perhaps, too, this is what some people find frustrating about poetry. That it isn’t always so nailed down as normal speech pretends to be. It is more liquid, more amorphous. There is a multiplicity of meaning that permeates a lot of poetry. And it is just because so much poetry seeks to find those moments of syntactic strangeness that allow the unnatural to creep in and become relevant. In poetry, we are made to confront the shadow selves of sentences that we would otherwise ignore.

Another example of this comes in sentences like the following, pulled from one of my own poems, “… but the sagebrush stays the same.” In there, there is a sentence which reads “After August no one rides through here.” As one of my wonderful readers pointed out, the sentence allows for two meanings. Again, one more natural and one less natural, but both allowed, and as far as poetry is concerned, both relevant. The first is how we would usually understand things: that after August no people ride through this place (in this case, Lusk, WY). The roads are emptied. But the less natural reading takes ‘no one’ to be an entity. Then the sentence takes ‘no one’ as a proper noun and means that after August No One rides through here. So we conjure up the image of the being, No One, riding a motorcycle through the town. This image is far more haunting, far stranger.

And, indeed, this happens frequently when we use words like ‘no one,’ ‘nobody,’ or ‘nothing.’ There are entire philosophical discussion on ‘nothing’ and suffice it to say, no one is really clear what exactly it means. There is a question of whether nothing is itself a thing. (As a bonus, we also have Heidegger who claimed that “the Nothing noths.”) That’s not entirely relevant, but interesting nonetheless. But what is wonderful is that sentences often have these shadowy other meanings which haunt them. And the strength of many poems is that they make use of these ambiguities of language.

As promised, now I want to look at a full poem and see how the issue of naturalness comes to bear. Or doesn’t. The poem I want to look at is Maxine Kumin’s “After Love.” The poem reads:

After Love

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

This poem was read out loud by another member of a poetry club which I am a member of. And after only a little conversation, two different readings of the poem quickly came to light. I remarked on how the poem reminded me of another poem which I am deeply in love with, Rita Dove’s “The Wake.” In particular, the following lines:

But the rooms still gaped—
the green hanger swang empty, and
the head of the table
demanded a plate.

The trigger for this association was the phrase “The bedding yawns.” Yawning and gaping seem rather close when they refer to houses and things in them, both signaling some sort of loss. This was furthered, by the poem’s emphasis on absence and separation (I use the word absence because that’s the second word in Rita Dove’s poem), as well as the imagery of the bed — the last stanza of “The Wake” begins with the speaker laying down in bed, a bed that is clearly too empty like the rest of the house.

Given these associations, it seemed clear that “After Love” referred to a time after some romantic relationship had been broken off. Why else for the bedding to yawn than that there is no longer another there to fill the space? I took this compromise and the bodies taking back their boundaries to be representative of what happens at the end of a relationship. Where the relationship brought together the two things into one (hence why couples are sometimes called “an item”), the end of the relationship leaves two stark individuals no longer able to cross the boundaries of separation. What is yours is yours alone, and the same goes for what is mine. No longer is what is mine yours and what is yours mine.

However, another member of the group spoke up soon after me to point out that they had read it far differently. That they understood the poem to be referring to a time not after love in the sense of the end of a relationship, but after the act of making love. This reading is far more hopeful than mine. It then means that after sex, which brings the involved parties into a physical union that is far closer, the parties are separated. The bodies are no longer entwined. Under this reading, sex brings about a oneness, and the end of the sex is the end of that unity (though other unities survive, perhaps).

Though it is unclear to me that either of those readings is more natural (if one is, I would want to say mine, but that may just be my own stubbornness), it is clear that both are available. And yet it’s not that the poem is helplessly vague. Excessive vagueness does bring about the possibility of multiple readings, but that’s not what happens here. Instead, language is used in such a way that it brings naturalness into question. It is unclear, in reading this poem, if we should even care whether one reading is more natural than another, even if it is indeed the case that one of them is. As it turns out, recognizing both readings deepens our experience of the poem. In this, it seems to be saying that naturalness is overrated. When we seek too far to simplify things, to distill poems to a singular meaning, we do violence to them. The strength of this poem lies in its multiplicity.

Life is a messy thing. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing that. We live our lives based on assumptions we can’t prove. We live, often, not according to known truths, but according to practicality, according to what works. But we also simplify. We try to force things into natural categories. And this is often a good thing. If all the olive oils in the grocery store weren’t grouped together, I would lose my mind trying to compare them. But living purely according to perceived naturalness may not be the best thing to do. And poetry helps us to break out of that. To challenge our notions of naturalness in language. To not take meaning at face value. We should not see this as a fault, but as a strength, an opportunity to see a portion of the complexities we are surrounded by.

Be well and be safe.

— D.C. Leonhardt

Today’s pen and ink pairing: Montegrappa Monte Grappa (M) and LAMY Turquoise