Josh Corey comments today on Mark Halliday's recent review in Pleiades.

The issues around paraphrase and "paraphrasable meaning" seem very complicated. Are we talking about the poem's style or rhetoric, or about its subject-matter, its themes, its logopeia?

A poem's style would be impossible to paraphrase (cf. Mandelstam's comment : "if a poem can be paraphrased, the Muse has not spent the night, has not ruffled the bedsheets" - or something to that effect).

On the other hand, a poem may have many layers of intelligibility - which might be open to successive layers (like an onion) of interpretive unpacking : which is similar to paraphrase, but not exactly the same thing.

Halliday's remarks about paraphrase were what spurred me to offer the successive "read-alongs" here, of the ongoing poem Rest Note. His essay reminded me of Wallace Stevens' repeated forays in this direction, & thus I felt licensed to give it a try.

Hopefully, the poems have not been rendered completely transparent - which would close off their future, to some extent (cf. Josh's comments on understandability). Probably impossible, considering my obscurities.

Jordan bespeaks about Mark Halliday's essay in recent Pleiades. My copy is at home, & I am at work, & I read it a couple weeks ago... but I'd say I was more convinced by Halliday's arguments than Jordan is.

Paraphraseable meaning doesn't have to be "earnest". In my view it adds depth to the ruffled surfaces. & it's part of communication. Unless the hegemonic post-argument of Cindy Fickle still stands (ie. poetry doesn't "mean", doesn't "communicate", doesn't "say", doesn't "point", doesn't "fill in the blank").

I agree pretty much with Mark Halliday (in his review in Pleiades), when he says that every good poem can be paraphrased. As long as you admit that there's always a better, deeper reading down the line : the one even the poets themselves missed. "The builders builded better than they knew."

Thinking of Wallace Stevens' letters (they might have been emails) where he explicates every stanza. So I might try to do something like that with Rest Note. Read along with me (follow the bouncing ball).

Enjoyed Mark Halliday's review of Helen Vendler book in Pleiades. He's got a light touch & a logical mind.

Also the M. Theune essay on poetic structure & "the turn". However, his point seemed rather feebly argued. Theune is onto something : but if he's going to talk about structure vs. current notions of (surface) "form", he needs a broader range of evidence. The "turn" is just one aspect, I would think.

Thanks to Jeffery Bahr for pointing toward PLEIADES, and some fine reviews (online) by Mark Halliday.

(Halliday's reviews, beneath their charm & urbanity, show some Aristotelian spine & rigor. Wasn't I, not long ago, complaining about dearth of good reviewing? It's out there, flooks.)

I really enjoyed Mark Halliday's 2 poems in Hat 6, by the way.

Enjoying the delights of Hat 6. I should read more poetry.
Like Kim Lyons' poems especially.

More evidence that the younger generation is just plain smarter than we are. (smart, ie. intelligent & stylish). Though occasionally the multiple layers of self-parody & self-consciousness are... a bit jejune (to this stuffy 52-yr-old senior citizen).

Happy to appear alphabetically between Nada Gordon & Mark Halliday. (Both of whose poems seem, in places anyway, to be riffing in jokey ways on mine. Widderruf. But I'm just being self-conscious.)

Mark Halliday was at Brown, in the grad program I think, a couple of years ahead of me. He published my first poems outside of high school, in a little spiral-bound anthology of "new poetry". I wonder what ever happened to that. Mark & David Cashman were publishing The Providence Review then (with the epigraph from the Bonanza Bus driver on the frontispiece - "This is Providence. Everyone changes here.") David is still writing poetry - had a book published recently (This Much : selected poems, 1970-2000. Catskill Press, 2003).

Read yesterday & today, new book:

This Much : selected poems 1970-2000, by David Cashman. Catskill Press, 2003. David used to edit The Providence Review with Mark Halliday. I met him back in the 70s and then didn't see him for 30 years, until I started going to church across the street from my house & found him there. He's an excellent poet, & I admire & envy this book. Makes our blogger's games look like so much trivial pursuit.

(Poetry happens, sometimes, on a different level, unbeknownst, anonymous almost, closer to ordinary non-literary life, without losing any of its authority, integrity, freedom, "literariness".) (I'm being somewhat more inarticulate than usual this morning.) (The ambitious & the professional can lose touch with it. I am speaking for myself here, others may identify. This may be some kind of natural or moral cycle, leading perhaps to re-discovery.)