I relish the tension that exists between certain verb pairs often used as roughly synonymous. This isn’t scientific, but here’s how I think of a couple of common verbs: “Look” describes the action of directing the eye to a focal point. “See” connotes cognitive reception of what the eye has detected. “Listen” describes the action of focusing the aural faculty on sound. “Hear” connotes cognitive extraction of definition from the noise. 

Consider this exchange:

— Did you see the tiger?
— No, I thought it was a shadow.

Or this exchange:

— Did you hear the explosion?
— No, I thought it was thunder.

Of course in each case the second speaker could have prefaced his answer with “yes,” followed by the same wording. It’s still a statement that something was picked up by the sensing faculty, but was not made sense of by the cognitive faculty. It was “translated” erroneously.

I want to compel the meditation to encompass “read” versus “understand,” with specific application to poetry. At one time I thought that rhythm and rhyme, metaphor and simile, were meant to give more immediate effect to poetic discourse, to make it easier to remember by being memorable. “Wine-dark sea” registers and lodges. 

But it’s more realistic, I think, to posit that the poet, often as not, injects friction into the reading experience, such that the payload carried by the text may not be readily apparent. My use of the term “payload” betrays a bias that the sense-making reflex of the human is indomitable. We look for meaning, within, beyond, beneath the wording, wherever we can extrapolate, imagine, concoct it. The doing so goes with language, which is what poetry is built from, on, with and around.

I scrounge for analogies with which to evoke how verses can feel: 

X-ray language: A configuration of bone. Animal or human? A wrist? A wing? 

Scaffolding language: Erected around an indistinct edifice. Bell tower? Skyscraper? Rocket? 

Disarticulated language: A stream of lexemes with sparse intercalation of relators, no capitals, no punctuation, ragged lineation. What is its “story” when the dust has settled?

There’s a rhetorical much-making around “stories” in Poetry, March 2025.

stories span through time
alongside life, stories extend
with prayers, stories extend
with songs, stories extend
the stories are still moving
(Manny Loley, from “From the Mesa: A Reflection on Language, Poetics and Personhood”)

Go on, soi-disant poet, spin me a story. Make it short, tart, square, level and true.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved