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Christopher Trujillo Professor Luck ENG 443; Sect. 01 5 December 2011 Sense and Nonsense In order to talk about poetry as either being sense poetry or nonsense poetry, we must first presuppose that there is some difference between the two styles of poetry that is significant enough to call for this separate categorization. Sense and nonsense poetry are so significantly different from each other that the categorization of a poem as either sense or nonsense is very beneficial to a poems audience. The major difference between sense and nonsense poetry is the degree to which an author has made their poetry intentionally hard to understand. Because nonsense poetry is more difficult (though not impossible) to understand in the traditional manner (through analysis of diction, imagery, etc.,), it is beneficial for a nonsense poems audience to be aware and plan to ingest the poem differently than they would a normal poem. By applying the method of World, Voice, and Theme analysis to both a sense poemLaser by A. R. Ammons, and a nonsense poemParadoxes & Oxymorons by John Ashbery, I will demonstrate a method for making sense of nonsense poetry, and I will highlight the stylistic differences made visible between these examples of sense and nonsense poetry. Further, I will use the analysis of these two metapoems to discuss what their authors say about the way people go about understanding poetry. In his poem Laser, A. R. Ammons illustrates that our minds are like lasers and that when we try to focus on any one approach to understanding a nonsense poem we will fail. Similarly, John Ashbery, in his poem Paradoxes and Oxymorons, expresses his view that readers are lead to new understanding through the process of paying attention

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to a poem over time and then being led by that poem to an understanding of it. Definitions We live in a post-modern world that really shrinks away from defining itself in any static way, so I hesitate since I will be attempting to define poetry, which has in recent times become some of the most definition-defying stuff of our lives. However much I dread my attempt, I will apply the following definition to poetry: In its broadest, non-excluding sense, poetry is any non-prose composition that attempts to communicate its authors message to a third party. Now that we have a definition of poetry in general, I think we could do with a contrast in definitions between sense and nonsense poetry. Sense poetry is any poetry that does not actively seek to limit the understanding of its intended audience. In contrast, nonsense poetry is any poetry whose author, when they composed it, actively sought to create features that would limit the audiences understanding of the poem. Now, while nonsense poetry seeks to limit the readiness of understanding, it does not altogether prohibit understanding, so that understanding becomes more difficult, but not impossible. Decoding Nonsense I learned the following sense-making technique from Brian McHales article, Making (Non)sense of Postmodernist Poetry. McHale explains that the technique I will apply to A. R. Ammonss Laser and John Ashberys Paradoxes and Oxymorons is a method that attempts to identify pertinent levels of . . . coherence or integration (McHale 8). Basically, I am going to analyze three (of the many) points of interest that one has when reading a poem. By points of interest, I mean features of the poem that are usually useful in the analysis of a poems message. In particular, I will be analyzing Paradoxes and Oxymorons and Laser through the analytical lenses

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of the world of the poemstheir scenes, the voices of the poemstheir personas, and the themes of the poemstheir ideas. World Lens In his poem Paradoxes and Oxymorons, John Ashbery has painted a compound world. By that I mean that there is more than one scene in his world. The first mention we have of the world comes when we read Look at it [the poem] talking to you. You look out a window / Or pretend to fidget (Ashbery). This line immediately gives us several of the parts that make up our current scene: we have a poem, we have a reader, and we have a room with a window. Im stricken by the ambiguity of this scene, which can represent two possibilities: someone is reading a poem either in a professional/educational setting or in a leisurely setting. Alone, this information is not very telling as to the nature of Paradoxes and Oxymorons, but it at least develops an interesting contrast that might be developed throughout the poem: reading poetry professionally versus reading poetry leisurely. Following Ashberys representation of the readers scene, we read a representation of the poets scene: And before you know / It [play] gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters (Ashbery). Here we see that Ashberys conception of the poets scene primarily consists of the tools of his craft. Having noticed this, we see that the poets scene deals primarily with his function as a poet. The same, we can now suppose is true for the readers scene. In some way, the windowed room and the poem are essential to the readers function, just as the typewriter is essential to the function of a poet. The last mention of the world of Paradoxes and Oxymorons comes from the last stanza: And the poem / Has set me softly down beside you (Ashbery). Here, we see that the previously separate scenes of the poet and the reader are now very literally connected by the poem they have in common. The world painted in this poem seems to express the idea that

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if a reader and a poet do their jobs, so, too, will the poem do its job and bring the two together. Relative to the multi-scene world of Paradoxes and Oxymorons, the world developed in A. R. Ammonss poem, Laser, is simple. Ammonss Laser world is simple in that it consists of only one scene. The scene of this poem takes place inside the readers mind, and inside of this readers mind we see a laser and an image. The readers analytical tool is the laser, and the image, the poem. Now, lets look at what this approach has shown us about the differences between Paradoxes & Oxymorons and Laser. First, we see that Paradoxes & Oxymorons had a multiplicity of scenes (three in fact): one each for the reader and the poet, and then one more for all threereader, poet, and poem, together. On the other hand, we see that Laser was made up of only one scene: inside the readers mind with the laser and the image. Now, it is tempting to say that this world lens illustrates that nonsense poetry will tend to construct complex worlds, whereas sense poetry will not, however, we can see that such an argument is fallacious: overgeneralizations are dangerous territory. However, what is important to draw from this exercise, though, is the idea that nonsense poems might have a higher tendency towards creating worlds whose meanings are gleaned through a more intricate interweaving of scenes than sense poems do. Voice Lens Having looked at the worlds constructed in Paradoxes & Oxymorons, it is time to turn our attention to the voices we can find throughout. As with its world, Paradoxes & Oxymorons has a plurality of voices. The first voice we see is the voice of the poet, and therefore the poem. I say that the voice of the poet and the poem are one since the poet is speaking to us directly through his poem: This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Here we see that the poem is speaking (giving us its message) and yet

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we are hearing the poets voice, speaking about the concerns of the poem itself. In this way the poets voice speaks through the poem as the poem speaks. Now, there is another voice: that of the reader/poem, which asks Whats a plain level? And, as was true with the relationship between the poet and the poem, there exists a relationship between the reader voice and the poem, which is to say that the reader voice speaks through the poem as the poem speaks. Now, we can put the two links together, since they are connected through the poem and their dialogue, and we get the following statement: the poet speaks through the poem as the poem speaks, and the poet/poem voice is speaking to the reader/poem voice. And these two voices (poet/poem & reader/poem) are speaking to each other and then through the poem to a live reader (see figure 1). Talk about complexity.

Fig. 1Ashbury writes Paradoxes & Oxymorons, which is read by a live reader. Now, both Ashbery and his audience member are connected. To further complicated matters, however, the poem itself gives us a representation of this relationship in the plurality of its voices: the poet/poem voice speaks to the reader/poem voice, and both are connected by their dialogue and the poem.
Ammonss poem Laser, on the other hand, does not require an illustration to understand. There is only one voice in Laser and that is the voice of the author speaking, through the poem, to his audience. This is, of course, the same relationship as exists between Ashbery and his audience, except that Ammons did not use the voice in his poem to meta-poetically speak about the relationship between poets and their audiences.

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Again, we see that the differing trait here is the complexity of the construction of the poems in question. Paradoxes and Oxymorons is complex, where Laser is not. However, this does not mean that all sense poems are as straight forward as Laser. Instead, this trend for complexity seems to speak to a very simple (though not easy) difference between the stylistics of nonsense and sense poems: complexity. Nonsense poems seem to be made purposefully complex, so as to confuse the reader, and stun them into a more sedate acquisition of understanding. Theme Lens Now that weve looked at voice, we can look at the themes inherent in these two poems. In order to facilitate the discovery of themes, I took the advice of Albert Cook, who in his article, "Expressionism Not Wholly Abstract: John Ashbery," wrote that the relationship between objects in a poem plays a vital role in ones understanding of its content (55). So, when I was going through the two poems, I united the concepts of voice, theme, and title. As such my themes are the result of looking at what the voices in these poems say, especially as those thoughts relate to each poems title. In the case of Ashberys poem, the concepts of paradoxes and oxymorons along with the content of each voice were coupled. The first voice, we hear in Ashberys poem is the poet/poem voice, which speaks about language and the relationship between a poem and its reader: You have it [the poem] but you dont have it. / You miss it, it misses you. With the mentions of missing in this passage, we see that Ashberys poet/poem voice is making a theme of incomprehension on the part of the reader with regards to the poem. So far, the reader and the poem are incapable of fulfilling their functions, which are, respectively, to receive and to give the poets message. If we look now at the reader/poem voice, we can see where the concept of paradox comes into play, especially in the very last statements made by the reader/poem voice: And the poem / has set me softly down beside you. What

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the reader is expressing herean understanding of the poem on level with the poets understanding, is paradoxical since throughout the poem the reader/poem voice has remained ignorant and questioning. This paradox is a very interesting aspect of this poem because it illustrates the theme that understanding poetry is an organic, rather than an analytical, process, where one reads the poem over time and eventually comes to understand it. In contrast to this theme of organically coming to understand poetry, Ammonss Laser has a theme that is an illustration of what happens when one reads nonsense poetry through too focused a lens. The poet voice (the only voice) in Ammonss Laser records the mind of the reader as it attempts to illuminate a contradictory image. The theme here seems pretty straight forward: if a mind becomes too focused on a single aspect of poetry, then it becomes overwhelmed with contradiction and inconsistency, so much so, in fact, that the mind fails to make any sense of the image/poetry at all. The themes found through this lens, for a third time now, show us that the difference between sense and nonsense poetry is in a tendency for a more purposefully complicated style. We must begin to acknowledge that the more complicated a poem is with regards to the number of fragments that make it up the more likely it is to be considered a nonsense poem. However, weve seen in this latest application that, indeed, complexity is not enough to make a nonsense poem: we also need paradox. After all, we can be very sure that had the mind in Ammonss Laser not had a contradictory image to make sense of, it would have easily enough made sense of it, just as so many others today are continuously making sense of poetry through laser-like approaches. The trick, then, for understanding nonsense poetry seems to lie in an approach that is not singular (laser-like), but pluralistic like the poetry it is trying to examine. And that is exactly what Ashbery and Ammons tell us in their poems. Ditch the laser, and experience the poem. Then you will understand it.

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Works Cited Ammons, A. R. "Laser." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert OClair. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. 294-295. Print. Ashbery, John. "Paradoxes & Oxymorons." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert OClair. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003. 407. Print. Cook, Albert. "Expressionism Not Wholly Abstract: John Ashbery." American Poetry 2.2 (1985): 53-70. Print. McHale, Brian. "Making (Non) Sense of Postmodernist Poetry." Language, Text, and Context: Essays in Stylistics. Ed. Michael Toolan. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 6-36. Print.