A Quote by Franz Grillparzer
Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?
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Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.
Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases
as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently.
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.
In order to produce learned fear, you take a neutral stimulus like a tone, and you pair it with an electrical shock. Tone, shock. Tone, shock. So the animal learns that the tone is bad news. But you can also do the opposite - shock it at other times, but never when the tone comes on.
I've never thought of my poems as violent. Violence, to me, has so much negativity attached to it - maybe that's my trouble with the word. But ferocious - indeed, I'll take it. And yes, poetry does need a bit of ferocity. Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity - the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.
Words ride on the energy of tone, its warmth or coldness; think of tone as the music of how words are expressed. You want this music to be soulful, whether you're giving sweet talk or tough love.
Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.
[My poems] of course, it's symbolic, in the way that things in a poem can be - that is, pointing to something beyond its mere ordinary meaning, while also retaining all the qualities of that ordinary meaning. In other words, it's a bear, but it's also suggesting something else, just by virtue of the attention to it. But it's not "symbolic" in that way we are taught to think about things in poems.
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that.
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