Cultures and Religions of the Himalayan Region

The Making of Meaning in Poetry :Quantum Possibilities

"Meaning" in poetry changes according to context. For instance, in my recent study of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, I was intrigued by how current theories of their work were radically different from that done by some of their contemporaries. Quantum ideas of "possibilities" and "uncertainty" explain how a poem's meaning can change according to readers and times. It explains how an author's biography creates meaning in a work and how meaning may be as legitimately constructed solely from the "music, rhetoric, image, emotion, story, and voice" of a poem. Jane Hirshfield calls these elements "central energies" in her book, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997). Researchers and writers such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Flow (1990) and Creativity (1996), and Douglas R. Hofstader in The Mind's Eye (1981) elaborate on the subjective experience of the reader, the complexity of the reading process, and reading's effect on consciousness and "self". Moreover, chaos and its quantum basis, as explained by F. David Peat in Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (1987) reveal mysteries of the writing process and validates intuition, inspiration, epiphany, and coincidence as manifestations of an "objective intelligence" akin to Plato's "forms" and Jung's "archetypes."
Finally, chaos theory reveals the mysteries of the writing process, and explains why Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched with Fire (1993) was able to correlate manic-depressive illness with the creativity of many poets including Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Hopkins, Eliot, Berryman, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton.

Outline

The Invention of Writing

Early Purposes of Writing

Writing Systems

Writing Styles

Writing to Heal

Writing to explicate

Writing to Argue

Writing for self-discovery

Journal Writing

Creative Writing