How does any of this mean?

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Around our house, two books taunt me with impossible questions: “What Do People Do All Day?” by Richard Scarry and John Ciardi’s 1959 introduction to poetry, “How Does a Poem Mean?”

Scarry’s book our family reads every day—and I still don’t have an answer for you. Ciardi’s crumbling volume hadn’t been touched for years until one of my children knocked it from its shelf, separating the pages from their binding. 

When I carefully turned those pages, I was shocked by what I found.

How does a poem mean?

Ciardi’s introduction starts, “A poem is a formal structure in which many elements operate at the same time. By nature, analysis is plodding at best.” 

A reader may take a poem apart to analyze it, but only in the service of putting it back together again. He goes on, “It is up to the reader, once the analysis is completed, to re-read the poem in a way that will restore the simultaneity and therefore the liveliness and interest of the poetic structure.”

Something about simultaneity and the poem being more than the sum of its parts made me realize—a poem is a system, just like a cell or an ant colony or a Swiss watch!

The poem’s system is held together by images and ideas, rhythms and rhymes, and its meaning emerges from the interplay of these elements just like wetness emerges from water molecules. 

Ciardi argues that asking what a poem means often destroys our chance at understanding and appreciating the poem. “A more useful way of asking the question,” he writes, “is, ‘How does a poem mean?’” In other words, we should look not at the poem’s literal meaning (man stops in snowy woods, raven repeats itself) but at how its elements work in tandem to create meaning.

This question of ”how does it mean?” applies far beyond poetry.

How meaning emerges

Ciardi describes poetry as a type of performance. A poem’s essence, he writes, “lies in the way it performs itself through the difficulties it imposes upon itself.” 

He sees learning to experience poetry as a form of play: a way of investigating a form’s limits that involves the reader and heightens their experience of being alive. Meaning isn’t handed over; it’s discovered together.

As with any system, the poet can put all the pieces in place, but once the poem is let loose on the world, its behavior can be unpredictable.

These principles are most pronounced in poetry, but they are true of any content we produce.

All forms of communication involve limitations, whether they are self-imposed or inherent to the medium.

It’s easy to fixate on the logic of what we want to say—the core message, the right angle, the ideal frame—and forget to consider how we say it—the format, tone, rhythm, images, and voice.  But the strength of these elements is often how the meaning lands. 

The audience can feel when something has been made with care (what Robert Frost calls “the pleasure of taking pains”), and this care helps to create trust.

An audience needn’t be trained in literary theory to appreciate a poem’s emotional pull. And this is true of all communication. Working with technical material requires poetic leaps to make the content accessible. Branding uses text, color, images, and fonts to unearth powerful feelings. 

Complex effects emerge from simple elements working together. Think about pieces that have really worked for you, that made you snap to attention or even feel more alive. What elements worked to enhance the piece’s literal meaning? What complicated feelings did these interactions evoke?

How to apply it

A writer working with dense or abstract material can treat their form as part of their message—playing with metaphor, rhythm, tone, or alliteration to evoke the topic’s emotional texture. 

An editor can think in terms of systems: how elements such as structure, subheads, graphical elements, and call-out boxes interact to heighten or flatten the content’s impact. 

A strategist can use the delivery to sharpen a message by letting the audience guide the medium, finding familiar reference points to illustrate abstract concepts, and carefully selecting a messenger to build trust.

All methods of delivery involve performance. We can hide behind a form’s conventions or use play and performance to heighten the experience. 

Of course, not all boundary-pushing is productive. (We’ve all been present at Q&A when someone opts to share their life story instead of asking a question.) The real question is, how can we be aware of and play with the limits of form in a way that works with and enhances our objective?

Quote of the day:

More on this topic:

• Explore the full text of How Does a Poem Mean?, brought to you by Internet Archive.

• Read creative director and writer Tom Elia on how poetry can help us find alternatives to tired industry speak.

• Check out Consilience, a quarterly journal of poetry and artwork that’s all about science. I particularly liked this poem about how memorizing they city’s streets shapes the brains of London taxi drivers.

Hi! I’m Alex. I write about scientific research for nonprofits, universities, and brands. I also help experts communicate their own research. Learn more about my work or connect with me on LinkedIn.

P.S. Are you struggling with how to present a particular concept? Hit reply–I’d love to help. 

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