I was going to avoid going into this, but I’ve spent too many hours mulling over it to not write about it:
Stanley Fish begins his essay with an example of lying to his students—telling them that something meaningless and arbitrary was in fact a religious poem of some value—and, after they respond according to this lie, concludes (Host Poc, I believe) that “acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source” (p. 270.) It seems to me that this is true only if your “formal characteristics” are preceded by a source that you trust more than your own ability to recognize—like the suggestion of an instructor. The difference, however, is ultimately mute because the recognition and what triggers the recognition both come from the same source. The interesting thing is that Stanley Fish identifies there is only one way to recognize a poem: If someone (or something) tells you it’s a poem. This is certainly true for anyone who studies poetry, who sees something called a “prose poem,” and thinks, “Sure, this is a poem.” Why are “prose poems” poems? Because whoever wrote them calls them a poem; whoever “created” the meaning is able to determine—or suggest with definitively—its most essential quality, the largest or most basic category it can fit into. We take that overarching construct (it is because I say it is) and assimilate it into our own ontology of meaning, all of which is in keeping with our society at large: We determine a prose poem is a poem because others have determined it and have taught us about the determination-ontology of meaning. Of course, one thing we don’t do in high school is study philosophy. We don’t study how we interpret meaning and why—we’re just given it and that is enough. I think if you look at education historically you’ll see a difference there. But before I get too far off topic, I’ll disagree with Fish’s statement that “we create poetry (and assignments and lists)… through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility” (p.274). No doubt we create things within parameters established by such systems, but we do not create them through these systems.
Fish’s conclusion is that if we all agree we are programmed to think by our culture and the education prescribed by that culture, and that this holistic program comes down to us from our elders—and the only way to step out of our programming is to be lied to within the framework that defines the meaning of a “lie” and a “truth” (but which, because it is a creation of meaning rather than an access of it, is either falsity or verisimilitude)—than all our problems, our differences, will disappear, and we will be free to create within the framework we have been given (or rather free to push what meaning we create in pre-determined ways through the pre-fabricated holes of the pre-designed framework we have learned to varying degrees of a pre-calibrated exactness). However, I remember being in high school and falling in love with Eliot’s Prufrock. It’s meaning to me was manifest in the way it was something I experienced, took around with me in little memorized passages—“Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / and watched lonely men in shirt-sleeves / leaning out of windows?”—and then a teacher asked us to dissect it, pull it apart by its seams and come to these realizations about the poem’s “meaning” by way of its associative innards. Is this why we study poetry; is it nothing more than a mental exercise, a linguistic form of a logical puzzle? Why do we care about poetry? What is it that makes a poem important? Fish’s essay is titled, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” and, in his postulation, the title isn’t facetious; after all, by calling the names on the board a poem, and by treating these names as a poem (to an extent that many “real poems” have not been considered), Fish created a poem—he is a poet.
I’ll leave it at this: Let’s say Fish found himself conducting the same study in a 16th century classroom. Let’s assume that in the 16th century the prevailing ontology of meaning was that a thing had a meaning in and of itself—that at least certain things were self evident. Now my history education revolved around battles and kings—not philosophies—but it’s a somewhat safe assumption (Decartes famous line “I think therefore I am” was a 17th century challenge). So we have Fish and his names on the board. He tells the class “This is a religious poem,” and the class looks at Fish and says, “with all due respect sir, no, it fucking isn’t.” The immediate response, that the 16th century students simply happen to come from a society and education that ascribes its own, different meaning to poetry, is an easy one. But it’s the implication I’m interested in: The 16th century students wouldn’t have been duped.