# Poetic Opacity -How to Paint Things with Words  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum]] - Full Title: Poetic Opacity -How to Paint Things with Words - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Poetry has a unique form of opacity that sets it apart from other types of writing, akin to painting. This intentional opacity in poetry serves to draw attention to the words themselves and requires a different reading style. Poetic opacity is a distinctive feature of poetry that enhances aesthetic engagement with the words. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/185957538 - Source File: Poetic Opacity How to Paint Things with Words by Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Viewers see paint and painted. It is central to most traditions of painting that there be a distinc- tive style. In the modern period artists took this in highly individualis- tic directions, developing styles unique to each creator. When we view paintings, we pay special attention to how paintings look, and we praise > painters not just for what they paint, but for how they paint—the latter often being more important. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0tgmjyxz1repxx1scdtftcz)) > In French “apparition” sometimes conveys a meaning of how something appears upon its first being seen. (The reading is enhanced by the fact that Pound wrote the poem while in France and its subject is a French subway; moreover, the immediacy of the perception would be in line with the influence haikus and, in particular, their use of clashing images had on Pound.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0th5c5mpmm7xdcbrjrqcmyp)) > A quotation gets at what was said, but normally what interests readers is the meaning conveyed or proposition expressed, not the exact words. Notice that quotations are rarely seen as untranslatable, while poems are, and when quotations are difficult to translate that is because some words lack cross-linguistic synonyms, not because the actual form of the words is so important. Puns resist trans- lation for similar reasons, but they too are not intended to introduce a formal veil blocking smooth passage to content. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0thr3geqz482ryr7x9qcv4j)) > This brings us to our conclusion. We have been arguing that a mark of the poetic, perhaps the mark, is poetic opacity. In poems there are two foci for attention: what is represented and how it is represented. The form of a poem is salient and central to its aesthetic value, and the experience of content characteristically involves seeing (or more accu- rately interpreting) something in that form while keeping the form in view. In these respects, poetry is much like painting. Poems paint with words. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0thzyd048z975g1bx9fywch)) > We will approach our account in stages. The basic strategy is to try to identify a “mark of the poetic”—some feature that poetry has across a range of styles and forms. A hint about this mark, we think, comes from the fact that a lot of people detest poetry. On the face of it, that is very strange. It wouldn’t make sense to hate many other aspects of language. It would be bizarre to declare a hatred for paragraphs or dependent clauses. It is also unusual to hate specific uses to which language is put: like speeches, or stories, or essays. Poetry meets with greater resistance than these things. The question is, why? One possible answer is that people resist poetry, because poetry resists them. Consider the second and third stanzas of Wallace Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine-Woods” > Damned universal cock, as if the sun > Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. > Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world¹ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rjb4kph7fj87dg1fd4fmxm)) > What could the meaning of a poem with such lines be? It has one, but it’s not readily evident. As this example illustrates, poetry, in compari- son to conventional prose, can be a challenge to read. The poem resists easy interpretation because the allusions in it are hard to detect without serious background knowledge. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rjcq8m30jyv1pn9xfz9way)) - Note: Like a crossword? > Words, in non-poetic contexts, are like windows that aim for trans- parency, delivering the world without interference. In communicative contexts clarity is king. Poetic words are usually intentionally chosen to resist this kind of transparency—they are supposed to be noticed en route to the world (assuming the world is to come up at all). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rm6yc3hpzvgmcckjm5gd6p)) > The answer is that poets conventionally select words and word placement (such as line breaks) with utmost care. It is a central aspect of their creative process. Words are not arbitrary, or even just instrumen- tal, in a typical poem. They are a locus of aesthetic choice—part of what a poet might revise and revise again while keeping other aspects fixed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rmc1mta35gm5jnb35q4vvp)) > This is one rea- son why it can be less satisfying to read poems in the drab typefaces used by some digital reading devices. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rmm1ekw9080nj2gyqm1xf2)) > no longer just mere vessels for delivering content but are an integral constituent in their own right. Words are a veil through which con- tent is delivered—a veil that is (or is at least intended to be) salient to the reader. Notice that this is another form of opacity. We will call it poetic opacity. To a first approximation, we will say that text is poeti- cally opaque if the author intentionally constructs it in such a way that readers’ attention is drawn to the words used and not just to what those words represent. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rmktzwtdpq88y44ejnn8bz)) > Here Rossetti uses rhyme and repetition to create a sense of rhythm. She also uses meter (iambic tetrameter), but mixes it up with three trochees for emphasis. These devices ensure that we pay attention to form, and not just content, though the two also interact: the poem sounds like a nursery rhyme but concerns adult themes about sexuality, which creates a sense of dissonance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rn8mya8w7eg05jj39e4yaa)) > One might wonder why they are all called “poetic.” Our answer is that they are all instruments of poetic opacity. They all draw attention to the text. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rnbpbbbbrz0mw7shgwwj4t)) > One might ask, why are there concrete poems and not concrete novels? Answer: manipulating the physical arrangements of words on a page makes them poetically opaque. We can’t ignore words that have been unusually configured. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rndw9zee3x0q14fjprsy3w)) > Also consider nonsense poems. Nonsense words lend them- selves to poetry precisely because they block the move to content, and draw attention to themselves. Here is an excerpt from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s “Klink—Hratzvenga (Deathwail)”: > Arr—karr— Arrkarr—barr Karrarr—barr— Arr— Arrkarr— Mardar > Mar—dóórde—dar— ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rnfeag37z45dyw99ez17y2)) > Notice that though concrete poems and nonsense poems are recent inventions, we easily recognize them as poems. Poetic opacity can help explain this, and it allows us to imagine new poetic devices, such as poems written using words that all have the same number of letters. Poetic opacity can also explain why we find poetry in things that are also named using different terms. Limericks, some prayers, and song lyrics all qualify and they are all poetically opaque. Rhyme, rigidly fixed forms, and musical setting make the words in each of these categories poetically opaque. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rngwhvcc4p9hpb5b89g5mn)) > Poetic opacity may even shed some light on content-based poetic devices, such as metaphor and metonymy. Though strictly speaking, these do not depend on form, the fact that poets depart from literal meanings forces readers to regard familiar words in new ways, and this may draw attention to the words themselves. We have already seen meta- phors from Shakespeare and Apollinaire, and examples are pervasive. Here’s another from Dylan Thomas: “Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?” This conveys the dark side of love by forcing readers to recon- strue kissing in a negative light. This reconstrual is based on content, but Thomas also makes sure to highlight form: he uses iambic pentameter, rhymes “kiss” with “*this*tle,” and ends on a question mark, calling his key term into focus through punctuation and lifting intonation. The result is a kind of doubling of experience in which the conventional meaning of kiss comes through, but the context calls that meaning into question and thus forces readers to grapple with the word itself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0rnjbn491yrs0c5mwrcw20f)) > On the other hand it would clue readers into how the work should be read. To read a novel as if it were poetry would involve paying special attention to words, treating them as if they were a decorative bar- rier interposed between mind and meaning. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0ty8x4cb8z1em24jad4gfc8))