Jake Bailey on “Portrait of the Marianas Trench”

Dear Reader,

I hope that all is well in these trying times and that poetry has helped keep you afloat in a world torn asunder by illness and systematic oppression. I also hope that this brief essay will help momentarily distract you by providing insight into my writing and what I think about meaning.

I have a hard time assessing my own poetry until I have sat with it for a year or so. My disorder makes it difficult to parse out signification sometimes, so I will speak to my writing process and conception of meaning in relation to the poem and in general. 

Generally, I will write while manic or while carried in the soft caress of a joint or two. In either case, my mind is able to unhinge from my normal experience of the world and language begins to take on a musicality and novelty that I am unaccustomed to when overly sedated by medication. The cannabis, especially sativa and sativa dominant hybrids, aids in circumventing the fogginess of the anti-psychotics that I take, allowing me to reach out for poetic vision, for voices that are not my own placed inside my mouth. While they appear as external to my waking self, the voices of thought within my mind mirror particular events in my life and encounters with the world. For example, in “Portrait of the Marianas Trench,” I had about four joints to reach the plateau of insight. Even though I was unable to understand it in the moment, this poem is ultimately about my divorce and the events leading up to and following severance at the nexus mental illness. However, that is just my current interpretation. 

I believe that meaning arises at the nexus of the written word and incarnation of the reader or listener within the world of the poem. As such, any interpretation derived from the schematic structures—i.e. the words themselves—has the potential to be valid and can be further sustained by conversations with other persons who have read the poem. I believe in what Wolfgang Iser terms the “virtuality” of a text. His theory postulates that a text consists of schematic formations that do not inherently have meaning within themselves, the formations being individual words, sentences, and connections between different words (drawing heavily on Roman Ingarden and phenomenology). He also posits that meaning does not exist solely on the side of the reader, either, avoiding relativism. Rather, Iser posits that meaning comes into being at the intersection of a dipolar union: between reader and written word. Meaning is, then, an emergent phenomenon relying on both the agent and the poem’s incarnation in word or speech. As such, your interpretation of my poem is wholly unique, though connected to other interpretations because of the always existent pole of the written or spoken word. 

Ultimately, my poem is what you make it within the permeable boundaries of the written poem and its recording. If you would like to know anything else about Iser, Ingarden, the virtuality of texts, or hermeneutics, just shoot me a direct message on Twitter or email me through my website.

All my very best,

Jake Bailey