"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense"
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Harrison is pushing back against the lazy demand that poems “mean” something the way memos do. His phrasing makes the poem less a delivery vehicle than a crime-scene report: provenance matters. Not the pronouncement, but how the pronouncement comes into being, what pressures and histories cling to it, what accidents of sound, syntax, and association escort it onto the page. A “message” implies a stable payload; “provenance” implies a chain of custody, a traceable origin story with smudges and fingerprints. That’s an aesthetic argument disguised as epistemology.
The sharper move is “an advent of sense.” “Advent” is arrival, event, almost revelation; sense isn’t prepackaged but staged into presence. Harrison’s subtext is anti-instrumental: the poem isn’t there to be translated into a takeaway, because the takeaway is only the husk. The real action is the moment meaning flickers into coherence and then threatens to dissolve again. That tension is the poem.
Contextually, this sits in the long post-Romantic, modernist lineage that treats language as generative rather than transparent: meaning emerges from the encounter between reader and text, not from a poet shipping a sealed box. It also reads like a corrective to our current content economy, where “the message” is optimized, flattened, and made shareable. Harrison insists on the opposite: poems are laboratories of attention, preserving the messy birth of thought. The value isn’t the conclusion; it’s the arrival, with all its uncertainty intact.
The sharper move is “an advent of sense.” “Advent” is arrival, event, almost revelation; sense isn’t prepackaged but staged into presence. Harrison’s subtext is anti-instrumental: the poem isn’t there to be translated into a takeaway, because the takeaway is only the husk. The real action is the moment meaning flickers into coherence and then threatens to dissolve again. That tension is the poem.
Contextually, this sits in the long post-Romantic, modernist lineage that treats language as generative rather than transparent: meaning emerges from the encounter between reader and text, not from a poet shipping a sealed box. It also reads like a corrective to our current content economy, where “the message” is optimized, flattened, and made shareable. Harrison insists on the opposite: poems are laboratories of attention, preserving the messy birth of thought. The value isn’t the conclusion; it’s the arrival, with all its uncertainty intact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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