The Problems Facing Poetry Are Not, in Fact, Problems

so. poems do not have meanings anymore, or so i'm reliably informed by those people who go to more college than me. i'm too busy being cool, you see. me, i'm not too worried about this lack of semantics, nor that we have now decided, in what must be the longest running debate in history, that context both matters and doesn't. similarly, i'm not bothered that we now have considerably more ways of interpretation than people alive. you see, i've realised something quite important. even i if i do say so myself, and i do. texts, you see, while they may not have meanings or contexts, and whether or not they mean nothing or everything or both or neither, posses something much more important. i shall choose to call it...socio-psycho-ability. i could have named it conversational value, or the even more vulgar thought mileage. in fact, perhaps that's better. so; thought mileage, then, is a certain quality of something that an object may posses in varying quantities. all objects have it, but in most it is at such an impossibly low level that our in-built censoring equipment quickly, efficiently and very gently guides our conscious mind from it. most things we do not think about, talk about, even look at in any meaningful way. whether we should or not is a discussion for a different day. but what i'm trying to get at, in an incredibly long-winded way, is that poems have thought mileage, you see? most have it in some degree, and a very few have it in supertankerfulls. it is the quality in things that some part of us goes ah! to. but not just ah!, and certainly not just aw..., but hmmm... and grrr... and right! and wrong! and right? and wrong? and yes! and no! and yes and no. it is the thing that makes things we see into things we think about, things that we hear into things we talk about and things we do into things we do again. cue; problems for the statements i began with. for you see, all the above discussions about context, about interpretation, about meaning most importantly, are all ways of measuring poems. they won't tell you this, of course, and i certainly wouldn't, but they are, really, aren't they? i don't mean in the cold hard operating room sense, although there is certainly an element of this that occurs, but merely in the fact that everyone, be it layman or laywoman, has an opinion on these matters, and texts that do not conform to these are excluded from discussion by the great social hive mind. but wait, and cue; the statements above becoming right again. for if every text has a quantity of thought mileage within it, then the ones that get discussed must be the ones with the most, right? and this, this unifying quality, is what i'm getting at. that we must celebrate the fact that someone, somewhere, has extracted enough thought mileage from shakespeare to prove (prove, i ask ya!) that shakespeare created the modern individual. now, in my view, this makes shakespeare good. not because i agree with the quite frankly preposterous idea, but because any assemblage of 30 repeated inky symbols on pulped dried vegetable matter that can create that delusion has a certain wizardry about it. but, and at once and the same time, we should realise that we can discuss a particular book to within an inch of the end of the world and not change the fact that it is boring. the only objective value that a text possesses is, in fact, the amount it will be thought about, discussed, and copied after it is read.
discuss.