Explicating with Expletives

Paul Stewart’s poem, Ledger, is essentially a triple-dog-dare on the page.

It opens with a fuck you manifesto before it intentionally destabilizes language and meaning, employing Cummingsesque experimentation with punctuation, line breaks, and the visual flow on the page without descending into gimmick a la Herbert, or, God forbid, acrostics.

Cummings used punctuation to create meaning; Stewart uses it to break meaning. Structuralist and Post-Structuralist readings are where the meat of this poem has rested on the sideboard after being grilled to a perfect medium-rare, juices fully stabilized instead of leaking out the moment the knife slices the flesh.

Let’s take a moment to differentiate between Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Think in terms of modernism and po-mo, not ante meridian and post meridian; otherwise you’re structuring the reading artificially.

First, let’s take a look-see at the fucking binaries. Structuralism is all about the fucking binaries, and Ledger doesn’t skimp on fucking binaries. For fuck’s sake, it even embeds one in the title itself (order(accounting)/disorder (chaos) for the discrening reader who takes a moment to ask how the title works with the text.

The binaries that refuse to be ignored in this poem are as follows (we’ll see if there’s time and space to examine them more closely or identify the more obscure ones):

rapid/slow

control/confined (freedom and loss of freedom)

safety/danger

certainty/uncertainty

pleasure/distress (recalling hedonism v. stoicism)

ease/difficulty

reader/writer

sense/nonsense

We’ll pause here before we delve into the art of destabilizing binaries because a rushed reading of this poem almost guarantees that meaning will be overlooked, prompting some readers to claim that there is no meaning in this poem, and that’s simply not true.

What is the point of all these binaries? Are they doing their jobs well enough to not need a side hustle? Do some of them have side hustles? Probably—who can make it in this fucked up economy without a side hustle? Is Vocal your side hustle? How successful does a side hustle have to be to cease being a side hustle? Questions for the flappers and philosophers.

What the fuck. If I’d been born early enough, I’m fairly certain I would’ve been a flapper who argued with Fitzgerald about the meaning behind my bobbed hair, fringe of bangs, and fringed cocktail dresses. I would’ve painted my face to jazz and frequented speakeasies.

Speakeasy. Does this poem? It looks like it on the surface, especially in the areas of what appear to be stillness, but, as we all know, still waters run deep while producing gin for the speakeasies. I’ll be in the bathtub if you need me.

There’s a binary I didn’t mention yet, not because it’s not important but because the headliner doesn’t open the show. What if you’d been late to the first Lollapalooza to find that you missed Jane’s Addiction? You’d have been wicked pissed. Same (kind of) goes for this poem: legibility/illegibility is the governing binary, which is discovered throughout the poem and lands solidly with readers who reflect on title after consuming the text of the poem.

This poem asks the reader to make sense of the relationships of the binaries on the page, but it takes a detour into Post-Structuralism, deliberately destabilizing the relationships it presents. Some readers may think this makes the poem fail, falsely believing that the surface and conventional relationships being undermined by the underlying meanings turn the poem into nonsense. It’s a deliberate fuck you to surface readers, and this reader thinks it’s exceptionally well done, to the degree that the poem becomes as much a paradigm of itself as Elizabeth Bishop’s The Map.

Creating a poem that exemplifies and demonstrates its own governing meaning is no easy task, especially when the governing logic centers on interpretation and resistance to interpretation. Surface reading misses these nuances, as that’s the type of reading that essentially demands texts declare themselves and make interpretation easy for the reader. This poem opens by telling you that won’t be happening here. The opening lines: “It's not my job or my commission to make you feel at ease when you turn the page in my ledger” tell the reader that making things easy to understand isn’t something the author has been employed to do, nor is it something that earns anything for the author. This is the author’s ledger, not the reader’s, and it demonstrates instability in a way that readers who want poetry to be uplifting or follow some contrived pattern will find destabilizing in and of itself, simply by rejecting the idea that any reader can define poetry, meaning, art, or beauty for another.

From a Formalist perspective, this poem is extremely successful as a Structuralist/Post-Structuralist poem: it doesn’t tell, it shows the reader what happens to meaning when someone deliberately fucks with it. Ledger is a mindfuck of a poem about what happens inside the mind when it’s being fucked.