A Walnut of Truth
By Richard Stimac
Cartoon by Micah Liesenfeld
Recently I was the guest on a poetry-focused podcast. The first question was the most predictable: What is your poem about? Then the host asked, What was the process of writing the poem? and, What does your writing practice look like? At the outset of the interview, I thought of the David Lynch line that goes something like, once the work is done, the suffering begins, referring to the demand for the artist to explain the work of art – even though the artwork was created to be the expression of a meaning unto itself.
I pushed back on the question, even becoming a bit argumentative. I’m a formalist, I said, which grabbed the host’s attention. How did I come to that? she asked. I tried to explain that I was not a formalist in the New Formalism way, that poetry should have definable meter and rhyme. I cited the New Criticism term “paraphrasable content,” referencing that when people try to represent a poem with different words, that endeavor cannot ever be fully accurate. Why, I asked, would anyone write a poem when its meaning could be stated more clearly another way? She seemed to think one would. I tried to explain that to restate in different words the meaning of a poem is to create a different meaning. The form of the poem is its meaning. We went back and forth. She was certain that poems had meanings that could be separated from the poems. I am certain they do not.
My supposition is that two factors power the question, What does your poem mean? The two stem from the institutionalization of poetry into MFA programs. These programs create critics first, craftspeople second. Poets are taught to think about their historical context, where they fit in, where they want to fit in, what they contribute, and so on. The driving question is, Where does my art fit in the structure of art? I feel that detracts from just doing art.
But what does it mean to “do art?” Although much is made of the so-called post-modern stance of the humanities today, I say that what passes for post-modern is a rehashing of the Platonic debate between philosophy and art. Philosophy won. Plato argued that to know, one should be able to explain meaning in precise technical manners.
Most, if not all, artists can do art and can explain technique, but when pressed to clarify meaning, they cannot. Philosophers can, so Plato wrote. A rhapsode can recite The Iliad but not explain the precise theme and other elements expressed through the epic poem. The sculptor can chisel a beautiful sculpture but not explain beauty. And so on. According to Plato, only the philosopher can explain the abstract meaning of art.
Post-modernism denies inherent meaning and emphasizes contextual meaning, yet, as I type this, I realize that the problem is not post-modern or post-structural, but that what passes for either is structuralism, which demands to know where something fits in relation to other things. The explicit is adjudged to be more valid than the implied. The definable is valued more than the undefinable. Something that has no definable meaning cannot be integrated into the structure of meaning . . . so, a metaphor is in order.
Let’s assume that art is like a walnut. The shell is a piece of artwork. The nutmeat is the meaning. As of now, we will assume that the piece of artwork and its meaning are two separate things, united, yet separate. The implication of the question, What does your work mean?, implies that the artist has a meaning, yet, for some reason, instead of just handing the nutmeat to an audience, the artist creates a shell to be cracked, a puzzle to be solved, a challenge to be conquered. Why would one do that? I don’t know.
Given this metaphor, the purpose of the question “What does your art mean?” places the burden of cracking the shell on the artist. In effect, the asker beseeches the artist to interpret the work. At least have the fortitude to do your own work! Let’s extend this metaphor even further. If the shell is the art and the nutmeat the meaning, then once one has cracked the shell and consumed the nutmeat, what does one do with the shell? An AI search tells me that the home uses for walnut shells are great and varied. So much the better for art that has been cracked.
I remember reading a comment by Umberto Eco that I’ll paraphrase: Art is an interpretation-generating machine. Each time that we interact with art, we turn the machine’s crank and out pops an interpretation. With simple art, say a Valentine’s Day card, we get pretty much the same interpretation, regardless of our effort. We turn the crank with great art, and we get new interpretations, sometimes wildly new interpretations. No prior meaning exists. The meaning comes into being through interaction with the art. The interpretation is an organic whole with the interaction. The parts cannot be separated into the piece of art, observer, interaction, interpretation, meaning and so forth.
Maybe by coincidence, or karmic fruition, I recently read how T.S. Eliot attempted to write The Four Quartets in such a way that one could only understand the meaning while reading the poems. The poems have no takeaway, no paraphrasable content, no meaning. One only understands the poems while reading them, not after reading them. About that, there is no question.
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Below are some of Richard’s poems — sans explication!
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Demobilized
My dad left part of himself in Viet-
nam. You can see them in a tourist pic:
A foot under a tea house table. A rick-
shaw decorated in red ribbons for Tet
Holds forearms in the spokes. A girl, baguette
A femur’s length under her arm, skips quick-
ly past a begging monk. A snapped chopstick
Gives the finger, angry at unpaid debt.
These are keepsakes no one meant to amass.
The collector of these gems is a fool.
Another father, ARVN, VC, N
VA, amputated names from a time when
Names mattered, sits in the shade on a stool
And counts his own parts scattered in the grass.
— Originally published in Penumbra and included in Bricolage (Spartan Press, 2022).
ἔσωσεν Ἄλλους
“He saved others”
(Matthew 27:42)
My father carried Agent Orange in his bones.
My mother bore a cancer in her womb.
But, with sweat, he brought forth bread from stones.
She rocked through nights in a sick child’s room
And turned her face to a silent, empty sky.
He cursed the earth, whose dust would be his tomb.
At night, in bed, I’d hear them talk, and cry,
But with the risen sun, they made a bearable life
For my brother and me. Who thought they would die?
I could not command my father, “Stand. Abandon strife
and sin no more.” Or stanch my mother’s flow
With a touch more precise than a surgeon’s knife.
Whence could I save them? I did not know
To save myself. How can I pay what I owe?
— Originally published in The Examined Life and included in Bricolage (Spartan Press, 2022).
Highland
No longer a young man,
I go east from the Gateway Arch,
that monstrous portal to the West,
a monument to destruction and glory,
empire and enslavement, to all the good
and bad my country offers. To me,
the prairie has a sacredness,
the unadorned vistas of the sky
remind me of gods: Zeus,
Azman, even Yahweh, on high.
I’ve come to visit my father,
in a nursing home, in Highland,
with its shuttered church
organ company, microbrewery
on the square, coffee shops, and more,
where my earthly father
has come to slowly die, dissolve,
like morning mist. Each time I visit,
less and less of him is there,
in Highland, Illinois.
I wonder at him, that he even lived.
I know his haunts: the alleys
behind the mill; the linoleum halls
of a now-demolished grade school;
a photo of him, shirtless, in Vietnam.
And now this. His teeth fall out.
He wants me to sue the home.
He tells me the same war stories.
I smile. He’s not happy, but
content, which may be the same.
We don’t hug goodbye. Haven’t
in decades ever touched. He turns up
the TV with reruns of Bonanza.
I watch Highland fade in my mirrors.
I want to cry, to feel the loss.
Rain begins. Heaven cries for me.
— Originally published in Voices and included in Blood, Water, and Stone (Spartan Press, 2026).
Memory of America
My father’s body is the memory of America:
thin limbs; swollen belly; weak and resigned,
stored in an institution away from public sight.
My father’s body is unexploded munitions
buried in a farmer’s field. One day, a plow,
a tire, a foot will find it. We will not hear of that.
My father’s body is an artifact
only academics and clinicians probe
for secrets. They will publish their findings.
My father’s body is a documentary,
in many parts, shown consecutively.
Critics and viewers alike praise it.
My father’s body is a family photo album.
There he is, shirtless, in a bunker near Saigon.
Here my mother, with me, in Illinois.
My father’s body is a relic I contemplate.
He feels himself barely more than an object.
My father’s body is the memory of America.
— Originally published in GAS and included in Blood, Water, and Stone (Spartan Press, 2026)
Winner of the St. Louis Writers Guild 2024 Deane Wagner Poetry Contest
Numbers
The cemetery built upon the river bluffs
covers three-hundred-thirty-one acres of land,
over one-quarter of a million buried there,
since its founding in the year 1863.
Nearly twenty-thousand Union soldiers rest there.
Around one-thousand Confederate men join them.
One monument with three flags marks the Southern dead.
Another stone stands for the 56th Colored.
There’s Private George Hobday, “Medal of Honor” etched
below his name, for brave action at Wounded Knee,
where nearly thirty soldiers died from wounds.
Three-hundred Lakota names are unrecorded.
Many, like me, like to wander among the graves
and do the math of the year born and the year died.
Ah, there is one who died over eighty years old.
Then there is one, twenty, with the years so recent.
I’ve only been once or twice to visit my mom.
She’s in SECTION 1z SITE 755.
The VA will lay my dad on top of her soon.
Someday, they will put me in an expansion site.
My one daughter, my only child, lives miles away.
She may never kneel before my marble headstone
and trace the letters and numbers with fingertips.
Remembrance is not a thing the dead can count on.
— Originally published in 1764: a literary journal.
– – – ssl – – –
Richard Stimac lives in the St. Louis area. He published two books of poetry, Blood, Water, and Stone (Spartan Press, 2026) and Bricolage (Spartan Press, 2022). Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region. He invites you to follow his poetry Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/richard.stimac.poet/.
Micah Liesenfeld is an instructional designer by day and a cartoonist by night, but if you rip off those disguises, you’ll find that he’s a husband and father of two who lives in St. Louis. You can also find him on Instagram @micahnova. Micah is a regular contributor to Supplement St. Louis (and we are still elated to have him).
Lot of stuff in just a few paragraphs, but illuminating. I always wondered how poets operate, how they craft their poems, whether they follow principles or guidelines. Stimac raises unusual questions about the craft of poetry, and finally provokes you by appending five beautiful poems. What should we do with them after what he said?