M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands
This is a follow-up to our current call for submissions prompt about using paradox and negation in poetry. That prompt was inspired by a quite serious non-fiction book. Douglas Hof book
In logic, there are discussions of the "Liar Paradox." If a poet writes, "This sentence is false," it creates a loop where truth leads to falsehood, which in turn leads back to truth. Hof calls this a "strange loop."
They may not have read the book, but many poets utilize the "strange loop" structure of self-reference and recursion.
Wallace Stevens is perhaps the most notable poet associated with this concept. In poems like "The Comedian as the Letter C," he explores "recursive meta-poetics." His work often features a "supreme fiction" — his term for a poem that tries to step outside of itself to describe the world, only to realize that the description is part of the world it is describing. This creates a loop where the "observer" and the "observed" become indistinguishable.
Postmodernist John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" mimics the "tangled hierarchy" of the painting by Parmigianino that it describes. It reflects on the act of reflection itself, with the poet’s voice spiraling through layers of consciousness that often return to the starting point of the gaze.
Randall Jarrell's poem "Eighth Air Force" invokes a poetic version of the liar paradox. By having a character state, "I have lied as I lie now," he creates a logic loop that questions the authenticity of the "I." The statement is true only if it is false, trapping the speaker in a recursive moral knot.
Lyn Hejinian, in her experimental work "My Life," uses a recursive structure to explore the "consciousness of consciousness." The poem is composed of sections that reference each other and their own construction, effectively building a "self" through a linguistic feedback loop.
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