Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The question of difficulty is one with which I wrestle constantly. I want to communicate in my poems—I can’t imagine writing without the desire to reach someone (nor could Paul Celan, a very “difficult” poet)--but at the same time I don't want to pander, and I don't want to do or say things in the conventional or expected ways. No one should set out to write difficult poetry (that’s just to provoke), any more than one should set out to write easy poetry (that’s just to pander). One should follow the lead and the needs of the poem at hand.

I don't think that any good poet intends to be difficult (or that any good poet intends to be "easy"), but I also think that difficulty is sometimes both unavoidable and necessary when one is trying to get at something complex, to say something that doesn't already have an already available vocabulary (it's usually a bad thing when something does have that conveniently at-hand language), or just when one tries to approach something in a unique and distinctive way, which good poems always try to do. T.S. Eliot said that genuine poetry can communicate before it's understood, and that's certainly been my experience. If one feels the poem, the conviction of its language and its emotions, as I felt “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when I first read it, that can lead to understanding—at least, that's the only reason one would want to understand it, the only reason one would care. It's like the experience of listening to music: we don't necessarily "understand" it, but we immerse ourselves in it and it affects us.

Much of what people say about "accessibility" is very condescending, as if "ordinary people" (whoever they are—certainly not us) are incapable of grasping or appreciating something complex, as if they're too dumb to connect with anything that has any nuance. I don’t think that poetry should be difficult, but I do think that it should be as complex as the world is. Poetry should live up to, enrich and illuminate the world, not simplify or flatten it out, which too many poems of all camps do (and probably always have—despite the perennial narratives of cultural decline, good poetry, real poetry, is a rare thing and always has been).

These days there is too often a cultural leveling, in which the notion of "equality" means that everything must be "equivalent," and all cultural products must appeal to the lowest common denominator—which is also highly patronizing, assuming that "the masses" can neither be interested in nor understand anything complex or challenging. This kind of thinking seems to function largely to displace desires for equality and democracy from the social realm to the aesthetic: a bracketing not everyone can afford. I have heard people assert that writing complex poetry is equivalent to writing in Chaucerian English (as if complexity were something obsolete which we must move past), and that difficult poetry is "unfair to the mental capacities of non-poets." Such condescending attitudes would discourage anyone from trying to read poetry—no one wants to be looked down upon.

The popularity of crossword puzzles, sudoku, video and computer games, and even convoluted television programs like 24 and The Sopranos indicates that people do in fact enjoy mental challenges. But, when people think about poetry (which is not often), and when they think of it as other than Hallmark card verse, there is the assumption that poetry is more difficult than other things (though many television commercials are more difficult to "read" than most poems), that only egghead intellectuals can enjoy or understand it, and that it has no "relevance" to "real life." That "relevance" (or "life," for that matter) could be a much broader category than simple and immediate identification is rarely considered.

21 comments:

Joseph Duemer said...

Is there really "the assumption that poetry is more difficult than other things"? When I look around the culture I sense there is an assumption that poetry is completely irrelevant. I'm not being sarcastic or dismissive here, just giving you my reading of the culture. I'm a poet, so I find this depressing, but that's the way it seems to me. Poetry is such a marginal activity that poets probably just ought to think of themselves as a separate tribe without much relation to the broader culture. Sucks to be us.

Reginald Shepherd said...

Dear Joseph,

I take your point, and have amended the post to take it into account. Both things are true: people think of poetry both as too hard and irrelevant (I think I said this, actually).

Take good care, and thanks for reading and commenting.

peace and poetry,

Reginald

tyrone said...

Reginald,

I'm writing a short lecture for presentation next week at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and part of it includes my take on how New Criticism inadvertently led to the bad teaching of poetry, which only led to its further irrelevance...Otherwise I agree with your argument that difficulty per se is not the issue...It's people's (including most university professors and I'm not excluding English teachers) view of poetry...

Tyrone

Joseph Duemer said...

When I was an undergrad more than thirty years ago, The Waste Land was still considered a Difficult poem. These days, I teach it to non-majors. Times change: specifically, the students in my classes have grown up on jump cuts, er, the ideographic method.

brian (baj) salchert said...

Reginald,

I was here earlier, but after I
left I went to Archambeau's
samizdatblog.blogspot.com where
today he posted something you
should read if you haven't.

About your Prufrock comment:
I know that for me, aside from my
sometimes feeling I was/am like
Prufrock, the sounds of Eliot's
phrasings were what kept me
reading and rereading what he
wrote. Understanding was
secondary. The mention by Joseph
of irrelevance moved me (in
thinking about Eliot) to change
"irrelevance" to "ear relevance".

Mark Scroggins said...

I once had a student practically explode in impatience when the rest of the class was complaining about the allusiveness of "Prufrock" -- "there're more allusions in a single episode of the Simpsons than in the whole poem!" he said. But it's a matter of *what* one alludes to, whether it's old tv shows & pop songs, which make for a kind of comfortable "in-crowd" feel, or "classic" literary texts, which make many readers I know feel inadequate, as if their education has failed them.

There're lots of kinds of difficulties in poetry other than just allusiveness (& I'd love for somebody to come up with a taxonomy someday that I can believe in). There's a kind of deliberate disjunctiveness in which the poem *isn't supposed* to "make sense," and that's part of the sense it makes (I guess) -- which is less interesting to me than moments when poets are thinking at the very edges of their intellects & emotions, and the line of the poem becomes just as tenuous and sometimes convoluted as what's going on in their minds.

I think most readers are simply unused to following written texts that aren't straightforward information-bearing devices, or that don't have clear narratives. It's not that they *can't* -- but they haven't practiced enough. You're absolutely right: getting the hang of it is really no harder than following a multi-plot tv series, or playing your way thru a complex video game. But most video game players & tv watchers are spending multiple hours a week devoted to those media, & turn to poetry (if ever) maybe once or twice a year: it's no wonder that they find it sometimes bewildering, just as it's no wonder that I've gotten wiped out in about 30 seconds on the one or two occasions that I've picked up a xBox controller.

Joan Houlihan said...

The fascination of what's difficult can be applied in many places (my scientific household is endlessly fascinated with things like watching how light is refracted through a glass, the properties of objects, how something works when it's not working, and, yes, definitely, video games—those enormously difficult things requiring prodigious powers of memory and analytical skill), while I am fascinated with the difficulty of interpretation in all art forms, especially poetry and film. There are those people who are fascinated with difficulty no matter where and how it appears (I think of it as a childlike trait, and people who remain fascinated with figuring everything out, or trying to, are very rare). One of my children, at the age of four, once spent a good portion of many days, trying to discern when day turned to evening, when that line was crossed, pulling a chair up to the window and simply waiting and watching. It started with wanting to actually see the streetlights come on, not just be aware that they were on, then turned into the broader desire to see that line crossed between day and evening. There's tenacity in that kind of fascination, and I think of it as the more scientific brand—the drive for and pleasure in pursuing a difficulty—and, if it broadens, sometimes for years or a lifetime.

For poets, the realm of what's fascinating is not really the poem, at first, but the sound of words, the color of words, the possible meanings of words, the powerful emotions and ideas that are both hidden and revealed through words. There was nothing so fascinating to me as a child than almost understanding what adults were saying, sometimes feeling lots of emotion behind the words, but not understanding all of the words. The rhythms, the syntax, the sound and pacing---all had their own fascination (I like Frost's idea of the poem's appeal like listening to half-muffled voices through a closed door—or something like that)—and all were part of the bigger mystery, the mix that made something spoken feel real. That sense of "finding out" something important extended to learning how to read and it seemed to me that words were the absolute keys to it all. I think there is fascination with difficulty when it seems that there is a secret to be revealed once the difficulty is overcome, when there is a payoff to the persistence of waiting and watching for day to become evening.

This is why it's hard to accept the point of view that a poem is not meant to mean (aren't words meant to mean?), or can mean anything at all, though I do love the idea of taking pleasure in a poem's other attributes (I have just read Longenbach's "The Art of the Poetic Line" so am fresh off the idea that maybe meaning isn't the gold at the end of the rainbow after all, and maybe the rainbow is enough—wait a minute, I think someone said that already ;-).

Thanks for this topic, Reginald, always worth thinking and talking about.

MR said...

Hi, Reginald -

Do you know Allen Grossman's Against Our Vanishing? He makes a distinction I think rather valuable. If you'll indulge a longish quotation: "The authority of poetry has as its good outcome the arresting of the attention of the reader even before intelligibility has been established. The poems that are read today in public & published in the press have almost universally withdrawn from the habit of making claims upon readers. Our audiences have been conciliated to the point where they are no longer instructed. Poets, because they so profoundly seek social honor, have ceased to engage in the risky business of instructing. Poetry that pleases by immediate recognitions, but does not instruct by the setting of hard tasks, seems to me poetry that is treasonous with respect to its own authority.... Among the 'difficulties' presented by the powerful & canonic poems of our culture, I discriminate those difficulties which can be mended by learning. Much of the scholarly response to High Modernism has been a quest for sufficient information to recapitulate the referential matrix of poems like the Cantos & The Waste Land. Where information can redress ignorance & enable response, I feel no meaningful difficulty has been found. Difficulty such as I regard as important for the civilization arises where the reference of the poem is toward facts of experience which are not normally or perhaps not at all susceptible to representation in language.... The difficulties which I think the poet must solicit, with whatever consequence for the response of his reader, are just those situated upon the business of confronting either the inherent limitations of our social language, with respect to reference, or the conventional limitations of our poetic procedures, with respect to the range of experience & the range of human cases they can take in. It is this latter sort of difficulty I would regard as not merely sanctioned, but obligated by the ethical implications of the poetic work."

Best,
Michael Robbins

Alfred Corn said...

Provocative, Reginald, and the first response is that Yeats's phrase "the fascination with what's difficult" meant difficulty in =creating= a work that required extreme skill on the part of the artist. It's not about difficulty for the audience. You and Ashbery have both said that you weren't trying to be difficult. Eliot, on the other hand, admitted that he =was= trying and that his effort was an inevitable response to the fragmentation and anarchy of the modern era. I question whether the early 20th century was more disordered than, say, 14th century Europe, or Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War, or France during the years 1789-1815---periods that nevertheless failed to produce works as disjunctive and unparaphrasable as =The Waste Land=.
But if you didn't know when you first began publishing that many readers would have trouble understanding your poems, you clearly do now, otherwise the blog entry wouldn't have been written. And if that knowledge is a cause of distress, one remedy is to bring the texture of poetic discourse closer to the conventions of day-to-day communication. I don't myself consider it correct for you to feel much regret if your poetry doesn't reach as many readers as, say, Billy Collins's does. The pleasure fans take in your work isn't posited on the extent of your audience. Very few music listeners can understand the music of Webern; that is no diminishment of Webern. We've all heard De Kooning dismissed as meaningless daubs of paint; but De Kooning isn't being judged. Still, in my view, it's more honest to admit to being difficult, and partly by intention, than making a disingenuous claim that the goal was always to be clear as a bell. And if that means belonging to an elite, well, we can't have everything. We can't be De Kooning and Rockwell both. And don't forget the option of being an equivalent to Matisse or Hopper.

Reginald Shepherd said...

Thanks to all for your comments. I appreciate Michael Robbins' pointing me toward that passage in Grossman, who is one of my touchstones as a poet and as a critic. I've reread Summa Lyrica several times, but haven't tended to return to Against Our Vanishing, largely because of the presence of Mark Halliday, who seems rather like the straight man in a comedy duo.

With regard to Alfred Corn's comment, I am quite familiar with the Yeats poem from which I take my title. I was repurposing it to my own ends.

I am aware that many people find my poetry difficult, but I was not being disingenuous when I wrote that I don't set out to be difficult. That would just be silly. I write in the way that it is given me to write, and I don't regret it. I do try to be as clear as I can within the bounds of the poem's demands. I certainly always intend that the elements, the building blocks of meaning, be as clear as possible. As Marianne Moore wrote, one should be as clear as one's own natural reticence permits; as her own work demonstrates, that leaves a lot of wiggle room.

I am quite happy with my poems ("Ariel was glad he had written his poems"); I wouldn't want to write Billy Collins' poems or (heaven forbid) Ted Kooser's. My quarrel is with a culture that denigrates, marginalizes, and/or trivializes anything complex, anything nuanced, anything that demands sustained attention and sustained thought. This attitude keeps away people who, if they actually read my work, and other "difficult" poetry, might well connect with it.

I thought that I had made all this clear, but I fear you have misread the thrust (to be phallocentric) of the piece, which was a strong defense of difficulty.

Take care, all, and thanks for reading and commenting.

Reginald

Alfred Corn said...

Thanks for clarifying, Reginald. What I wonder is whether there's any point defending difficulty at this point. It clearly has strong support in all of the arts right now. Meanwhile, the one indefeasible defense of any approach to the making of art is, "It's what I want to do."

Curious to hear, on the other hand, what it is you find so repugnant in an accessible poet like Ted Kooser. It's just as revealing to hear reasons why an artist =dislikes= one aesthetic as why he likes another.

MR said...

Yes, I usually skip over Halliday's side of things in Against Our Vanishing. He is good at drawing out poets though: viz. his interview w/ Bidart at close of In the Western Night.

Btw, Reginald, as someone whose name ends in s, I must cheekily protest yr leaving off the terminal possessive s from proper names ending in same. What manuals of style we have agree: plural nouns, no s; proper names, yes s. Sssssss.

--mr

Steve Fellner said...

Hi Alfred,

Since I am insignificant, I have the privildhe of being obnoxious, because good manners won't do anything for me, since I'm doomed to receive nothing, which is fine, so I'm going to intercept your question that you asked Regnald and answer it myself, pretending it's for me.

I hope Reginald forgives me for doing such a thing, but I have an answer, and because I have a limited number of things to say I feel I should take advantage of the few times I have something to say.

This is my problem with Ted Kooser first his work has already been done by better poets. I'd group him with someone like Wendell Berry )who's aesthetically conservative and politics are occasionally dubious, but his heart is in the write place and has actually taken the time to pretty agressively and comprehensively think out the role of the farmer and his role in modern society), but unlike Wendell Berry who has written good even if dated essays about his art and his poety, there's a self-satisfaction in Kooser. His plainspoke narratives often end with easy wit or a false lyrical leap that signals Poety and for me worse a self-satisfaction, usually a false humility that I think appeals to a lot of people because of its sweet sentimental contentment, but i actually think is a self=congratulatory i'm not going to investigate this narrative or line of inquiry much further because i'm thoroughly self-satsfied.

I think a lot of the poems he puts on his website are emulations of this mindset and bore me...i rarely can read them through to the end and definitely, rarely want to read them more than once...

as oppsed to someone like lucille clifton whose poems are plainspoken but line breaks and word choices encourage multiple readings...it's too bad anthologists are obsessed with her weaker poems like homage to my hips which are sentimental and unsatisfying...her political and biblical poems are so fun though...

ted kooser has obviously inspired people like carl dennis and billy collins who have the same self-satisfaction...

i much prefer someone like richard jackson or david kirby (if we're talking about White Male Poets or even if we're not) who are indulgent in useful ways. i care about the middles of the poems, they have a reason to be there, unlike dennis and collins who just want to show off their High Concept and their clever (and for me often annoying closure, end)

with much affection
steve fellner

with much respect,
steve fellner

Reading the District said...

i suppose, no, scratch that, i completely understand the possibility of difficulty. as a result, i've wanted to examine things in my own poetry as differently as possible, in as many ways as possible.

but what if it isn't, er, possible? what if that kind of language isn't available to a poet; where it's not necessarily his choice to speak plainly and allows him(her)self a clear line of narrative? will that make the poem any less difficult, or will it just be written off as "easy poetry?"

i love "difficult poetry" as much as the other, but also love a plain-spoken poem more than anything in the world. how does one reconcile those differences in writing? can you? i think so. dunno how, but i think so...

Steven Fama said...

Dear Reginald,

You write:

"The popularity of crossword puzzles, sudoku, video and computer games, and even convoluted television programs like 24 and The Sopranos indicates that people do in fact enjoy mental challenges."

Allow me to suggest that you're forgetting that all these are mental challenges with -- generally speaking -- a certain, definite resolution. Ultimately, the crossword puzzle or sudoku has AN ANSWER: no ambiguity or loose ends.

And that's how many (most?) like their literature, and their poetry. It's a big part of why, for example Sue Grafton outsells Faulkner, and Mary Oliver outsells John Olson.

John K said...

Reginald, greetings. Have you seen some of the essays on "The New Lyric" in the most recent (January 2008) issue of PMLA? There's some interesting material there, a good deal of which touches upon the ideas you articulate in your post.

Don Share said...

I often suspect that, as Vendler says, "'Accessibility' needs to be dropped from the American vocabulary of aesthetic judgment if we are not to appear fools in the eyes of the world." (Though there are plenty of other things we do to make that happen, obviously.)

As Geoffrey Hill famously put it, according to Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian - "public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not."

Don Share said...

Forgive me for repeating things I've said over on Harriet, but these passages from the exchange between Harriet Monroe & Hart Crane published in Poetry magazine back in 1926 also come to mind:

"... as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem...

This may sound as though I merely fancied juggling words and images until I found something novel, or esoteric; but the process is much more predetermined and objectified than that. The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past."

Phanero Noemikon said...

[An English formation, of which the ending -cult is not etymologically regular: cf. L. difficil-is, F. difficile. It has been regarded as deduced from the n. difficult-y; and it may have arisen under the joint influence of difficul (see prec.) and difficulty. It appeared earlier than the adoption of difficile from French, which it has also outlived.]

d'iffy cult(y)

What is difficult, and what constitutes a cult of the difficult?

I'd rather see the poetic equivalent of say a problem
in non-linear dynamics or
knot theory than the equivalent
of 3 kids on a corner pointing
up? That's not really true either,
because iconically the 3 kids looking up is essentially what led to the creation of non-linear dynamics in the first place..
Most of these distinctions are quite facile in language, and politically motivated, political in the sense of ego.

See spot run

as a proteomics event frame

is scarcely anymore
or any less complicated
than

Grampus succor such charge's
door light

Poetry or Art
are in no way
separated from
the biological substrate
so pooring hogwash on hogwash
to find out what hogwash
washes out
seems utterly piggish
and

of the trough
so to speak..

but then
that's a reading

ontologically
it all sort of gets
flattened out

into a beautiful
diagrammatic

the diagrammtic
field
to the field of affect
has sort of the same relation
the fates have
to the gods

the gods are the passion
and the paradox of affect
and the fates

feed the lacemaker

the fates seem superior
and just more "cool"
in the end
but then that's the
dog's nose on the window

wind

O

John Gallaher said...

I've said this to people myself many times, but I think I'd like to hear more from you on:

"One should follow the lead and the needs of the poem at hand."

We all just kind of nod at that, usually, but more and more I'm wanting it to be fronted up a bit.

s said...

喜餅禮盒 喜餅價格 訂婚禮盒 訂婚喜餅
素食月子餐 飛梭雷射 柔膚雷射 獸醫師 創業鞋之澡堂 洗鞋子 洗包包加盟彌月禮盒 彌月禮 玻尿酸 皮膚科 皮膚科診所 肉毒桿菌 肉毒桿菌瘦臉 脈衝光 除斑 Flex PCB PCB Electronic PCB 衝孔網 菱型網 不鏽鋼 壯陽 成人用品春藥 壯陽藥品 持久 手工水餃 中華湯包 mini usb 催情 增大 模具廠 104法拍網 信義房屋 房屋買賣 台北法拍屋 塑膠射出成型 模具 Odm 塑膠射出模具 Oem代工廠 塑膠射出 塑膠射出廠 模具設計 Precision Mold加盟創業 冷凍宅配 宅配美食 Light guide panels Plastic Products Mold design 沖孔網