Here’s a test for the GRE:
Bad is to Accessible as
Good is to ____________.
Thanks to one of my longtime favorite etymology resources (besides the expensive OED, which I still don’t own), here are the antonyms of synonyms and synonyms of antonyms for “accessible” and related words–i.e. some possible opposites of “accessible” to consider:
-
incomprehensible
inexplicable
unclear
unintelligible
dark
obscure
enigmatic
puzzling
unfathomable
lost
missed
Sound like some of the stuff you’ve sat through at dive-y cafe open mics? Sound like some of the stuff you’ve sat through written by perpetual intellectuals with little life experience? Sound like some of the stuff you’ve sat through by the most defended, guarded, insecure members of your writing workshop?
Based on this little bit of research, I have a new theory about why people sometimes write this way. Think of the people that write these poems. What do they want you to think about them–not their work–but them? That they are, in fact, enigmatic, lost, dark. They wear poetry like clothing (a beret, say) and write to be considered a writer. That you don’t understand gives them a sense of power, and that you are afraid to admit it gives them more.
By making art about the artist, rather than the work itself, we can so quickly loose sight of the audience and the most powerful possibility of artistic expression: to communicate. Next time you are about to choose the word “accessible” to dismiss someone’s poetry as simplistic or trite (which are better words, if that’s really what’s going on)–I implore you to consider all the antonyms above. Is that what you want to be encouraging in poetry?
28 Comments
Sorry … again with the inadvertently disabled comments. Bad blog! Bad!
Does anyone actually use this word to disparage any one else’s poetry? I’ve never heard it. I know poets who champion accessibility, but their poetry is attacked because it is superficial, not because it is easy to read per se. After all, many people who hate Billy Collins like the perfectly accessible work of poeets like Kenneth Koch, Joseph Ceravolo, Ted Berrigan, William Carlos Williams, William Bronk, and Robert Creeley–and many more.
The issue is not that poetry is easy to understand or accesssible, but that it doesn’t offer enough to the reader. A flat free-verse lyric in unexceptional language offering up a banal personal experience might be accessible, but what makes it poetry?
Here to say I agree with you.
Collin Kelly thinks Jorie Graham is responsible for giving accessibility a bad name, though from what little I know of her work, it seems fairly accessible to me. And I don’t mean that as an insult.
My argument that accessibility is not a bad (and dare I say it — even a good) quality does not mean I think it automatically engenderrs good writing. I think Michael Wells put it well on his blog when he described the relationship between poet and reader as mutual. Far too often, I feel like poets are dropping their end of the deal. Frankly, I see a lot more writing about banal personal experience that is inaccessible than stuff that is easy to understand. The mundane, transcended, can make brilliant poetry. But by definition banal is a pretty hard starting point.
So what makes Collins the target of derision that does not exist in the work of other poets you list? (Say “accessibility” and I’ll punch you in your overpaid nose.)
Banality.
I think “banality” is too general. It’s subjective. What I find banal, another is passionate about.
Liked this post.
Cute.
Define “banality.”
Maybe I’m way too plugged in to the poetry world, but there is a movement of poets out there who use “accessibility” as a derogative term…and Billy C. and Ted K. ususally get the brunt of this. There are many poets who believe Billy and Ted are “dumbing down” poetry. Jorie Graham’s work has gone from being fairly accessible to more “enigmatic”…if that’s what you want to call it. Jorie has lately been championing poetry that’s more challenging to readers. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it would appear her definition of challenging and accessible do not jive.
Thanks for chiming in, Collin.
I complain all the time about the dumbing down of poetry, but I would never say the problem is that this dumbed-down poetry is too “accessible.” Show me a single citation for this usage which you claim is so common.
Define banality? I looked it up in the dictionary and the definition I found was “Billy Collins.”
Was there a photo as well?
I ruined the joke. It should have been, “I looked up ‘banality’ in the dictionary and found a photo of Billy Collins.”
Try again — Billy Collins and WB Yeats walk in to a bar…
I believe it was Donald Justice who claimed that poetry without obscurity and hidden meaning was both frivilous and and trivial.
Have you forgotten Harold Bloom’s famous attack on the accessible…not to mention any other modern poet who might write with a mulitcultura, feminist or queer sensibility?
JD McClatchy famously struck out against Adrienne Rich’s guest editing of BAP for being full of nothing but “clutter and cliche.”
When Mark Halliday reviewed David Kirby’s “The House of Blue Lights,” he dubbed the accessibility of it “ultra talk,” and praised it for the humor, etc. Then, David Graham in Valparaiso Review bizarrely takes Halliday to task for promoting this type of poetry.
Stephen Dobyns…who likes accessible poetry…took a swipe at Jorie in The Courtland Review, which quoted Jorie’s rapturous defense of the difficult:
“…the motion of the poem as a whole resisted my impulse to resolve it into ’sense’ of a rational kind. Listening to the poem, I could feel my irritable reaching after fact, my desire for resolution, graspable meaning, ownership. It resisted. It compelled me to let go. The frontal, grasping motion frustrated, my intuition was forced awake. I felt myself having to ‘listen’ with other parts of my sensibility, felt my mind being forced back down into the soil of my senses. And I saw it was the resistance of the poem—its occlusion, or difficulty—that was healing me, forcing me to privilege my heart…”
Steve Kowit’s essay “The Mystique of the Difficult Poem” pretty much names all the names. I could go on and on, but I’m tired, Robert.
Thanks, Collin. Get some rest.
I’m sure you know the Graham is quoting and paraphrasing Keats’ famous letter on “negative capability.” A defense of the difficult is not the same as a negation of accesssibility. Does Bloom really use that word to attack the Rich selection? I thought he hated it for other reasons. After all, Bloom is no friend to the avant-garde.
I know for a fact that Mark Halliday actually likes accessible poetry. His own, in fact, is quite “accessible” by anyone’s standards. He is fairly conservative on this issue.
Donald Justice’s poetry is pellucid. I very much doubt that he would have said that poetry without obscurity is “frivolous.”
Get your facts straight. Nobody really attacks poetry simply for being “accessible.” They do attack the idea of accessibility as a desideratum, which is quite different.
Given we’re now sixteen comments deep on this one: good, bad, and indifferent — I can only assume we’ve hit a nerve. If I haven’t already made it abundandly clear, I’d just like to point out my primary source is my own subjective experience. I feel no need to cite MLA references. Hell, I (mis-)spell things aurally sometimes. The point is, this is a blog — and I feel fine about putting forward topics for exploration without publishing an appendix full of back matter. That we can expore this and choose to says something about the medium and the power, purpose, and niche it fills that large press runs do not.
That said, I will say that I object to attacks on accessibility as a desirable quality in writing as much as I object to people couching attacks on accesibility in poetry in other terms (pellucid, anyone? — great word, by the way). I still stand by the claim that the purpose of writing is to communicate, and failing that the writer has failed. That doesn’t mean you have to communicate prosaic ideational concepts; semblance and wisp is equally important. Nor do you have to use only fifth-grade English. But if the experience remains locked half within your psyche and half on the page, and only you and a few of your drinking buddies have the secret key to unlock it, the poem has missed a much bigger mark. Poetry is what happens inside the person experiencing the poem. Not the one writing it.
What if they gave a reading and nobody got it?
You make a statement and can’t back it up. That’s all I’m saying. NOBODY attacks accesibility per se, as you claim. Most intelligent readers of poetry, however, realize there is some necessity for “enigma,” which you seem to confuse with the merely “incomprehensible.” You think a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms is an “etymological” resource. It is not. You use clichés like “abundantly clear” with no sense of irony. You confuse a demand for clarity and precision in writing with some sort of academic pedantry.
John, there is absolutely no need for enigma in poetry, and the fact that you use one one of the antonyms from my post sort of weakens your argument that an examination of words via the dictionary is not a legitimate way to understand what we are (and are not) talking about here. Poems meant as puzzles weaken and dilute the possibilities of the art far more than poems that are banal.
Thanks, Jenni, and thanks for stopping by.
Thanks, Patry. And thanks for stopping by.
Thanks for reading my essay, but either I wasn’t sufficiently clear, or else someone has rather completely misconstrued what I wrote. In any case, I do not take Mark Halliday to task for his “accessibility” in the essay mentioned from *Valparaiso Poetry Review*. I’m on Halliday’s side in this specious argument, if sides need to be taken.
David Graham
billy collins takes his work from other people. he puts it into his own poems and calls it good. does anyone know who he took the lines of litany from?
Collins’s use of two lines from the Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon at the beginning of “Litany” is called an epigraph. It sets forward a theme, or, in this case, proposes to take another poet’s idea in a different direction.
The New York Time gave some treatment to this poem in 2002:
http://tinyurl.com/2djt7r
I must ask: did you come here to discuss accessibility in poetry? Or to try to get someone else to do your Google-ing for you?
I like the challenge of a tough poem. An art I’ve got to work for. An art that reveals more than what I could derive from a prolonged trip to the supermarket or sitting at home on my la-z-boy contemplating the world. If I wanted a quick giggle or a shallow cry I’d merely click on day-time television and have a go with the soaps. I crave philosophy. The profundity to elevate my spirit, to transcend my mind to knowledge of existence that’s capable of quivering me. After having immersed myself in poetry of that caliber, pieces from contemporary writers such as Billy Collins seem child’s play. I read a poem of his, which I do on occasion, and immediately I feel a delightful warmth… but seconds later am overcome by a sense of mental laziness, as if I’ve cheated my synapses of the expansion and growth it so desires to stay within the shallow comforts of my phsychological zone.
I appreciate that you speak from the authority of your own experience. It is indisputable, and resonates with me in its way. I like Claudia Emerson’s idea that “instead of ‘accessibility,’ we might also aspire for ‘clarity’ and then strive for, instead of ‘difficulty,’ ‘complexity.’” I’m not sure these words fit all poems, but it seems a more appropriate and balanced direction.
And oh yes, as for the previous Rebecca comment, I believe T.S. Elliot, indisputably one of our most difficult poets, said it best: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
Excuse me, *T.S. Eliot (I’ve been adding that extra L sing grade school for some odd reason)