The poems and interviews in the latest Shenandoah eviscerated me (in a good way, as opposed to the cockney slang “gutted” or some form of seppuku). The following portion of an interview with Claudia Emerson particularly resonated with me:
Sarah Kennedy: Two terms, “accessibility” and “difficulty,” crop up in discussions of current poetry so frequently that it sometimes seems that a poet can only attain one of these. What are your thoughts about the issue of accessibility and the potential readerships of contemporary poetry?
Claudia Emerson: One of my first loves in poetry was Robert Frost, and I was inspired early on by his deceptive simplicity. Instead of “accessibility,” we might also aspire for “clarity” and then strive for, instead of “difficulty,” “complexity.” If we care about readers and all (and not just those in the academy), we have to give them a way into the poem. And I think we need to remember that clarity does not preclude depth. If our language is precise, our imagery clear, our metaphors original and well crafted, then we can indeed create poems that will reward a listener on being heard for the first time and also replay the astute close reader. I am willing to work pretty hard at [here I assume she means reading, rather than writing] a poem–but only one that eventually repays my rigorous attention to it.
Poetry can be particularly vulnerable to the kind of experiment that deliberately sacrifices meaning, for one example, to explore language as unstable and untrustworthy; the poetry then proves that–but of course such poetry’s continued existence needs its accompanying criticism (or dissertation or panel presentation)–and I would suggest that the criticism (or the “explanation”) becomes too essential a part of the poetry since without it, certain kinds of poems are bells without tongues.
Thanks to the Poetry Daily newsletter for first pointing out a portion of this excerpt to me.
18 Comments
robert,
i think this hits on the only major qualm i’d always had with avant garde forms — that a critical education/understanding is required for appreciation. this always seemed like the reading experience once removed to me.
however, i do enjoy the pushing of limits and comfort zones in this sense. i do like the idea of readers at any skill level taking nothing for granted.
i’ve started to see this as a bipartisan political situation, where i appreciate the moderation provided by the diametrical relationship. i’d hate to see either pole run away with things.
It’s always a balance, isn’t it? Every poem has to have its own existence, but all poems aspire to commentary. And because poetry by definition bends the practices of ordinary speech, the practice of poetry in general tends toward distortion & paly with convention.
Thanks, A.D. I think the most timeless writing always accommodates readers on many levels, the most fundamental being some delight in language and its intangibles – musicality, shades of meaning, and of course Booth’s “Precious Nonsense.”
That we’ve somehow devolved into what I agree are rightly called partisan camps of accessible versus complex seems to betray a false dichotomy borne out of hazards free verse. Still, poets like Frost (albeit a poet of mostly blank, not free verse) remains an iconic example that dispels the myth of dichotomy.
P.S. You aren’t related to e.e. cummings, by chance? I thought the tendency to play loose with capitalization might run in the family…
But should we really aspire to commentary, Joe? Did Whitman? Did Frost? Yet the ushered us into the contemporary voice.
I think it’s deeply hazardous to work backward from criticism to craft. Inspired writing not so much demonstrates as dispels most taxonomies as false. Since the academy is retrospective by definition, and since the contemporary voice lends itself to so many difficulties of subjective interpretation, I wonder if the partisanship between complex and accessible hasn’t been generated by murdering our poems in dissection, then incorrectly assuming we can sew our discoveries back into something equally profound.
I think I may have just coined a counter-phrase to McPoem: the stitched-together academic Frankenpoem.
well, i once worked with a woman who told me she was cummings’ niece. (she didn’t have nice things to say about the man.)
i do share his birthday, however.
Robert, Whitman so aspired to commentary that he reviewed his own books. And he hung like glue to the few sentences Emerson wrote about his work. Poetry is not pure. Nor should it be. Most of the American poetry written these days, especially that coming out of MFA programs, is boring because it believes it should aspire to purity & (gasp!) should never aspire to commentary. Poetry wouldn’t even exist as a social practice without (formal & informal) commentary. Purity, bah!
And of course you know I write the above in the most generous & cheerful spirit possible.
Joe, I have yet to experience anything but cheerfulness & generosity from you. It is refreshing.
I can imagine Whitman appreciating Emerson’s insights into his work. But I think there is a difference between aspiring to the attentions of an appreciative audience and aspiring to be heavily glossed by the academy. The latter lends itself to what I believe to be a very dangerous form of self-consciousness, where the merits of the work rest solely in A.D. rightly called “the reading experience once removed.”
..and are also known by your initials. Spooky.
William Shakespeare might have a thing or two to add to the “a critical education/understanding” of poetry to be understood. The assumptions in that way of thinking are obvious and dangerous.
David Mamet said, “The difference between entertainment and art is accessibilty and necessity. Which I think sums up my thinking on the poem and its set aside month of recognition. I too am a fan of Frost and he influenced me greatly. Shakespeare, however, had the most profound effect on me personally.
He broke down barriers and opened the gates for the common people. I feel art evolves and with it it carries the “DNA” of future peoples and artists.
Here’s to National Give The Art Back To The People month.
“Here’s to National Give The Art Back To The People month.” The “NGTABTTPM”
Now that’s a month (or a year) I could get behind!
Peace.
Yes, and the acronym just rolls off the tongue…
Thanks for stopping by.
I was thinking the same thing. It’d be okay on a t-shirt but trying to explain it may prove difficult.
Robert,
Methinks I’ll add you to my Echoing Voices…Those on my sidebar, not those in my head.
Peace,
Thanks! Just remember – if the voices in your head say, “I am Robert Peake” – they’re lying. I’m out here!
If they say “I am Robert Peake”, I’ll consider myself lucky to not have them say, “I am Caesar”, or “I am Karl Rove”, or “Genghis Khan”.
It’s when they all start standing up saying, “I am Spartacus” that I know I’ve let them watch too many movies.
…wow are we off topic.
So much talk (much of it self-flattering), condescension, and competitive on-the-sleeve “erudition” about not being those;
So little communication.
Over 40 years and I’m still trying to overcome the academic.
So much round-about unadmitted effort to “figure out” the “game,” the “gimmicks”.
To paraphrase bobby d.:
“Twenty years of schoolin’!?/
“Put me on the [night] shift!”
Poetry is not anti-intellectual; but it is not an intellectual exercise.
One does not, during the writing, ask such questions as, “Is this ‘complex’ enough? Does it sufficiently baffle the reader?”
One writes, as truthfully and accurately as one can, and the “complexity” takes care of itself.
A poem “is”; it is “zeroing-in,” not a theory “about”.
A poem is a verb — the result of visceral action. All the “critical” “evaluation” and “analysis” come after the fact — if at all.
I recall a poem I wrote decades ago (“On a Beautiful Morning with the Sun Out”), in/with which I strove to be as open, “accessible,” clear and obvious, as possible — to, in a word, _give_ the _experience_, rather than an “artifact” “about” the experience.
I struggled to leave out _all_ potentially misunderstood extranea — “complexity”.
Decades later, not having read it in at least ten years, I reread it — and was stunned at the emotional complexities in it; complexities I had not been aware of at the time, let alone intended to include.
“Accessible”? Yes. Of “clarity”? Without question. “Complex”? Unavoidably.
It’s not that complicted:
Write honestly and truthfully, accurately, and let the head-gamers worry about the presumed differences between “complexity” and “difficulty” — about what degree of arrogant insularity/”complextiy”/”difficulty”/blah-blah-blah must be consciously, deliberately “built in” to “transform” a piece of writing from prosaic to “poetry”.
About what is “necessary” to make one’s poems “superior” to those against whom one insecurely measures oneself, and with whom one competes in running perplexed circles around even oneself.
Stop trying to be a “poet,” or to convince others — but especially oneself — that one is a “poet”. Strive instead — in _all_ things — to _feel_ that one is not a fraud.
All else? 97-plus per cent of “literary criticism” is a self-involved cottage industry irrelevant to “literature,” and to which “literature” is irrelevant. Shopsters “talking shop” with shopsters.
By contrast, being is not a career, and a verb cannot be taught.