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DAILY SHVITZ

On Difficult Poetry

Michael Weiss

If you translate the good Robert Pinsky's paragraph on the necessary "difficulty" of poetry out of its academician's Guide to Life-speak --

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

-- you have a rough equivalent to the following: "The reader is not a consideration."

Here's a secret shared by poets who write poetry worth reading and remembering: When they read a good poem they don't talk about dissociation of sensibility or even comment on the expert use of caesura or spondee. They say, "That was a bloody good poem."

T.S. Eliot is a briar patch of pretension wherein a few odd roses gasp into existence. Ezra Pound? Not just "difficult," but unintelligible, wrongheaded and scholastically disastrous (his translations of ancient Greek were on par with his politics).

As for the manufacturers of contemporary verse, that collective workshop of rhyme-less, rhythm-less insecurities, Philip Larkin got their number long before they were a number:

“Kingsley [Amis] and I used to read other people’s poems, and seriously planned getting a rubber stamp made – or rather two rubber stamps made, one for each of us – reading ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘What makes you think I care?’”



Michael Weiss

Michael is a contributing editor of Jewcy. His work has appeared in Slate, Gawker, New York, Democratiya, The New Criterion and The Weekly Standard. His blog is Snarksmith.


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BeccaB


Michael -- I'd just forwarded your recent props to Kipling to my father (a big fan, who's had us stay at Naulakha)--and though I enjoy "Barrack-Room Ballads" I also love Wallace Stevens and James Joyce. I have no desire to make a fetish of difficulty for its own sake, but I don't see that as being what Pinsky is doing here...

I can't read that paragraph from Pinsky as saying the reader be damned -- quite the else. As I take it, he's saying that many human beings take pleasure in surmounting various kinds of difficulty (why climb Everest?)--and thus, for readers who like this particular kind of challenge, difficult texts can be a source of pleasure (rather than some sort of sick joke perpetrated by the writer at the reader's expense -- which is how some of my students have tended to regard them). If you like the challenge of making a hole-in-one or dancing on point and I like reading Ulysses, we both enjoy the challenges of difficulty in different realms--and there's nothing wrong with that. But it wouldn't make any sense for me to say that you shouldn't enjoy them because I prefer putt-putt with windmills and a bit of waltzing, and can't see the point of devoting all that time and energy on the green or at the ballet barre.

I certainly wouldn't say that all sorts of literary difficulty are equivalent or are equally beloved by all readers: me, I'll take Gerard Manley Hopkins over Ezra Pound any day. (Though if you put Penmaen Pool up against Sestina: Altaforte or In A Station of the Metro, I think GMH may get smacked down.) But after I've said "that was a bloody good poem," I might well like to have a go at figuring out how Hopkins's "expert use of caesura or spondee" helped to make it so good.