After some literary carousing a while ago, I got into an argument about so-called difficult poetry, which hinged on whose work was more difficult, Tim Lilburn’s or Al Moritz’s. Tim Lilburn had read that night, both had just published collections, and now Moritz’s Sentinel has been shortlisted for this year’s Griffin.
Moot, I hear you call; perhaps, since no one reads it, etc. (Next, stay tuned for Do We Care if Anybody Reads Us?) And in any case, doesn’t all poetry make some difficult demand on the reader or listener? Oblique and figurative, it requires always more—aural attention, deciphering, meta-knowledge, a listening under or between the words, some good stillness to let that listening happen—than the narrative and linear into which we tune by default.
That night at Mitzi’s Sister, this argument, which ma-ay have been well-watered, stumbled around accessibility. The accessibility of poetry is separate from concerns of its marketability—how many people poetry is reaching—but the two get smushed together, as if a batch of easy-peasy poems would suddenly go all CSI. (Will this question, which arises from a capitalist, market- and readership-based quantified evaluation of art, fade as this recession slows us down to fondue parties and reading E.E. Cummings to each other when we can’t afford the cable bill?)
Billy Collins, posterboy for accessibility, has gotten a fair bit of flak for what a Verse magazine blog entitled “The Trouble With Billy Collins,” which article in fact has very little to do with Collins at all. Collins himself, though his own work is not really cavernous enough to be interesting, is not an advocate of simpleton poetry. His mission with Poetry 180 and the Library of Congress poem-a-day program was to gather “a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing—poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate.”
On the surface, no wrong; after all, Collins’s intention, to get students to enjoy poetry rather than tie verse to a chair and beat it until it confesses its meaning, is superficially laudable. Would that the institutionalisers had been similarly treated! When my little brother came home from his high-school English class with an assignment to find a poem, I eagerly cracked out my library. He brought in Seamus Heaney’s “The Skunk”—good for teenagers, we figured, short enough, with only one or two dictionary words, a strong speaker, and funny, with its deadpan wife digging about in the lingerie drawer. Alas, poor Seamus was rejected, by the expletive English teacher, presumably for not being sufficiently posthumous or pentametric.
What gets Collins and his ilk into trouble is the very notion that poems should be gettable and pleasurable, that they should open themselves to the reader, rather than the other way around. We suck, as a species, at dwelling in incertitude. Perhaps the problem is that poetry is being shoehorned into the category of communication, which is increasingly one-way (Lloyd Robertson with the sound off—in—or—out—Twittered inanities to which no one need respond). If signs and signifiers are the only ingredients in poetry, then all those who have access to language should also therefore have access to poetry (especially to wr
iting it, though this is a rant for another time). Have the tools overtaken the creation?
The danger, of course, is that defining poetry as opaque by nature can easily become an excuse for poetry that is just muddy, or which results in what Verse blogger Brian Henry calls the “dull cacophony” of banal, unimaginative descriptions of life experience. Aha! So the problem isn’t poetry, or poetry’s inherent difficulty, or poems that are difficult. It’s bad poetry, and poetry that chooses, if it can’t convince us, to confuse us.
I much prefer Jorie Graham’s apologia, during a recent discussion here in Montréal: by its complication, poetry is the genre that more accurately and usefully reflects the human condition. Like Graham’s work, like Lilburn’s career-long apophatic project, like Moritz’s hairpin intellectual ueys and eviscerating lyric aftershocks, even Cummings, he of economic-slowdown melted-cheese accompaniment above, is the opposite of straightforward, but we understand the illogic so deeply that en entire century shivers at his locomotives and roses.
