Sherry Chandler

Difficulty

Found these two posts of interest in my reading this morning, both on the subject of difficulty. Though these two poets might be characterized as from opposing camps, and though they are talking about two different kinds of difficulty, they are both tackling the question of why poetry is all but disappearing from the public discourse:

Todd Swift on Poetry Is Difficult:

I have long argued for, and tried, in my own small ways, to promote, poetry’s greater cultural relevance. I still believe poetry is the highest art form, maybe even the finest intellectual, if not spiritual, pursuit, alongside philosophy. I am no longer sure poetry is widely sustainable, unless the mainstream public, the media, and the poetry world itself, try harder to work together. There needs to be a moving away from marketing, from reducing everything to sound-bites. The attempt to sell poetry as a “story” the media can “use” means its truer values have been distorted, and the public no longer understands or cares about the art’s richer, subtler worth.

Robert Peake on What Poetry Can Not Say:

There are two kinds of difficulty, as I see it. On the one hand, we have difficulty as a way of saying we require the reader to bring some effort or energy to the poem. Here, the payoff for such effort must be equal or greater to the effort expended. This is the healthy, respectful kind of disregard for one’s reader also known as artistic integrity.

But there is another, more detrimental mode of difficulty where the writer is building walls. Such poems can actually still matter, if the poetic compensation (as in sound, rhythm, and the shimmer of inferred meaning, independent of literal meaning) is enough to carry readers through a sufficiently complex and enjoyable experience independent of the author’s intent. But the practice of enigmatology for its own sake does more harm to the art, frankly, than the sing-song banal. Only good poets get alienated by bad poetry. Everyone gets alienated by insular arrogance. (Just not everyone is brave enough to admit it.)

Peake, in turn, is reacting to this article by Robert Pinsky in Slate, In Praise of Difficult Poetry:

This time, let’s take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less “difficult.” Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy…

So, have we come full circle? By writing in Slate and appearing on The Colbert Report, is Pinsky pandering? Trying to make poetry cool?

I don’t know. I think I’ve fought my way into another paper bag and can’t fight my way out.

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