Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us. […] Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level.
Difficulty is perhaps the taproot that makes poetry different from and (dare I say it?) more nourishing than prose. Prose exists to make ideas go down easy. It explains, it contexts with a vengeance. Even the greatest novel does yeoman duty of creating a setting that defines and restricts its characters’ actions; within the setting, the novel tells us the character stood and left the room or peered over the rim of the canyon or whatever; the novel, as a rule, presents motivations in order to explain why characters are in a particular setting and why they do what they do there.
Poetry, lyric poetry especially, tends to set all this aside. Actions are presented as quiddities, without explanation, and even when explanations seem to be present they are equivocal, polyvalent—in short, difficult. If the research referred to above is correct, this difficulty is what brings readers of poetry back to poems again and again. Surely few readers of prose reread even the most poetic prose as frequently poetry readers reread poems. This makes poetry the most durable of forms, the most rewarding, the most satisfying.
In my experience, readers who dislike poetry typically dislike complexity, period. They prefer the reassuring hand of the patient narrator at their elbow, the pleasures of characters they can “identify with”—that is, characters who have been sufficiently explained so that they, the readers, themselves feel explained and clarified.
Poetry can be clear as snowmelt trickling across the tundra, but the story it tells is full of shadows, which tell us something new and different every time we look into them.
*
Philip Booth |
DREAMSCAPE
by Philip Booth
On the steep road
curving to town, up
through spruce trees
from the filled-in canal,
there have been five houses, always.
But when I sleep
the whole left side of the blacktop
clears itself into good pasture.
There are two old horses,
tethered. And a curving row
of miniature bison, kneeling,
each with his two front hooves
tucked in neatly under the lip
of the asphalt. I am asleep.
I cannot explain it. I do not
want to explain it.
hey… just noticed the "notify me" I can check that and NOT have to research the net<br />to see / get ? jeesh…. so doing will surely reduce all of the crap that I go through to "get to the 'gooder' stuff"<br /><br />so… here is the check
for me… it is NOT difficult/easy/// explained-defined/ not explains-not defined…<br />the "Bedrock" for me (mis never the understanding or intelligence that I bring to it<br />or what I am told "what it is" … it is the<br />INTEGRITY <br />of the piece<br /><br />
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: for those legions of your blogfollowers who are yet riveted to this comment stream… kookie what is on the net ! An Ad Reinhardt 1953 essay that is in the book. As I do not differentiate an art piece from a poem.. I read this as if he is also talking about poetry… especially as it has now become ?<br /><br />https://users.wfu.edu/~laugh/painting2/reinhardt.pdf
am enjoying these comments simultaneously immensely and emonstrably…. saw Waiting for Godot on live tv sometime in the 50's (as I recall)…. what impressed me was<br />how much was being done in black and white and how simple the set was… as I remember it through this present fog…. a banged up trash can and a park bench.<br /><br />seemed to be real people speaking real speak in a
If writers don't offer difficulty, they can't offer complexity. I'm not saying that the complexity has to be in the verbal surface; there are many Modernist works that in my opinion are complex on the surface in order to conceal the not very interesting simplicity underneath. (I think, for example, of Robert Coover's fiction.) The difficulty in Stevens is in the meanings, not the
Ed I think I <i>have</i> seen Lahr’s take on Gogo but I can only find an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZrTh-78K2o" rel="nofollow">audio version</a> online which is very familiar-sounding so now I’m not sure. Not my favourite. Nor was I that fond of Zero Mostel’s Gogo. I first saw <i>Waiting for Godot</i> when I was about nineteen. I got up at the crack of dawn to watch an Open
speaking of Waiting for Godot: a few years ao, when Barney Rosset still had his hand/mind/heart in Evergreen he published this of mine<br />http://www.evergreenreview.com/120/ed-baker.html<br /><br />I guess that there are now very few "out there" who know ANYTHING beyond the Cowardly Lion about Bert Lahr ? He was some terrific stage actor…. and more.<br /><br />as for what the reader
Jim,<br /><br />your points are well taken but I suspect there are levels of accessibility open to different readerships: certainly the Olson or Stevens reader won't find any less delight in reading works as multi-layered (and nuanced) as theirs than in reading a more reader-friendly work like <i>Godot</i>. However, Becket's prose can be pretty tough slogging at times.
I think the word ‘difficult’ does poetry no favours. Prose can be difficult too. It’s just that fewer prosers stretch themselves and even fewer readers are willing to commit to a difficult novel when it takes them all their time to read a difficult poem of a dozen lines. I’ve just read <i>The Awakening</i> by Kate Chopin which is not a difficult novel to read—far from it—but it is an ‘involved’
Joe: I appreciate your 'picking up' on "Blown Language". Interesting how I came to use that as a definition of (some of) what I was doing when at Hopkins in 71-72… Things that didn't get into my master's thesis (Okeanos Rhoos on my web-site) became a separate piece here:<br />http://fact-simile.blogspot.com/2010/08/ed-bakers-pointscounterpoints-now.html<br /><br />that
I love the term "blown language," if only because poetry is ultimately about the syncopation of breath. Prose is pretty much ordinary breathing; poetry is a kind of <br />pranayama.
then we, if we do, get to a simultaneous position of<br />points/counterpoints; or, as I called it "Blown Language"<br />which has nothing to do with Lang Po or NoPo although<br />even this point is pointless ? see my prose piece that looks like poetry<br />albeit "concrete" poetry.. the 1971 unexpurgated "Point/Counterpoints"….
I think you're exactly right, Conrad. In fact, I've been working on an essay, which has turned into a rather large balloon full of water that I'm trying to carry across a tightrope, the main argument of which is that we have a deficiency in terms for prose that cause us to misunderstand poetry. We have two terms for what you and I love most: poetry and verse. We know that the former
Joseph,<br /><br />I'll say it's the reason poetry, certainly compared to prose, has always held me spellbound. I love the arcana, endless interrelatedness of parts and sheer beauty of its music (and every poem does sing!) Every poem is the holder of a secret (as Ungaretti once said) and it's the reader's unique privilege to try to unravel it. I'll even go so far as to say