Friday 1 March 2013

My encounters with difficult poetry

I don't suspend disbelief very willingly. I like to stay close to the text. If there's something I don't understand I don't like skimming over it until I find something I do understand. When evaluating a poem I don't edit away the inconvenient mysteries. I'm prepared to blame the poet, even call their bluff. Consequently I struggle with some poetry, and read books that attempt to explain it to me. Amongst the books that analyse poems are

Where these sometimes fail for me is even when they can decode a difficult phrase, they don't explain why a simpler phrase wasn't used instead, or why a more obvious interpretation is discounted.

I also read theory and articles, mostly to shake me out of my habits -

Occasionally I write articles to help me collect together what I've learnt

Then there's the poetry itself. Sometimes I just give up. Elsewhen I write about the problems I have with particular books, trying to provide details about where my gaps in understanding are. The posts below are amongst my most popular, as if readers enjoy watching me expose my ignorance -

I suspect some of my troubles are caused by my lack of awareness of factors that affected the poet, though becoming aware of these factors doesn't always solve everything

  • Maybe there are unknown aims that compromise my view of the poem. If I only see this drawing as a rabbit looking left I might criticise the execution, not realising that it's a duck looking right too. If I then notice the duck and point out that the duck's not very good either, the artist might respond by saying that accuracy of either image isn't the point. And they'd be right, but if accuracy doesn't matter one way or the other, the artist might just as well be more accurate in order to placate people who judge by measuring the realism. Or is the artist's technique lacking? (it's my drawing, and mine certainly is). A poem, like a picture, can do more than demonstrate an idea - it can also fulfil other aims. The criticisms of the piece might still be valid even if the critic missed the "main point" - why should the main point be the only one?
  • Maybe the poem's constrained by a form that's hard to notice (it's an acrostic, or an N+7 piece, for example).
  • Maybe the poem's a reaction to something - the poet's previous style, or a prevailing fashion. This might explain the poem (and its historical or personal importance), but doesn't justify its contemporary value as a poem. An old poem rebelling against end-rhyme loses much of its force nowadays. Besides, there are good and less good ways of reacting, however worthy the cause.

7 comments:

  1. Before this post, I'd never heard
    of Mr Prynne. Not a word. Now
    I have and my world is no
    richer.

    However, I had fun cutting and pasting one of his works, and am convinced that's what he was doing in the first place and it was all a joke.

    NIBBLE SONG trio

    No gain by night in
    the passage of rowling
    sound: the crystal tube
    is pasture for the moment
    ploughs up thoughtful
    acid lines, is cold.
    The glass sweats out and
    falls by its weight and by
    the mountain path, it
    glint snaps them, di-
    morphic marble. We sit
    up the sloping path to
    the kiosk, icy newsprint.
    White butterflies in
    the sun, dip too close to the
    table and the
    fields, in the sun
    round by the lower
    light and look out slowly.


    The glass sweats out and
    falls by its weight and by
    the mountain path, it
    is pasture for the moment.
    No gain by night in
    the passage of rowling
    sound: the crystal tube
    ploughs up thoughtful
    acid lines, is cold.
    Up the sloping path to
    the kiosk, icy newsprint.
    White butterflies in
    the sun, dip too close to the
    table and the
    glint snaps them, di-
    morphic marble. We sit
    round by the lower
    fields, in the sun
    light and look out slowly.

    White butterflies in
    the sun, dip too close to the
    the mountain path, it
    ploughs up thoughtful
    falls by its weight and by
    the glass sweats out and
    the passage of rowling
    acid lines, is cold
    round by the lower
    fields, in the sun
    light and look out slowly.
    No gain by night in
    sound: the crystal tube
    the kiosk, icy newsprint.
    is pasture for the moment.
    Up the sloping path to
    table and the
    glint snaps them, di-
    morphic marble. We sit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Before this post, I'd never heard of Mr Prynne." - his name's a byword for difficult poetry, associated with "the Cambridge School" of poetry. Some say he's amongst our most important poets, the one who most deserves an international reputation. He sells well in China. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/apr/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview30 gives background. http://www.arduity.com/poets/prynne/prynnedifficulty.html offers help with his poetry.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do you think there is a possibility that he is deemed 'our most important poet' because no one understands the work, and it is better to say it is great, and be thought clever, than the other thing? Other side of the question - if difficult poetry is the 'best'... does that mean that poems one understands are, by definition, poor?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Some poetry that I used to find difficult isn't so anymore (indeed, I now sometimes write similarly difficult poetry), so I'm prepared to give hard stuff a second chance (Prynne has had several chances). Even if I don't like complete poems, there may be fragments to learn from. My time and patience are limited, but then everybody's are - the issue is where, and how routinely, to draw the line.

    The http://www.arduity.com/ home page says "This is not to say that all poetry that is hard to grasp is good poetry, in fact much of this material is really quite dire because it tries too hard to be clever / erudite / profound and ends up not being worth the bother. However, the poets and poems on these pages are shining examples of the opposite tendency", and Stephen Burt wrote "Some of the most celebrated 'difficult' poetry of the past ten years seems to me derivative, mechanical, shallow, soulless, and too clever by half". Even the poets Burt likes can seem patchy to him - "over and over (it seems to me) [Les Murray's] Collected Poems places clumsy or merely doctrinaire work right next to some of the best descriptive poetry in the language".

    ReplyDelete
  5. All fascinating stuff - there is an old adage for prose writers (so I'm told), that warns us not to stand between the words and the reader, waving a red flag on which is emblazoned NOTICE ME, NOTICE MY WORDS (IN THAT ORDER).

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm playing devil's advocate here—I'd also never heard of Jeremy Prynne—but you might want to look at the article in The Guardian by Robert Potts and the poem 'Rich in Vitamin C' with its commentary by John Kinsella. I wonder why the Chinese appreciate him so much. Apparently he's written poetry in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en so maybe you need a certain non-Western mindset to get him. That said I won't be rushing off to buy any of his books any time soon. I've just actually ordered Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

    I find it hard to distinguish between bad poetry and difficult poetry and I suspect that much of the time bad poetry is palmed off as merely difficult and the damage that’s done will take decades for us to get over. I’m not saying that all difficult poetry is bad but I hate that lost feeling I get after reading certain poems; it’s a bad feeling and I don’t want to read poetry that’s going to make me feel bad. Pound was the first to confound me who I discovered about the same time as William Carlos Williams and you can just imagine who I took to. Williams taught me that depth and complexity are two vastly different things.

    I don’t mind being ignorant. Ignorance can be got over. I was ignorant the first time I heard the music of Schoenberg and now I’ll listen to it willingly and enjoy it. I still don’t enjoy Pound.


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've seen the 'Rich in Vitamin C' article before. Bits of it help. I've not heard of "Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry." though. I'll try to get hold of it - sounds useful.

      "I suspect that much of the time bad poetry is palmed off as merely difficult and the damage that's done will take decades for us to get over." - Could well be. Difficult poetry isn't read by many people, nor by a wide range of people, so assessments will take longer anyway.

      I try to mix my reading up - the familiar, the challenging, and material that's way beyond me; the poems, and books about the poems.

      Delete