Difficulty and Impossibility
December 3, 2004
The idea of “difficulty” implies to me that one is faced with a problem or situation or task for which there is a solution involving more than the purely personal. Otherwise “difficult” is the wrong word and should be replaced with “impossible” right?
So, I have to develop a generosity of spirit when confronted by a work that seems completely meaningless and assume that it is just difficult/complex/whatever. But is it also fair, at some point, to stop being charitable and decide that what purports to be a work of art– which implies that it has some intended communicative power– really isn’t? That it’s not the difficulty of the piece but that it really is “impossible” aesthetically? Meaning that there is no significant communication happening or intended to happen beyond the purely interpretive and connotative… and thus completely personal?
I’m willing to grant that Jonathan’s much smarter and more well-read than I. And I certainly have no reason to disbelieve him when he writes about liking this poem or that poem even when I find the same poems to be completely meaningless. I’m avoiding reading his BAP commentary until I am done with my own, but I am curious about his take on some of the pieces in there which strike me as little more than wordplay. For instance, this by Kenneth Koch:
Spine
The backache penny comes niche a lesson
Boa constrictor easel pretzel nylon peaches ruffles
Dance elevators less and more dark
Sassafras reaches me foghorn parenthood quietly duck
Penniless master and nincompoop hallway
Which seasons come into and look
Or this in the Bruce Andrews piece I’ve already noted:
Ringing anthemic lies– unpack sizzle thumping hammer spars as fun stuff & slip it off. Collective butcher shop projections festoon on your desk, truly uneventful habitat disinclined to be contritionally restored. Motive bodega bjork hole portishead squirt at the squint– don’t make me big sarcastic forbearance skirting the turkeybeat. Husband admits to rental nimbus slutted on history. Mumble the surviving, translate the howdy– promotion got me perpetual perjury machine, narcotic-oblivious piglets in open court. Frighten the blouse pulp overbite, party-favored pocket disasterdom pseudo-enactors enjoy.
I’m not contending that there is no meaning here or that they were composed completely randomly (though there is more than a small portion of poems which I do believe are composed in such a way that they are no more interesting or meaningful than the little rants I used to write down when I would get high in my younger days). Clearly the words are chosen around the basic themes and there is some attention to music as well as the blunt instrument of alliteration.
But how is such a poem whose understandability– as far as I can tell– is almost solely in the hands of the reader, who must go to great lengths to interpret and create the meaning in the work, any better than, for instance, the Billy Collins poem in the same anthology? I could conceive an elaborate justification for the Collins poem based on a movement from vagueness to specificity, wordless awe to apprehension, the idea of the centrifuge and separation, men and mechanicals, our technological society, etc., (preview of my review: I’m not going to) — but I would be rightly nailed to the floor by various poetry bloggers who would characterize me as making up for Collins’ laziness and slack writing and basically creating something that isn’t there. “The Emperor Has No Clothes!” they will (and have) told me.
But is the lazy slack writing, the “bourgeois subjectivity and the I-cry” (as Josh put it this morning) of Collins and Pinsky and Simic (to choose three who are railed against regularly in blogland), really any more lazy and slack than essentially doing a word-clustering brainstorm and waiting for readers to take up the banner and proclaim it an exhilarating, mystical composition of great complexity and “difficulty?” And these aren’t even egregious examples because, as I said, I think the pieces I am quoting from are significantly less random and more purposeful than some others to be found in a variety of avant web publications.
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Philosophy, Poetry and Poetics
All me-stream all the time.
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December 3rd, 2004 at 5:31 pm
There’s a certain sense of humor you need to read both Koch and Andrews. An earnest attempt to interpret or “understand” this poetry might be a little misguided.
December 3rd, 2004 at 7:39 pm
That seems like a bit of a copout to me. I’m far from a humorless kind of guy, and I’m more than open to a pretty wide idea of understanding… but some variation of your comment could be applied to many poets that I am sure you would (that you have) taken a great disliking to on your own blog. For there to be a joke there has to be something there to apprehend.
What I’m really looking for is someone to share with me what these poems are doing for them when they read them… you seem to like them. What are you getting out of them? As you read them, what is conveyed to you?
If there’s nothing to get or interpret or understand, what makes them poems? What do YOU get from them?
It’s easy to say “if you have to ask you’ll never know” but as a fellow jazz fan you know you can share what moves you about music with someone else to help open their ears. Rather than mocking me, why don’t you share with me some things about these poems that elevate them beyond the kind of random wordplay to be found in a thousand undergraduate workshops by a thousand would-be postmodern poets?
December 3rd, 2004 at 10:55 pm
Chris, I think you are on to something. I am not sure why Pinksy, Collins, and Simic are considered slack or lazy in their writing. It strikes me that it takes a great deal of effort to successfully use, god forbid, something resembling straight forward language and yet still stumble onto something original, something that, to paraphrase Donald Hall, says the unsayable. It is much easier to create the illusion of difficulty, yet create nothing at all. However, it is a worthy enterprise to create something difficult that also passionately engages the communicative process.
My question is, how original and post-modern are many of these poems? Poets have been experimenting with the deconstruction (I hate to use this overused word but it fits the bill) of language since Gertrude Stein. In 1968, the year I was born, Jackson Mac Low wrote:
Recognize I neither sure, All I
O neither
These, he emptiness
Sure, emptiness liver front
O recognize
He also wrote such lines as:
Once the kenurlders has settled on a schema, the new pipes were brightened. The quiet pitches were liberated. When the fleets flamed, the deals were offensive, though the foolers increased their pretense.
He went on to even more extreme experiments. Are these new “experimental†poems really just recycled aesthetics? Are we at this point just refining what is no longer ground breaking or shocking? In poetry, as well as in other art forms, what hasn’t been tried? Is experimental dead? Have we come to the point were the experimental in poetry and art is so common place that it ceases to be experimental and it fact has become hackneyed and clichéd? One could easily argue that more traditional poetry and the poetry represented by Simic and Collins has also become cliché. To truly “make it new†what aesthetic must the next generation of poets forge now that we have such a wide-range of past endeavors draw from, and yet distinguish ourselves from past generations.
(I think I ventured off topic. Also, it is late, so I hope this will sound coherent in the morning.)
December 4th, 2004 at 6:55 am
Koch’s poems is about various parts of the body, metaphorical transformations of each part. In the spine section we find like “pretzel” and “boa constrictor” and “dance elevators.” In what sense do these things resemble a spine? What benefit does the poet get from not saying “my spine is a like a twisted pretzel.”? That might be a productive question to ask. Koch’s poetry is usually a model of clarity. So why would a poet capable of both modes opt in this case for a more “difficult,” oblique style? Perhaps because the parts of the body do not speak in clear, comprehensible sentences? This poetry is fun, people. Fun and funny.
I’m sure Chris is not a humorless guy.
The Andrews I feel less inclined to defend. Maybe later.
December 4th, 2004 at 7:56 am
Thank you for this. I’m with you part of the way… I recognize that Koch is choosing words, terms, and phrases that have connotations and references to the subject at hand. That’s the “connotative” part in my initial post. And I realize there is humor– Armpit the earth mother of all things is bald enough even for me to get it
But you lose me when you ask what benefit Koch gets from not saying “my spine is like a twisted pretzel.” As I read it, he’s changed one kind of artlesness for another. The cliched phrase, bereft of grammatical attachment, is still a cliched phrase! I don’t think he gets any more mileage out of it by divorcing it from its common syntactical context. “Dance elevators” is a great phrase– I don’t think it is done any justice by just being part of a soupy mix of other phrases.
That being said, I’m glad you brought up the fact that Koch can write in other modes, as he has poems I do like. His motivations for resorting to this kind of form could be: laziness, that it becomes easy to publish even journal style jottings once you are a “name” poet, an attempt to appear modern, sheer playfulness… who knows. I can think of all kinds of reasons good and bad, but none of them have much relevance really since what I do have is the poem.
Anyway, when you say “Perhaps because the parts of the body do not speak in clear, comprehensible sentences?” I think you’re verging on the plainly ridiculous. Body parts can speak in clear comprehensible sentences– through poetry, where they often have. But even so, I’m not requiring that they DO, I’m just wondering what the artistic effort (and the value) ultimately lies in patching together– as I initially mentioned– a series of phrases and words because of their connotation, and how that differs from any other random, amateurish frivolity?
And really, I’m not looking for a defense, just curious what strikes people when they read. I appreciate your time sharing with me a bit of it. I’ll come up on the Koch poem again in a few days anyway and we’ll see how it feels after some time to think on it…
December 4th, 2004 at 7:59 am
David: your post inspires some thought but it will take me a bit to work it out into something coherent… enjoying your blog!
December 4th, 2004 at 9:27 am
Well actually Koch wrote this poem in the early 1950s, before he was famous. How it got in the 2004 BAP is a mystery, maybe because it came out in a journal posthumously. I think a good deal of the humor would be lost if it were written in grammatical sentences. I enjoy the poem quite a bit because the difficulty is only skin deep, as it were. That is, we understand it easily enough without everything being spelled out explicitly. Kind of like a child-like riddle. The artlessness is part of the charm for me. It is a question of tone.
Just clarifying my reaction to it, which is helpful, because it forces me to make explicit what to me, but not to other readers, jumps out immediately.