[New-Poetry] Re: difficult poetry

[Anny Ballardini]

I have a weak spot for Pinsky. I invited him to the Corner and he contributed with generosity. When I sent out the update with the usual 10-15 new poets he was the only one to answer back with an incredible enthusiasm to thank me again. To which I sent him a mail in which I said something like this:
You, the most famous one, are the only one to send me another thank you. I was very moved. 
He will somehow be a hero for me for a long time now. 
Besides his translation of the Comedy. I would never venture into something like that!

  From: David Graham 
   Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 3:18 AM

  On Apr 24, 2007, at 9:44 PM, jforjames at aol.com wrote:


    Guest's Heap o' Livin' sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest's popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest's approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don't wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult?



    --Robert Pinsky
  ===============================


  If the only choice we have is between Edgar Guest and Wallace Stevens, well, that's a stacked deck from the start.  Change the terms, say, to Langston Hughes v. Wallace Stevens, and you may have to ponder a bit more deeply.  Or, to put it in different terms, Frost (accessible) v. Hart Crane (difficult):  who is better, and is difficulty per se the deciding factor?  


  There is difficulty and there is difficulty, of course.  One brand, as I've often noted, is the difficulty that disguises its own challenge under a genial accessible surface, such as Frost's "The Road Not Taken."  


  Is Whitman difficult?  Well, yes and no.  Same for a lot of Williams.  Yeats runs the gamut from simple to extremely knotty, and I'm not ready to say that "Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop" is a lesser poem than "Vacillation."  Moore's certainly more difficult in many ways than Bishop, but is she better?  


  As Langston Hughes reminds us, there is perfectly lucid, accessible, and even "easy" poetry that is quite wonderful.  


  Some difficult poetry is splendid, and a lot is turgid, pretentious, affected, and irritating.  


  I also admire Pinsky, and his full Slate article is well worth reading, especially for his remarks on a range of individual poems quoted.  (http://www.slate.com/id/2164823/) 


  His point isn't well represented by the snippet quoted above.  But let us praise the delights of challenging poetry without putting lumping all accessible stuff into the Edgar Guest category. . . .






  ========================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu
  Home Page:
  http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
  Poetry Library:
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