[New-Poetry] Collins on clarity

[Bob Grumman]

One thing I find interesting about Collins's remarks on clarity is his 
assumption that a poem is a message.  That the poems of Wilshberia are 
almost never anything more than messages is a major problem with them 
for me. 

Another reaction of mine to what David quoted: I know and admire poems 
(some of Roethke's, for instance) that start in or near incoherence and 
gradually clarify, which is the opposite of what Collins favors.  Much 
music that I like does the same--starts as noise or close to it but 
eventually achieves a standard resolution.  Not that I'm against what 
Collins favors.  Or jittering back and forth in a poem.  The placement 
of clarities and their opposites in a poem is surely something to be 
decided on a case by case basis.

Another thought: Collins is talking about what I'd call psychological 
risk; he seems not to realize that there's such a thing as aesthetic 
risk (which, yeah, is no doubt in some final sense a psychologica risk, 
but very different from what Collins is talking about).  My Poem poems 
seem to me pretty clear (and sometimes intimate), but unrisky.   My 
mathematical poems seem a great risk to me, usually.  For instance, will 
my graphic images come across as crude to a "real" painter?  Are the 
phrases I use that are intended to be gripping images banal and/or 
sentimental and/or pretentious?  Or incoherent.  I, for one, fear being 
considered incoherent, and fear more actually being incoherent and not 
able to recognize it.   I also fear  being too simple..

Interesting topic.

--Bob