[New-Poetry] Some Characteristics of Unclarity (long)

[Anny Ballardini]

I'm sending it to my blog! James let me know if you do not wish it there.

From: "TheOldMole" <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 9:10 PM


> I'm saving this one.
>
> jforjames at aol.com wrote:
>> The Poem May Be Unclear/Difficult/Obscure Because...
>>
>> Purposeful Evasion of Understanding
>> The poem was not meant to be clear or understood in any conventional 
>> sense. Purposefully the poet has crafted something that can’t be parsed 
>> or comprehended. It may have been out of fear that the reader would think 
>> the poet thin of mind, or it may be just the poet resists the idea that 
>> poems should be knowable in a conventional sense.
>>
>> It's All There With Enough Time, Effort, And The Will
>> It may take you several hours, days or weeks, years or a lifetime, but 
>> nothing in the poem is not stated or misexpressed in a way that it can 
>> never be comprehended or experienced fully. You might need a bigger 
>> dictionary or full encyclopedia set, or the ability to develop the 
>> emotional perspicacity of a Collette, but you can get there from here, 
>> eventually.
>>
>> Merely Readerly Failure
>> The poem is reasonably clear and understandable if the various references 
>> and allusions made in the poem can be recognized and grasped. But they 
>> can ‘t be: (a) Because you have different knowledge set or (b) you have a 
>> fairly low level of erudition. The latter is not elitism; it’s a fact 
>> that more you’ve read and studied, the more you’re likely to understand. 
>> Some poets prefer to throw a wide net; others are perfectly happy that 
>> only readers of a certain level of acumen will gain entry to the poem’s 
>> fullest sense.
>>
>> The Translation or Transference Problem
>> The poem was perfectly clear in the poet’s mind, but, as rendered, most 
>> readers can’t understand it. A translation/transference problem ocurred: 
>> words as ‘shabby equipment’, or the author’s inability to shape/make the 
>> kinds of sentences and language elements that would make the poem 
>> understandable across a wide & diverse group of readers.
>>
>> Mimesis Doesn’t Mean Clear
>> Mimesis of the chaotic or confused: The world is chaotic, life is 
>> disorderly and imperfectly understood by the human mind, therefore the 
>> poem can must mirror the disorder and the chaos. The jigsaw puzzle 
>> spilled, with no attempt made to organize and piece it together.
>>
>> Pushing the Language To Its Limits
>> With a vast vocabulary and syntactical inventiveness, the poet uses the 
>> language in a way that is often hard to follow, to parse, to make sense 
>> of. Maybe the poet has pulled out all the stops or is pushing the 
>> envelope, so to speak. Think Hart Crane or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or the 
>> way Wallace Stevens feels his way through a poem by thinking based more 
>> on sound than sense. Ordinary words can be apt neologisms in hands of 
>> certain poets. Gertrude Stein pressing ordinary rhetoric into the 
>> ‘surrhetorical’.
>>
>> The Attraction of The Fragmentary And Disruptive
>> The aphoristic and imagistic attractiveness of certain sentences and 
>> phrases are undeniable. So much so that some poets are content to string 
>> these elements together or splatter them about a page and just let them 
>> do what they may in the mind of the reader. Sometimes it’s just enjoyable 
>> to cut things up, the collage, the kaleidoscopic, the slamdance of words 
>> and syllables, to break sentences unexpectedly, to leave the reader 
>> hanging on ledge of words, to practice legerdemain in language.
>>
>> It’s Ineffable or Just Too Complicated
>> The difficulty/obscurity of the subject matter or psychological state 
>> that impelled the poem makes the poem difficult/obscure. The writer 
>> intended to be clearer but couldn’t manage and perhaps no writer will 
>> ever be capable of capturing the meaning/essence of it in words. The 
>> experience is real but ineffable. The emotionally driven lyric flight, or 
>> the speaker so surrendering to a language rending state that may verge on 
>> glossalalia, hysteria, or a speaking in tongues. Or, in fact, the subject 
>> matter is too great in scope and too multi-faceted or too deeply layered 
>> to ever be captured in language or in the space of a single poem or even 
>> a sequence of poems. Think of thee poem of America that Whitman almost 
>> managed to write.
>>
>> One or More Possible Readings
>> The poem is composed in such a way that perfectly good readers will come 
>> away with vastly divergent notions of what the poem is about or trying to 
>> getting at. No one reading is correct; all represent valid 
>> interpretations and experiences of the poem. The composition may have 
>> been intentionally constructed to expose multiple facets and 
>> interpretative aspects. Or it just came out that way. Once the poem 
>> enters the public domain, whether the poet intended this is somewhat 
>> beside the point; though the poet has a right to be disappointed if 
>> his/her preferred interpretation/experience wasn’t carried over to the 
>> reader (which is related to translation/transference problem).
>>
>> Calling Attention To The Materiality of Language
>> The poem is meant to be an experience of perception, rather than to be 
>> understood. The experience being on the level of the materiality of 
>> language (sound, alphabetic construct, shape, etc., being foregrounded) 
>> and consciously not employing the communicative elements of language 
>> offers. Sound poetry, pure poetry, certain forms of language poetry. Of 
>> course, many readers may experience it in many ways, which is generally 
>> not seen as a deficiency but as opportunity.
>>
>> It’s Surrealist, Fantastic or Dadaist
>> The poem intentionally takes the reader into a place where things aren’t 
>> clear in any ordinary sense, in order to give the reader some new and 
>> intriguing experience. Often employing extravagant collocations of things 
>> and weird imagery. It can be the dream poem rendered exactly as 
>> remembered stream-of-consciousness dictated. Or, as in dadaism, the 
>> wholesale rejection of poetry as anything more than a conceptual art or a 
>> socio-political act that should push, if not shove, the reader out of 
>> his/her complacency and literary comfort zone.
>> Strictly Experimental As To Form or Rule
>> The poem is using a particular pattern or formal construct for its 
>> structure. The form is paramount, not the content. Poems based on a 
>> mathematical sequence, like a Fibonacci. Ignoring grammar and syntax for 
>> effect. Or language games: Purposefully substituting a random noun 
>> wherever the verb is supposed go in the sentence, for example. It’s 
>> Oulipo, baby.
>>
>> Too Spare And It Becomes An Open System
>> The poem is stripped down to a point that what words remain, as clear as 
>> they are, invite or allow many different ways of fleshing out the poem in 
>> reader’s mind. Or the poem is a pane and now many people are now going to 
>> see many different things through it. The paradox of description: Too 
>> much and too detailed in description and the reader’s mind is not be 
>> given free rein to explore in and around what has been expressed, gets 
>> too lazy to tease out nuances. Too little descriptive guidance and all 
>> control of the reader’s experience and taking from the poem is 
>> surrendered, whether intentionally or unintentionally.