Re: [New-Poetry] An Era of DÃ(c)tente for Creative- Wri ting Programs

[Chris Lott]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Mark Weiss<junction at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I was really talking about "difficult" poetry, the kind that doesn't yield
> easily to understanding, that makes you search for how to read it.

But why is that difference significant if, in the end, you are relying
on a feeling that you can't explain? Regardless of the difficulty, you
are pointing to a subjective, aesthetic opinion and saying it's
sufficient. I agree. I just wonder why people want to pick and choose
*when* it's sufficient.

> To put this in perspective, my mother told me that when she was in college,
> circa 1939, the class read a poem by Wallace Stevens to universal confusion,
> and the professor admitted that he didn't get it either and almost nobody
> did. Yesterday's difficult art is often today's staple. It's clearer, maybe,
> in the visual arts or music. Pollock doesn't present particular challenges
> any more, and a great deal of once-unplayable music is now taught to
> teenagers in conservatories. The culture simply no longer finds the work
> off-puttingly strange.

Sure, I use various modern artists and free jazz as analogies all the
time. You won't see me arguing with that. I just made this same kind
of case on my blog, referencing bop and free jazz and how they were
seen as non-musical, unplayable, unlistenable, etc. Now much of that
is part of the mainstream scene.

On the other hand, the mere fact that something isn't accepted is no
guarantee it will continue to have value. Some things don't get
absorbed, but just fade away.

It does trouble me that I've been able to find my way inside of other
kinds of new art far more readily than poetry.

> The effort of learning how to read the poem can be what's most compelling.

Maybe this is the most significant difference, because I'm not sure I
agree. In the end, it's the reading of the poem that matters most to
me, not how hard I worked to get to the point I could, or how hard I
worked to create sufficient meaning given writing that is more the
stuff of poems than actually being a poem.

c