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

[Mark Weiss]

I have a feeling we're talking past each other 
here. I'm not proposing that "the mere fact that something isn't accepted is no
guarantee it will continue to have value."

A species of the difficult is poetry written in a 
foreign language.  I'm a translator. My Spanish 
is way too weak for what I undertake, but 
translators who are profoundly fluent report very 
much the same thing. All romance languages sound 
pretty to Germanic ears, but once one gets past 
that, in reading a poem in Spanish, even if one 
barely grasps its easiest layer of meaning, one 
senses the honesty of the effort and that there's 
something to be gained from going further. One 
falls in love, as with another human being, on 
the basis of what would appear to be insufficient 
evidence. As it happens, one gets fooled, but 
only occasionally. The poem, as one begins to 
translate, may turn out not even to be "about" 
what one thought it was. One discovers layers of 
meaning and artifice, one acquires the cultural 
knowledge that the poet demands of us. And 
eventually not so much an intellectual construct 
but a picture of the poem's structure and process 
emerge. This is a profoundly moving experience, 
and to the extent possible it's what one wants to convey to the reader.

Some of the poems one falls in love with are 
exceptionally difficult even for native speakers. 
Virtually every lover of poetry in Latin America 
reveres Jose Lezama Lima's work, but very few 
would pretend to follow his drift through his 
complex patterning. But read it aloud and one 
finds all the richness of the language, and a 
hallucinatory world of half-glimpsed 
understandings. The poem demands of you that you 
come back to it again and again. It's a very long 
commitment. James Irby, without doubt the 
profoundest student and translator of Lezama's 
work (an incredible amount gets lost in 
translation nonetheless), has written 25 pages of 
notes on just the first four stanzas of one of 
the poems, Pensamientos en La Habana. And it changes one's life.

I had an extraordinary experience with a short 
poem of Eliseo Diego, a perfect lyric. I fell in 
love with it because of its beauty of language 
and its strangeness. It wasn't until well after I 
translated it that I understood that in a very 
brief compass Eliseo was giving us the history of 
black people in Cuba. The cultural information 
involved kept thickening. I did an ok job, 
probably as good as can be done, but hey, it's not the original.

Lezama, referring to this process (I use the word 
advisedly) of discovery, posited that "sólo lo 
difícil es estimulante." Estimulante is a much 
more serious word in Spanish than its English 
cognate. It can be both adjective and noun, and 
can mean, for instance, the force that though the 
green fuse drives the flower. "The only true 
stimulant to growth is that which is difficult," 
or "only the difficult stimulates growth." Not 
difficulty for its own sake, but for the sake of 
growth, which is a process that occurs through the process of discovery.

It goes without saying that not everything that 
appears difficult is stimulating. Difficulty can 
be worn as a mannerism, and some things turn out 
to be hollow. The mystery is what it is about a 
particular poem that makes us persist in the 
effort, what it is that makes us trust it, even 
if we have no idea what's going on.

Mark


At 04:40 AM 7/4/2009, you wrote:
>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
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