When we ask what a movie or novel is about,
this is usually to collect a bit of information on it.
When we ask what a poem is about,
this tends, instead, to be shorthand for, OK, OK,
but tell me what it means.
In other words, just reduce this Helter Skelter language
to something I can get.
Bottom line it for me, pal.
I haven't got all day here.
Suddenly, the clock is ticking.
And in fact, asking what a poem is about
is like asking what music is about.
And our inability to answer that question succinctly
is hardly a testament to the meaningless of poetry or music,
for that matter.
When we mistake a poem for a newspaper article or even
an anecdote, then the expectations
for a poem's language changes, and drastically.
As Eliot said, poetry, quote, "is a concentration,
and a new thing resulting from the concentration,
of a very great number of experiences, which
to the practical and active person,
would not seem to be experiences at all," unquote.
Indeed, at its best a poem might be
comprised of breath, desire, intelligence, and memory,
our influences and conventions, rhythm and imagination, sound,
narrative, history, and spontaneous play,
as well as reference emotion and the unconscious
in the music of the language itself.
As Robert Creeley put it, "simply, it is a complex."
Poetry resists just this kind of disclosure.
To me, that is part of a poem's unique power, our inability
to reduce it.
In fact, poetry is already a reduction
or, as one of my undergraduate students
said recently, a compaction.
We don't need to unpack a poem for its pleasures
to be visited on us.
Seldom do we get a chance to do so at a poetry reading,
shuttling along with the poet's voice from poem to poem, one
after another.
This doesn't compromise our pleasure
if the poems are any good.
Indeed, it can heighten it to hear the poet's own cadences,
timbre, accents, breath, asides, and silences, even.
But talking about it later won't ruin the poem
or make snobs out of us.
When did discussing something unknown or new
threaten to make us elitists?
Or perhaps it is liking or even loving
something we don't fully understand that makes
us sound pretentious?
In that case, I am guilty.
Much of what I love in poetry, admittedly, I
do not fully understand.
But then again, I don't fully understand
the paintings of Basquiat or my dog either, for that matter.
But that doesn't prevent me from loving them,
however irrationally.
As Donald Hall puts it, quote, "there
are a thousand ways to love a poem.
The best poets make up new ways, and the new ways mostly
take getting used to, unquote."
Yet, what is it that we lose in a defensive response
against poetry?
Perhaps, ironically enough, it prevents us
from further access as entry or passage to our imaginations,
to our ability to think in ways beyond our logical kin,
to feel through language, perhaps, especially,
to remain in a poem's uncertainties and doubts
"without any irritable reaching after fact" or reason,
as Keats famously wrote to his brother.
Saying, I don't get it, or worse,
blaming it on the overly obscure poets writing to show off,
as Billy Collins claimed on Talk of the Nation,
is just a way of rutting ourselves
in the little trench we've dug to stay safe in the familiar,
in the world we like to think we recognize and know.
Poems destabilize that, seemingly effortlessly.
So it's no wonder poets with their peculiar locutions
and allusions appear blameworthy themselves,
or worse, the institutions that support them.
When did we learn to go around citing
the meaninglessness of that which we don't yet understand?
As a protective measure, I think I follow this.
As my student, Hannah, says, we don't like to feel stupid,
and poetry, it seems, can do that.
It's a defense, right?
It shields us from the object of our dismissal, the poem,
in this case.
But more importantly, it prevents us
from any obligation of having to participate
in what the poem might mean.
Abdication of our own ability to respond
can be really satisfying.
And we can fold our arms indignantly,
look to either side, and say, well,
this nonsense isn't my problem.
And this dismissal can be funny too, as the recent Onion
headline, parodying poetry's irrelevance
to contemporary matters, reads, quote,
"distressed nation turns to poet laureate
for solace," saying later that, quote,
"their masterfully crafted verses and subtle explorations
of interiority dispel the nation's fears in a way
that nothing else can, unquote."
The general public, Jarrell went on to say,
quote, "has set up a criterion of its own, one by which
every form of contemporary art is condemned.
This criterion is, in the case of music,
melody, in the case of painting, representation,
in the case of poetry, clarity.
Instead of having to perceive, to enter, and to interpret
these new worlds which new works of art are,
the public can notice at a glance
whether or not these pay lip service to its own principles
and can praise or blame them accordingly, unquote."
Today, perhaps even jazz's unique rhythms
and improvisatory modes are part of the culturally accepted
Ken Burns-approved art forms, even if late Coltrane
and Bitches Brew are still forbidden from the radio waves.
Perhaps we have even grown accustomed to this estranging
quality of modern visual art.
We can look admiringly at a painting by Mark Rothko
without straining to will it into a figure
or rise at anger at its apparent disavowal of portraiture.
We don't demand to know what it's about.
It might be about color, and we can
be pleased to see color manipulated compellingly.
At least we can accept it as a fact of artistry,
as artifice, its former estranging in capacity now part
of the familiar fold of what hangs
on the walls of notable museums.
Why, then, should a poem, simple as 30 or 40
words carefully ordered, generate so much
anger and frustration, derision, even?
Because a poem may be in search of uncertainty and discord,
full as it is of both curiosity and the unknown.
A poem is, at once, an act of making,
poiesis, and an encounter, as Paul Celan reminds us.
In an early essay, Celan writes, quote, "now, I
am a person who likes simple words.
It is true, I had realized long before this journey
that there was much evil and injustice
in the world I had now left.
But I had believed I could shake the foundations
if I called things by their proper names, unquote."
In fact, the moment the poem has ended, it asks us for more.
It lingers, or bedevils, or simply
overwhelms us with its possibilities.
It is comprised of language, after all,
and it has the capacity to differ and defer endlessly,
ineluctably, sometimes even pleasurably.
But why should this debate about poetry
continue-- arguments about its death,
its unfitness for modern life, its inability
to accommodate human experience, its unapproachability
and obscurity?
And its myriad difficulties date back to well
before even 1928, when Edmund Wilson asked,
"is verse a dying technique?"
By 1960, in his famous Meridian speech,
Celan said, quote, "ladies and gentlemen, it is very common
today to complain of the obscurity of poetry," end
quote.
By the early '90s, its Dana Gioia's undying "Can Poetry
Matter?" essay articulating many similar concerns over poetry's
dwindling markets, if not its inaccessibility.
Last month, in the Washington Post,
Alexandra Petri asked, "is poetry dead?"
And I can't help but think of rapper El-P saying, quote,
"the critics claiming every year,
'hip-hop's over,' fuck you.
Hip-hop just started.
It's funny how the most nostalgic cats
are the ones who were never part of it," unquote.
The assumptions there are that poets, themselves,
are holding poetry back from gaining wider audiences.
So why is this?
Is it because poetry gets more and more obscure, less
and less readable?
No, not at all.
Jarrell puts it like this.
Quote, "in England, today, few poets
are as popular as Dillon Thomas.
His magical poems have corrupted a whole generation
of English poets.
Yet, he is surely one of the most obscure poets who
ever lived, end quote."
Jarrell's point-- and he cites many early wonderfully
perplexed responses to Shakespeare--
is that even if poetry is obscure,
that's hardly a reason to not read it.
Besides, Jay-Z's irregular sensual rhythms
and Lil Wayne's arcane and prolix references and puns
have hardly prevented them from appealing
to millions, literally, today.
In fact, I think this debate about poetry,
beyond its place in popular music,
resurfaces zombie-like again and again because poetry is
a language art, like no other.
And it is precisely because of that
lure of direct communication that we like to assume
is possible was spoken in written language
that poetry continues to trouble as it swerves out
of the realm of the expected, attendant as it is,
to setting the conventions of communication
in place, only to lay the promise of direct communication
itself aside.
Wittgenstein said this more elegantly in his notebooks
when he wrote, quote, "do not forget
that a poem although it is composed
in the language of information, is not
used in the language game of giving information," unquote.
But that slipperiness of a poem, elusiveness,
even, is not a wall.
That's an invitation to participate
in the field of meaning any poem makes
available on first hearing or reading.