Would we ask composers to use fewer notes
or for dancers to rely on only familiar movements?
We may not enjoy or even understand what they do,
but that's hardly a call to relegate them
to pre-approved melodies or expression.
If artists aren't encouraged to expand the horizon of what's
possible for human imagination and experience,
perhaps we are better off leaving that
to Hollywood or in the care of our elected officials.
I find that the common assertion that poetry
has no significant audience is merely the uncritical sentiment
of its sad detractors, eager to persuade us
that what they don't care to understand
doesn't actually exist or that it's
too difficult, that it's too pretentious, that it alienates,
et cetera.
Perhaps it is not the goal of a work of art
to make its audience feel at home, to assuage,
to reflect, or validate.
When you next hear a broadcaster cite
the highly readable qualities of some new book
or read a review harkening to poetries
and accessibility, you see, they're
trying to gain your confidence by assuring you
of your own lack of intelligence.
And don't worry, plenty of callers will phone in to agree.
When you hear this, take heart that poetry
is thriving, refusing to disclose itself
in ways that belie its form.
This is one of its strengths, not a weakness.
Though, to be sure, obscurity and difficulty are hardly
ingredients for quality in poetry,
let alone for effectiveness or the power
to bewitch, or delight, or amuse.
In other words, don't misunderstand
me to say that willfully obscure poetry is of the finest
quality and poetry easily approached is necessarily bad.
Hardly.
In fact, nowhere more than the poems of Dickinson,
or Celan or Lorine Niedecker are the simplest words
put to such disarming and strange effects.
What I mean is that, finally, what we most want from poetry,
to just mean one thing and to come out and tell us directly
what that one thing is, well, poetry
is unable to accommodate that wish.
It befuddles, vexes, seduces and never fully reveals itself,
all while laying inert there on the page before you
or vanishing into the air in which it was spoken.
But now, look, like those whinging critics deriding
MFA programs as the pernicious corruptors of creative writing
as we know it, even I have fallen into that old trap
of defending poetry myself.
As Jarrell says, quote, "poetry does not
need to be defended any more than air or food needs
to be defended.
Poetry has been an indispensable part of any culture
we know anything about.
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life,
but animal existence," unquote.
But if poets are supposed to veer towards that which they
do not know or understand, to make something out
of that grappling, as I've argued, why should we
expect anybody to follow along in such
a strange, murky endeavor?
We can't expect that, nor should we.
In fact, to expect some kind of dutiful, assiduous readership
is also a kind of elitism.
I'm not sure poetry deserves readers,
actually, which I know is odd to say,
I realize, after all the railing against the dogma
of accessibility I've unleashed here.
But actually, a reader's intelligence, patience,
and inquisitiveness really are gifts.
And following Auden, when he says, quote,
"every poet has his dream reader,"
I've come to feel like any careful reader, whosoever, is
a dream.
Perhaps what AR Ammons says is true.
Quote, "having once experienced the mystery, plenitude,
contradiction, and composure of a work of art,
we afterwards have a built in resistance
to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification
that have often contributed to the destruction of human life.
Poetry is a verbal means to a non-verbal source, unquote."
And if you choose to follow that grappling
in mystery, plenitude, and contradiction as a reader,
well, it is a gift.
And it is a poet's luxury that you
might wish to follow along and make meanings
along any particular thread of words
forming stanzas, those verbal means to a non-verbal source.
And truly, a bright, curious reader is a gift.
The good news is that in poetry, they are inextricable.
What you get from the poem is precisely what you give to it,
and that's lovely.
At times, fatiguing too, no doubt, but still lovely.
Accepting the award for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters at the National Book Awards,
John Ashbery said of poetry, quote,
"it is fun, though it isn't supposed to be.
But somehow, the difficulty is embedded in the pleasure,"
end quote.
Surely, this can be the case with reading too, as when
a poem truly disarms us.
One of the definitions of "accessible"
is "open to the influence of," as in,
a mind accessible to reason.
To be open to the influence of the unknowns of a poem,
that is the kind of accessibility
I hope to encourage here, not for poetry to accommodate
our expectations, but for us to accommodate
the strangeness of what a poem might present us with.