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Define Difficult

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago

 

What is difficult poetry?

 

An opposition is set up between poetry and everything else, and between some poetry and "difficult" poetry.

 

What is easy poetry?

 

Easy poetry might be plain speech lyric narrative.

Easy poetry might be verse -- narratives that use easy-to-recognise meter and rhyme to be poetry rather than prose. Many of these also aspire to plain speech when read aloud.

Easy poetry might be spoken word, when spoken (not read).

 

Non-difficult poetry might be, like some of that written by William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Neidecker, Charles Reznikoff, or Louis Zukofsky's shorter poems, poetry which seems to be very plain ("words dogs and cats can read") on the surface, although it rewards rereadings.

 

Non-difficult non-poetry may be...

 


 

9/4

 

After rereading the Pinsky & Burt articles yesterday, I came up with the following list of qualities that I think make a poem (or any written work) difficult -- feel free to add, augment or argue:

 

what makes difficulty

 

length

 

vocabulary

 

imagery / symbolism

 

form (or lack of form)

 

subject matter (or lack of obvious subject)

 

language (when not English)

 

grammatical / syntactic disruption

 

presentation (typesetting, layout, visual components, et al.)

 

Eliot, for instance, is largely difficult because he uses multiple foreign languages, extensive and obscure imagery (largely taken from classical mythology and the European epic tradition), free verse (i.e., minimal formalism), and he doesn't come right out and tell the reader what his subject matter is. This strikes me as a recipe for a particularly Modernist form of difficulty in verse.

 

Williams, Creeley, Zukofsky, and the others mentioned above are not difficult in the same way, because they are not willfully obscure (to my mind): they present imagery that is superficially easy to recognize (often taken from everyday experience), and they usually write in vernacular English that's accessible to most readers. Zukofsky, Williams, Stein, and others tend to wield their works' length (cf. 'A', Paterson, Making of Americans) in such a way that the piece is difficult to comprehend for all its size, although page-for-page the writing isn't hard to understand.

 


 

Duck, Mother

 

"We know that this world of ours is interesting."

--Joseph Wood Krutch

 

Projectiles enter by way of an open window,

ricochet around the kitchen, and fall, weary,

to the floor. Tourists passing through ooh and ahh

at our salads, rummage around in our medicine

cabinets, looking for God knows what.

 

Like all of us, they are doubtful, divided, eclectic,

and experimental, trying this and trying that,

clicking on this, on that, on the others,

pulling our old Joan Sutherland albums down off

the shelf, putting them on the dusty turntable and

 

yes, giving them one last listen. The crockery

is too fragmentary, too varied to rank among the supremely

great crockeries, but we give ourselves wholeheartedly

to it nonetheless. As long as we can move freely

around the kitchen, we find our lives well worth living.

 


growing in

its a jungle out

there goes difficulty

 

 

 

art goes ringside

 

 

how did the show

get down there

under the carpet?

 

 

greet the Geats’

baritone sounding

without the Baltic

 

 

sea to distract

for all the waves

flashing

 

                -- that and

more is how summer

goes and grows,

 

 

how it shows that it knows

 

    -- where

the ring they put

in your shoe shines.

 


Comments (2)

Anonymous said

at 5:51 pm on Sep 2, 2007

sometimes innovative poetry is considered difficult. in part bec one might not know how to read/listen to it. sometimes lit theory makes it accessible but the theory might seem to some to be pretentious or exponentially more difficult than the poetry. but sometimes reading theory can make the poetry easier in the sense that then we can see it is an experience, it is closer to one's actual experience than a linear narrative lyrical transparent poem. is.

Anonymous said

at 5:13 pm on Sep 4, 2007

what about the privileging of difficulty in its own right? difficulty for difficulty's sake?

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