Category: Audience

Here, have a weird photo while you read about difficult art…

As I was thinking about the idea of accessibility in poetry, I came across this. Harold Bloom breaking down the types of difficulty:

“Hart Crane is a difficult great poet, but very good, even great, poetry need not be overtly difficult. A. E. Housman is a clear instance, and there are many others. There are also difficult poets who at first look easy, but are not. Walt Whitman proclaims his accessibility, but his best poems are subtle, evasive, Hermetic, and call for a heightened awareness of the nuances of figuration.

Difficulty in great poetry can be of several, very different, kinds. Sustained allusiveness, as in the learned poetry of John Milton and Thomas Gray, demands a very high level of reader’s literacy. Cognitive originality, the particular mark of Shakespeare and of Emily Dickinson, requires enormous intellectual agility as the reader’s share. Personal mythmaking, as in William Blake and William Butler Yeats, at first can seem obscure, but the coherence of Blakean and Yeatsian myth yields to familiarity.

I think that poetry at its greatest – in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake – has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” Barfield says: “It must be a strangeness of meaning“… ”

from “The Art of Reading Poetry” in The Best Poems of the English Language (emphasis Bloom’s)

I hope you’ll forgive me for relying on these quotes of Bloom’s and Keillor’s, but they do synopsize well, as two ends of the spectrum. And it’s not a coincidence that Bloom is writing from inside the academy whereas Keillor is a humorist, radio host and popular author.

Here’s the thing: I agree with both of them. I wonder what they would have to say to each other if they were in a room together. I would like it if they would both show up and have a great big intellectual throw-down in my comments section.

Until then, happy writing.

Here's poetry-advocate Garrison Keillor:

America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicsim is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put into perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out — what mustn't be lost, in the dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty — the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history — and when this spirt is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naive, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience — think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouses: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the  past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter — poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure — all that matters about poetry to me now is directness and clarity and truthfulness.

from Good Poems for Hard Times (emphasis mine)

Accessibility. It's either a dirty word or a delightful word, depending on your point of view (and perhaps your relation to academia). I've been kicking around the idea of accessibility, especially as it relates to why people avoid poetry.

I suspect that a vast swath of Americans come away from high school or college exposure to poetry both scarred and skittish. There's an idea that poetry is essentially coded, oblique, elusive, and snobbish. Self-referential to a fault. Requiring a Cliffs Notes. That it's only for insiders.

You know, that's sometimes a fair assessment. I can't blame anybody for avoiding those poems. I'm sometimes tempted to avoid them myself.

But meanwhile, there's a huge amount of poetry, past and present, that does consider its – if you will forgive the marketing term – its "target audience." Wonderful poetry, whose hoped-for audience is the average thoughtful reader.

Ted Kooser's "Selecting A Reader."