Hard or Easy Poems

I’ve spent a good part of my life reading hard poems. T. S. Eliot, one of the generators of those poems, claimed in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” that poetry (at least modern poetry) must be difficult: “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into meaning.” I’m not convinced that a poet “must” become anything, but certainly if she writes allusive, indirect, and linguistically dislocated verse, the results are not going to be immediately comprehensible. On the other hand, if she writes in a notably difficult manner and is notably talented – if she’s Marianne Moore, say, or Sylvia Plath – the result may well be a string of masterpieces that lodge permanently in the psyche and form an essential part of our literary consciousness. Sylvia Plath wouldn’t be Sylvia Plath without the deep and dark substratum of purposeful opacity. In short, difficult poetry achieves effects unobtainable by simpler means and needs no defense from me.

T. S. Eliot has surely lodged himself into my consciousness, and I will probably read The Waste Land again. There are many beautiful passages that will always move and engage me, even when I only half understand them. And if I fully understood them – if Eliot had cast those passages in simpler diction and homey metaphors – I expect I would be less rather than more engaged. Eliot met his moment and wrote in the difficult manner that, he believed, social, cultural, and literary circumstances made obligatory. But struggling to reconstruct his buried narrative and fractured thematics (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) is not something I relish in the way I once did.

By contrast, his contemporary Robert Frost didn’t feel compelled to shore any fragments against his ruins, yet Frost’s poetry feels authentically modern, which is to say: it’s harder than it seems. Although Frost sometimes did write in rhymed tetrameters, anyone who can breeze through “The Silken Tent” (one sentence cast as a Petrarchan sonnet and governed by a metaphorical conceit as “metaphysical” as anything by John Donne) is not paying attention. And paying attention is, perhaps more than anything else, what poetry asks of us. That’s what makes the reading of poetry so intensely collaborative. Still, I’ll admit to moments of frustration when the attention required seems incommensurate with the benefits accrued. Ever tried getting through Ezra Pound’s Cantos?

Photograph by C.Castilla / Adobe Stock.

The poetic universe will not be divided into hard poets and easy poets. The terms are shorthand for very approximate tendencies, and “hard” poets sometimes write “easy” or at least relatively welcoming poems, and “easy” poets often complicate matters in unexpected and fruitful ways. Furthermore, what constitutes difficulty or simplicity is largely a matter of individual sensibility. One reader’s unendurable Ezra Pound (mine) is another reader’s genius. As an intemperate youth, I eagerly plunged into the philosophical conundrums of Wallace Stevens’s most formidable late poems. Now I look for poetry that makes my throat catch.

Of course, poetry can do a lot more than make the throat catch. It can bear witness, disturb, delight, enlighten, awaken, or interrogate the language that constitutes its identity. And when champions of hard poems argue that those poems abundantly reward the necessary effort, they’re probably right. But why not read less difficult poetry as well, from which we can also derive pleasure and profit.

This revelation was borne home to me recently when I idly picked up an anthology blandly titled Good Poems, compiled by Garrison Keillor of the determinedly folksy radio show Prairie Home Companion. My first thought was, Shouldn’t I be reading an anthology compiled by Czesław Miłosz or some other suitably august literary figure? And in truth, the guiding principles laid out in the introduction did not inspire confidence. Keillor really does seem to believe that poetry can be divided into two warring camps: pretentious highbrow twaddle on one side (Eliot is his particular bête noire) and, on the other, the poetry gifted to us by “conspirators of friendliness” such as Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Keillor’s polemics seem reductive, but I found most of his selections to be what he claims them to be:  poems that have been “deeply loved by people and … deserve to be.” You can be wrong about T. S. Eliot and still be right about accessible poetry.

Still, I would never claim, as Keillor does, that all real poetry tells stories, whether implicitly or explicitly. If you’re determined to, you can find a story in anything. But Emily Dickinson, to take the example of a poet whom Keillor strangely considers to be quite straightforward, wrote lyrics of concentrated cerebration that, more often than not, fly free of any narrative constraints. She also wrote great “story” poems, but in whatever mode, her difficulty is inseparable from her genius. Keillor wants poetry to be “good” (egalitarian, narrative) rather than “great” (erudite, allusive), but really, poetry can be any damned thing it wants to be.

He’s right about one thing, though: there’s a lot of exemplary poetry that doesn’t get taught in graduate school. Joyce Sutphen and Lisel Mueller and John Ormond? I wouldn’t have known who they were, let alone been gobsmacked by their poetry, if not for this anthology. Whether they and the other 170 or so poets are good or great doesn’t much matter in the end; either can trigger in the reader certain emotional reverberations. That’s not everything, but it’s a lot.

It may be that the deepest emotional reverberations are to be found in the most formally demanding poetry. Pound’s Pisan Cantos, many aver, are almost unbearably moving. Then again, Pound didn’t write this:

driving the freeway while
listening to the Country and Western boys
sing about a broken heart
and the honkytonk blues,
it seems that things just don’t work
most of the time
and when they do it will be for a
short time
only.
well, that’s not news.
nothing’s news.
it’s the same old thing in
disguise.
only one thing comes without a
disguise and you only see it
once, or
maybe never.
like getting hit by a freight
train.
makes us realize that all our
moaning about long lost girls
in gingham dresses
is not so important
after
all.

That poem, “the last song,” is by Charles Bukowski, a writer I always assumed I would dislike: the poet for people who don’t read poetry. And indeed, Bukowski’s successful impersonation of a garrulous, undisciplined lout is not always separable from his frequently garrulous and undisciplined poetry. Given his philosophy of composition (“it has to come out like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk”), it’s no surprise that he wrote some bad poems. But Keillor has managed to find four or five samples of Bukowski’s work that can stand for a necessary countertradition of populist art. You may not appreciate “the last song,” but it’s a genuine poem. If it wears its heart on its sleeve, well, what a sleeve! Those “Country and Western boys” used to wear gaudy shirts with rhinestones on the sleeves. In a way, the whole of this countertradition in poetry is a bit like country and western itself: if you disdain it for its surface ingenuousness, you’re missing some wonderful music.

Most of Keillor’s selections are quieter and less gaudy than the Bukowski examples. Mary Leader’s “Her Door” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” are unlike anything ever written by T. S. Eliot, yet strangely compatible in their lyrical grace. They’re not better – they may well be worse – but I don’t care. Even in their imperfection, they can give us what poetry gives.

Poem source: “The Last Song” from Bone Palace Ballet by Charles Bukowski. Copyright (c) 1997 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.