28 January 2016
The past couple of weeks have been a change of pace for me, hiking and then touring in New Zealand. I’ve continued reading poetry, though – finishing Plath’s Ariel and New Zealand poet Sam Hunt’s Chords. Hunt’s poetry was a refreshing change from Plath’s in that I usually had some idea what each poem was about after one reading. Not always, but still . . . 
This led me to think about one of the struggles that we all have with poetry: simply put, it is hard to understand, which can be irritating. It is no fun to read something then put it down and say, “What the hell was that about?” We like to understand. When we read something we can’t help feeling that we’re supposed to understand it, and there’s no denying that that’s not always our experience when reading poetry.
I realize that as an English major and writer and literary person, the sort who still reads poetry on purpose without anyone assigning it, I’m not supposed to complain about poetry’s opacity. I’m supposed to embrace it. When other people wonder why poets can’tjust say what they mean I’m supposed to smile smugly and patronizingly, implying that I’m one of those in the know. At the very least, I’m not supposed to agree with such Philistines. But a part of me does. The truth is, while I do like Plath, my favorites of her poems were the ones I thought I came close to understanding. And Plath isn’t even the worst. I recall how, in college, when I read assigned poems by Hart Crane and John Ashbery, I found myself eagerly underlining not the lines that were especially beautiful or powerful but the occasional ones that almost made sense, and I can’t help feeling that that’s lowering the appreciation bar a little too much. I haven’t gone back to try Crane or Ashbery since then.
It hasn’t always been this way, of course. Opacity has not always been valued, or even tolerated, in poetry. Pope could write
            True art is nature to advantage dress’t,            What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’t
and describe poetry as if it were simply the best way to communicate a message. But even then it wasn’t that easy. Even in times when poetry was expected to be clear, the poems that are remembered from those times are always the ones that, beneath their superficial clarity, also bore hidden depths of meaning. In short, whether a poem appears to be clear or not, it is a part of the definition of good poetry that it  . . . well, it’s just hard to understand.
So here’s what I’ve been thinking: we are right that poetry is opaque, but we are misguided when we complain about it. It’s not surprising that we should do so, of course. We have been trained by our intellectual world to treat every other area of written communication as something to master and appropriate for our own purposes. We read for practical, stated purposes: to learn something, say, or for diversion. Either way, one measure of a written work’s success is the speed with which we are able to get our money’s worth from it. Thus we expect clarity, facility, smoothness of style, and – if the goal is to learn – a few charts and graphs that summarize the text for us and make it unnecessary for us to read at all. This is how the demands of our lives in the information age have trained us to read, and if that’s how we approach text, it’s not at all surprising that we find poetry frustrating. But that is not the fault of the poetry; it is the fault of the mindset we bring to the poem. We are not supposed to understand a poem. Again, we are not supposed to understand a poem. We are suppose to meet it.
Archibald MacLeish, in “Ars Poetica,” wrote
            A poem should not mean            But be.
That line – as indeed the rest of the stunning poem – is itself an example of what I’m talking about. The line offers the suggestion of something important and true, but absolutely no clarity, and no two people reading it (or one person reading it a twice a few years apart) will understand it the same way. It does not explain but suggest. But at least one thing it suggests to me at this reading is that the encounter with a poem takes place not in the arena of written communication but in that of Being. In other words, reading a poem is less like reading another sort of text than it is like meeting a new person.
Think about the experience of meeting people for the first time. Some people come across as fairly transparent. What you see is evidently what you get, and within minutes you can make a determination about that person: “What a delightful woman!” or “Why are you telling a stranger about your ex-girlfriend? You are a needy person with poor social skills.” It is the same with many poems; some are easily accessible at a first encounter. But – also like poems – no person is really just what you see on the surface: even the most “superficial” person has hidden depths. Other people are harder to read at an initial encounter or even frankly puzzling and contradictory. Some of these are intriguing and invite closer acquaintance. Others come across as pompous or elitist and not worth the expenditure of any more effort. Just like poetry.
So, yes, poetry is hard. Some appears relatively easy, but even that is deceptive. To encounter a poem for all it is worth will always take effort and often time. Like people. Because poems don’t mean; they are.
      Ars PoeticaArchibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute   As a globed fruit,
DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless   As the flight of birds.
                         *               
A poem should be motionless in time   As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time   As the moon climbs.
                         *               
A poem should be equal to:Not true.
For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean   
But be