James Tate: Does a poet ever strive for obscurity? I can’t think of one.
Kay Ryan: Who needs more? [laughter]
Carl DennisPhillips: No one is deliberately writing so no one would understand what they’re trying to say. That would be perverse….
We had dawdled over lunch and now we were late. Having missed the opening statements, we arrived in time to see Sven Birkerts interrogate an increasingly uncomfortable Carl Phillips about one of his poems deemed “obscure.” Then he moved on to Kay Ryan, who completely disarmed Birkerts and the audience with her legendary wit. Then when he read a Tate poem that “throws you up against the gap of sense” Tate shot back gruffly: “It doesn’t feel like a whim to me. Feels like it means damn good sense!” (Nota bene: Poets like to talk about poetry, not their own poems.)
Carl Phillips was eloquent on the merits of a certain kind of obscurity acceptable in poems—what Stanley Kunitz called “moments of wilderness.” You can’t explain them, but if you take them out the poem falls apart.
Sven Birkerts: But how do you know when it’s wilderness and when it’s bad?
All agreed that poems should at least be complex enough to merit rereadings, and that this may be mistaken for “obscurity.” And yet, Birkerts admitted, the “high art of deccelerating” necessary to “meet a poem at its own pace” is a challenge even for him.
Carl Phillips: Do I feel satisfied at the end of writing a poem? That’s really all I can do. I feel most of us are writing from a private space wrestling with hard ideas.
Kay Ryan: I’m trying to be as clear as I can be to myself. I am weaving a fishnet. But I have to come back and see if there’s a fish in it. I don’t know right away if there’s a fish in it or not.
*
Is “obscurity” the modern vehicle for enchantment that meter used to be?
I think so. Birkerts said “difficulty” can be a pejorative or it can be a challenge. But he never broached it as a pleasure. Not the pleasure of puzzle-solving, but the pleasure of being lost. And not being lost in a wilderness, but being lost in a labyrinth, a garden maze, an Alhambra. It’s the pleasure of the baroque, of not having possibilities foreclose but multiply (at least for a while) while you read. At the end of the discussion Birkerts suggested that nowadays “obscurity” performs a mimetic function—that poems would not seem like life if they were perfectly transparent. But I disagree. We don’t want poems to be like life, which is itself a little too mundane. We want what the poets in Cocteau’s Orphee want—“Etonnez-moi! Astonish me!” We want pleasure. And sometimes the oneiric, the obscure, is the only way to feel transported.
Again, I have to express astonishment that it’s as if Randall Jarrell wrote in vain. Over a half-century ago, he dealt with “obscurity” in a way that seems still to have eluded our contemporaries. And I quote:
“If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.”
I urge folks to read Jarrell’s essay on so-called obscurity, and wonder if his name even came up on this panel – and if not, why not.
A taste of his essay can be found here.
And though obscurity is not the same thing as inaccessibility, in a profile of Geoffrey Hill by Robert Potts, published in The Guardian in 2002, this point is made:
“Hill says of the accusation of `inaccessibility’ that `the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.’
“`In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.’”
You have made me think first of the obscurity which seems to aim for the vatic, for the enchanting, for the superrational– the Hart Crane of “Voyages,” to pick a nearly pure example; second of the dryer, sometimes anti-sensual obscurity which seems to aim instead to help us decode not only itself but the secret (bad) messages around us, the poem which insists that we ought to try to solve it, that we are missing out on an important (ethical) truth if we do not attempt to pick its lock (some of J.H. Prynne, for example); and, third, of whether these two categories,distinct and usually opposed in principle, are not surprisingly close to each other in practice, when we sit down to reread individual poems.
Poetry is always trying to say at least two things at once. Metaphor and simile are only the more obvious outriders of this inherent semantic doubleness, this parabolism. English poetry begin in Anglo-Saxon riddles, in which the phenomenon is epitomized in miniature. You could say that obscurity is the inevitable by-product, the excrescence, of the intellectual energy required to solder at least two distinct things or ideas into a single phrase or passage.
Add to this the 700 types of ambiguity, and the general poetic habit of indirection (raised to the Nth power in places like Russia, where the writer is often in danger of political persecution), and the desire for symbolic resonance (so that the composition as a whole becomes symbolic of SOMETHING ELSE). . .
- rhythm and meter and imagery and style might be understood not so much as the means of enchantment in themselves, but as the vehicles for this inherent doubleness – the means by which the reader is seduced and acclimated to its peculiar intellectual challenge.
Ange, Thanks for speaking up for the joys of lost-ness and the centrality of enchantment.
Especially enchantment.
All this talk about meaning, communication, expression, complexity — all of these are marginal phenomena. The ineffabillity of the poem-experience is central and subsumes all questions of communication and meaning. This is not to say that meaning is irrelevant; only that it is secondary to the holistic experience of the poem. And your word “enchantment” rings the bells: The aesthetic experience is inarticulable; or, as a really bad play-writing teacher who kicked me out the 2nd day of class used to say, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” This overstates the case, but as the kids were saying a few years ago, I feel him.
To quibble with your proposal, I would say that tone can equally be a vehicle for enchantment in post-metrical poetry. Some of my favorite WCW or Frank O’Hara or George Oppen or H.D. or whom-have-you poems are perfectly clear — and perfectly enchanting. Because of their tone.
And tone is famously inarticulable and incalculable.
Thanks!
I hadn’t realized Carl Dennis was up there with Carl Phillips, Kay Ryan, James Tate and myself.
I think you mean Carl Phillips, not Carl Dennis. Big difference there.
Quelle horreur! Big difference there, yes. I’ve corrected the mistake. My apologies.
Steve, are the two categories of obscurity really similar in practice? Really? It seems that Prynne or any Langpo would go out of their way to avoid an image like Crane’s “Dolphins still played, arching the horizons.” Which image is what I read Crane for.
I don’t want to fetishize obscurity. John’s right that you can be transported by the poet’s tone. (Thanks, John, for the props: funny how musicians don’t have to be convinced of the importance of enchantment, but poets — hybrids of musicians and intellectuals — do.)
Don, I am embarrassed to say I haven’t read Jarrell on obscurity either. I don’t think he came up at the panel, no. I do wonder why, per Don and Henry’s comments, we are always having to reinvent the wheel, re-explain what should be basic assumptions about poetry. Of course (English, and some but not all other) poetry’s salient feature is being double-tongued. Of course Geoffrey Hill is right about accessibility. Tell all that to the newspaper reviewers, who hasten to justify their column inches among paid advertisements by assuring the public that this book under review is accessible and plain-spoken!
My new favorite occurence of the word “obscure” is E.M. Wilson’s remark about the Symbolist’s rehabilitation of Gongora at the end of the 19th century (according to Chris Andrews in the 19 October TLS):
“A poet so obscure, they felt, must be very beautiful.”