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Tuesday, November 23, 2004 |
Just a few quick notes — packing tonight and traveling after work tomorrow, so it will probably be Friday before my next post.
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Henry, I don't just mean "work harder at it" (though I wish I could find the time for that) but "work differently." Poets should write, once past the first draft, anyway, taking into account intelligent, interested, kindly disposed (they're looking, ain't they?), but busy readers who don't know and don't much care anything about the poet, and who must be persuaded it's worth their time to continue reading the poem and to look for more by the same poet. That doesn't mean explain everything or make everything simple, but poets shouldn't make a poem more difficult than it needs to be, and the harder it is for the reader, the more reward of some kind — intellectual discovery, surface beauty, emotional insight, what have you — the poem has to deliver. This part of it is no different from what any writer has to do. The more difficult the idea, the clearer the writing must be. Only cranks — and too many poets — make it a point of pride to be "difficult."
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Jordan (blog here and Million Poems here), once past the size and nature of the audience for poetry, I agree with every word of your comment. And, of course, there are people who buy poetry. They're you and me and other poets. I've got more books of poems than the last five bookstores I've visited put together, and almost none of mine are duplicates. But the books of Billy Collins, whose publisher says have sold more than any poetry since Robert Frost, sell only a few tens of thousands of copies. That doesn't quite reach the level of minuscule sales.
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Josh, I agree with much in your last post, but I don't think the intimidation many people feel when confronted by poetry has anything to do with "poetry-as-institution," whether visible or not. Some of it comes from terrible teaching in elementary and, especially, middle and early high-school, but far too much of it comes from poets who confuse cleverness or intricacy with profundity, or who, as Don Paterson said, think "theory and practice form a continuum." I'm not saying that applies to you. The effort you put into your blog is, by itself, evidence that you care that others understand your project.
8:35:59 PM 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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