The two most certain ways to bore someone are to present nothing unknown and to present nothing connected with what is known. (Nodding yet? Which nod?) It starts early: babies a few hours old stare longer at patterns with variations than at either unpatterned imagery or at patterned imagery which doesn't change. Between the two extremes the appropriate balance of novelty and familiarity to necessary engage an audience can vary wildly with the difficulty or strangeness of the new material and with the intelligence, motivation. Sometimes difficulty is, for animals like us, inherent in the material. We are not, for instance, good at applying statistical data, and so we feel safer driving on I-95 (as long as we're the ones doing the driving) than we do riding in an airliner, and we continue to vote for public policies which discourage the building of nuclear power plants.
Difficulty in poetry is not of that kind, for we are marvelously good at the subject matter of poetry, which is the subject matter of all imaginative literature: the feeling of living with other people in the world we're given. Nor is there anything else so reliably and endlessly fascinating to us — but how can that be, given that we are so good at understanding the subject and that we're easily bored by what isn't newish? The obvious but less important reason is that the world we're given is constantly changing at every level of organization and experience, from new and lost people to aging and changing bodies to new political arrangements to new technologies. The more important reason is that we and our relations to other people and the nonhuman world are so vastly complicated and various that, as good as we are even as infants and as incredibly sophisticated as we become growing into adulthood, no human being can experience even a fraction of the possibilities.
Stories teach us how to live, and even the purest lyric poem is a moment in a story. There is wisdom in the injunction to delight and instruct, and the traditional techniques of poetry, including especially meter, can help make a story more memorable and affecting, but I'm most emphatically not saying that poetry and plays and novels should be written to "teach a lesson." A well-made story or poem is a report of an expedition into uncertain territory, and readers will know immediately if a writer hasn't taken an honest look around. And while it's true that even beautiful and profoundly moving stories can be pernicious — the Bible and the Koran come to mind — Adorno's famous claim that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" is cowardly and dangerous. Jaques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, noted that the turn from literary values in the writing of history resulted in "leaving the glib popularizer a free field"; on a listserve I subscribe to someone recently wrote that poetry had moved on, and now we have country music if you want rhyme and meter. Well, people do want rhyme and meter and story and character. Who do you want to give it to them?
2:10:58 PM 
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