The headmaster of the School of Phlogiston is in high dudgeon because Billy Collins, in his introduction to 180 More, uses this opening stanza from Rae Armantrout as an example of inaccessible poetry:
Streamline to instantaneous
voucher in / voucher out
system.
Silliman correctly points out that the rest of the first section does "contextualize" the opening, and it is indeed to possible to make sense of what's going on — which I don't think is all that much, but then I haven't read the complete poem. Armantrout has done some fine work, and it may well be worth the effort of parsing this piece's elliptical references and foreshortened syntax.
But Jesus H. Christ on a Harley Davidson, 180 More is intended to introduce new readers — high school readers — to poetry, to entice and intrigue. In an anthology like this one, and perhaps in any anthology, a poem's got about two seconds to make the reader want to pay attention. Only familiarity with and interest in Armantrout's other work might lead a reader on in this case, and that is just what we have not got in the intended readership of this book.
It isn't a question of the value of "difficult" versus "accessible" poems in any absolute sense, but of developing readers who find sufficient pleasure in poetry of some kind that they become willing to risk a little of their time navigating texts which may not offer immediate rewards — though in my opinion, the rewards must always be commensurate with the effort, and that's seldom the case with the haut avant garde, and that's as it should be. Risk-takers, as valuable as they can be, must usually fail.
8:57:35 PM
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