I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing
down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the
non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as
unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away
from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem
about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive
verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a
medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too
long becomes tediously generic.
The problem, it seems
to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring
to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an
instant complexity. It isn’t complexity, though, since something that is complex can , with effort
and expertise, be unpacked, bit by bit.
What is achieved, though, is something we call a muddle, a confluence of
ideas that lacked salient clarity to begin with and which are not fitted
together in terms of making a working relationship toward a more developed
structure but instead piled one on the other, like half read magazines in a
waiting room. Connections between what is superimposed over the other are
ironic, at best, and always unintentional. One could manufacture a theory about
the clutter, make it it conform to the particulars of some nested set of buzz
phrases that produce more clouds than sunshine, but then the theory becomes
more important that what it was supposed to bring to conversational
exchange. Rather than process a subject through whatever
filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces
the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk
they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.
I rather love
ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's
rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience;
the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would
prefer poets engage the ambivalences and incongruities in a sphere recognizable
as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those
words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of it’s own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired
of spinning their self-reflexing tires
and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.
