If Only We Couldn't Understand Them
How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem,
Part V
By JOAN HOULIHAN
 Essay #1: "On The Prosing of Poetry" Essay #2: "I=N=C=H=O=R=E=N=C=E" Essay #3: "The Argument for Silence" Essay #4: "The Best I Can Do This Year" The following sources are cited in this article:
1, 2, and 3. Billy Collins, in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
The following poems are cited in this article: For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday by Ellen Bass Tulip Blossoms by Ellen Bass The Era, stanzas 1-3, by Mary Jo Bang Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse by Franz Wright
The following website is cited in this article: The Courage to Heal Debunked |
I think accessible just means that the reader can walk into the poem without difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.1
Because many contemporary poets have chosen the way of the mythical trickster, taking the reader through gulleys and gorges thick with word-midge and image-mist (Over here! No, over here!) or into briar patches where the overlapping branches prickle with meaning just out of reach—and leaving us there—or tempting us with an apparent meaning of the poem, only to find that like touching a tar baby we are forever stuck onto it, our subsequent efforts to struggle free only making us more stuck; we are grateful, at least at first, for the Billy Collins poem. Enter here. Enjoy the visit. Exit there.
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keeps saying "what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?" And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
2
The other pleasures: all those pleasures aside from the one of discovering meaning in a poem. What are those other pleasures? Presumably, these are the elements of a poem—its imagery, metaphor, music, structure and so on. There’s wordplay. Syntactical twists. Line breaks. Humor, perhaps. A storyline (but not one with a point—then it’s fiction). Paradoxically, without the net, however fine, of meaning, to hold these elements together, to give them a shape and a raison d’etre, the poem is much less accessible. Gertrude Stein, for example, meets all the critera for “other pleasures” perfectly. So does much of John Ashbery. Without the hovering spirit of the author’s shaping intellect and intentionality we are back in the briar patch. Enter anywhere. Wander around helplessly. Exit nowhere.
On the other hand, the Billy Collins poem, though distinguished by its humor (an unusual, and welcome, attribute of contemporary poetry), is also a Mary Oliver poem, a Rita Dove poem, a David Lehman poem, and a Maya Angelou poem, among many other contemporary poets, because it is a poem we can understand. Immediately. We feel no drive to delve. It is not a poem we need to analyze. There are no pesky layers of meaning. What you see is what you get.
But the real question is what happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem.
3
Mules of Love, a newly released book of poetry by Ellen Bass, is a book chock full of accessible poems. It is also a book lauded by, among other luminaries, Billy Collins:
The sudden intimacy of these poems of Ellen Bass will hold you to the page. She knows an awful lot and is ready to tell it all. her poems will quicken the pulse, and as you read you will become anxious to discover more and more, but she can only tell you so much, one good line at time, and that is more than enough.4
“..and that is more than enough.” An ambiguous phrase, but one that points to Collins’ previous statements about being satisfied with the “other pleasures” of a poem. If we suspend our need to find meaning, perhaps we will experience the “quickened pulse” the anxiety to “discover more and more” of what Collins found in Ms. Bass’ book. For example, in the poem whose last line is used as the title of the book:
When they laid you in the crook
They pulled you from me like a cork
You dug me out like a well. You lit
I was sure that kind of love would be
Massive the burden this flesh
What’s the first word that pops into your mind when I say “spring”? Green! “adored?” Passion! Very good.
Is it too much to ask that the speaker be dug out like something other than a “well”?
That she have a heart with something other than “deadwood” in it to be “lit”?
That she describe her love without using the words “earth” or “stars”?
Another original simile.
“One good line at a time,” Collins says. But if this be pleasure, in what does torture lie? Not only is the signature line in this poem racked with unintentional grammatical possibilities and irrelevancy of comparison (you have to wonder who selected it as the book’s title), but the poem itself is full of amateurish gestures: overwriting, mixed metaphor, and trite language. In fact, it sounds the same kind of alarm Ms. Bass' writing sounds in her non-fiction bestseller, The Courage to Heal, a stew of pop-psych cliches served up as original thinking with a big dollop of illogical thinking on the side. Fortunately, the sloppy thinking she exhibits in a poem will not destroy people's lives through fraudulent, uncontrolled therapy the way The Courage to Heal did. It will only cause uncontrolled yawning.
But—we can understand it. The problem is we don’t want to. At least not so soon, not so easily, not without some kind of journey, some kind of new insight, something. Anything. We want more than gas and a handful of bromides for our trouble.
Ellen Bass writes of ordinary life with a fierce and loving passion. Her honesty, her insights, and her mastery of language, particularly metaphor, make this book compelling reading.
5
Tempted by another goldplated blurb, we try again:
Tulip trees hang over the Kalihiwai River,
In some ways, such writing is worse than that which obfuscates and fancy-dances in order to create a dazzling surface, a distraction from its basic emptiness of content or intellect. The (too-obvious) meaning in a Bass poem cannot compensate for the lack of a dazzling surface.
Of some reveller reeving through
Pink promises fell like posies cranked robotic
to grant and grovel for
It may well be that the less meaning there is in the poem, the noisier it gets. Many Dylan Thomas poems prove this principle. A poem without meaning is fine—as long as the poem does something with itself other than hanging around looking vacuous. However, while the pleasure of language itself is better then diving into a poem and coming up with cliches, can’t we expect poetry to give us both pleasure and meaning? This is the real difficulty, the challenge of poetry. Despite decades of talk therapy, even psychiatry has discovered that:
Despite the best efforts of poets, emotions are largely beyond words.
6
In fact, it seems that the more difficult it is to express an emotional truth, or meaning if you will, the clearer, more accessible, more accurate, the language needs to be.
Franz Wright embodies this equation perfectly. The language of his poetry, never “tricky” or “dazzling” is in the service of a difficult quest for emotional truth and therefore needs to be absolutely clear, never distracting:
And not to feel bad about dying.
it is only
to exclude death from our thoughts
as the horror of being excluded— …
coming in off Lake Erie
appearing out of nowhere
Here, a plain-spoken narrator, in simple declarative sentences, makes an exact correlation between the articulated fear of death and its inarticulate power as reflected in the landscape. The brilliant hinge stanza, stanza four, leads us from a philosophical, “talking” meditation on death to a non-verbal fear of it, the words “something like that..” casual in their expression of futility lead us to death’s embodiment in natural imagery.
A brilliant and original language in the service of difficult emotional truth, by defintition, renders the concept of accessibility null and void. For example, Dylan Thomas’ handful of great poems exhibit meaning and all the other pleasures at once. This is also true of Hopkins and Stevens. Sylvia Plath exemplifies the combination in most of her poems. In fact, it is this combination—original language in the service of difficult meaning— that is essential for greatness in poetry.
Contrary to Collins’ remarks then, it may be that the other pleasures of poetry arise from difficulty itself. If a poem is to be more than entertainment, if, in fact, it is to be great, then it must express difficult truth, both originally and clearly. The challenge for a poet is to put those other pleasures in the service of meaning.
Copyright © 2002, Joan Houlihan
This is not only accessible, it’s like walking into a Denny’s restaurant. Familiar. Comfortable. Serving the same ol' stuff from the same ol' menu.
For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday
This is not only accessible, it’s like walking into a Denny’s restaurant. Familiar. Comfortable. Serving the same ol' stuff from the same ol' menu. With the meaning served first and out of the way, we look for the vaunted other pleasures of this poem. The fresh language, the surprising syntax and multi-level metaphor, the apt image.
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly.
and all the love flowed out. I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore.
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weaknesses, my sins.
must learn to bear, like mules of love.
When they laid you in the crook
Sweet. But no longer fresh.
of my arms like a bouquet...
They pulled you from me like a cork
Surprising but unintentionally comical (what is the sound of one baby popping?).
and all the love flowed out.
Fortunately, the sloppy thinking she exhibits in a poem will not destroy people's lives through fraudulent, uncontrolled therapy the way The Courage to Heal did. It will only cause uncontrolled yawning.
...I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore.
You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
Massive the burden this flesh
The final, resounding couplet. Problem: where is the referent for the simile
“like mules of love?” What, exactly, is like “mules of love?” The burden?
No, that can’t be right. The burden is what the mules of love carry. So it must
be an implied comparison between the mules of love and the act of learning to
bear the massive burden; to wit: this burden I must bear (child and duty) is one I must learn to bear as mules of love do or would do if they were in my position; that is, having to carry something heavy (like duty) but with love. (He ain’t heavy, he’s my baby mule.)
must learn to bear, like mules of love.
Tulip Blossoms
Mastery of language. Particularly metaphor. Redder than—of all things—blood! And port! And cherries! His “dusky asterisk”? Again, the “other pleasures” of this poem are chiefly absent—except for the son’s one-liner, which provides some (unintentional) comic relief. There are no original, striking lines here (though the one-liner is at least memorable)—and, to cap it, it means something: the difficulty/joy of motherhood (albeit as described by a sentimental, rather amateurish writer). A meaning for which we didn’t have to work (and, unfortunately, it’s exactly worth all the work we did).
large lemon-yellow flowers dangling from both banks.
As my son and I glide in a rented kayak,
they fall to the celadon surface, floating
like blessings in a private ritual.
When I smooth one open, the flat crepe petals
fan out, revealing a center so red
it’s almost black—redder
than blood, or port,
or the deepest bing cherries—hidden
in the core of the blossom, the rippled base.
“It looks like an asshole,”
my son observes softly, almost
to himself. And I am glad,
remembering the first time
I saw his dusky asterisk,
its perfect creased rays—
glad he can see the flower
in the most humble, darkest star.
A paradoxical equation begins to emerge: perhaps the more accessible the poem, the fewer “other pleasures" the poem gives us. Meaning may be clear, but, as we see in Ms. Bass' poems, it may be meaning that's obvious or uninteresting. What is the purpose of accessibility if there is nothing interesting or new to access? Better to have a sound and fury signifying nothing, or not very much; a momentary play of language, something to admire in a line. Perhaps the sounds and syntactical twists, the sheer pyrotechnics of a Mary Jo Bang poem:
A poem without meaning is fine—as long as the poem does something with itself other than hanging around looking vacuous.
The Era
the ringbolt of a mind,
merry wished and whistled now.
from some well. Later he said, Look here,
earth is a low matter only, a pact
parched by some latent bet
that was bound to go awry.
…………………………………….
Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse
Not to take it so personally—
the force we exert all our lives
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
something like that, the Canadian wind
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
Joan Houlihan is a poet-essayist who lives in Boston. Her work appears in such publications as Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Black Warrior Review, Marlboro Review, Harvard Review and Poets and Writers magazine. A mini-chap of Joan's work is found at: Web Del Sol.