Steve Kowit on Complexity and Simplicity in Poetry

[HowardM2]

Steve Kowit's "The Mystique of the Difficult Poem" (http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/press/kowit.html).

WARNING: This essay is quite long. It's very much worth the effort, though.

[Autumn]

Interesting essay but indeed very long. I've to save it and read it some other time. Thanks, Howard.

Autumn

[Dunc]

Fun to read. Thanks, Howard.

What I am asserting is that although clarity is by no means a sufficient condition for successful poetry, it is, in all but the rarest of cases, a necessary one.

Well, yes, though just whose case is rare is interesting. On the one hand, difficulty is not an automatic vice. Otherwise no one would waste time on Donne or Lowell (as to syntax) or Eliot (as to message).

On the other hand, incomprehensibility is okay if the poem belongs in Experimental or some riddling kind of Humo[u]r or is just about its sonics; but being understood is otherwise and always the heart of the game.

But it’s curious to see all that blood on the village green as our author reserves the right to wander over to the deconstructionists to criticise Bloom, then back to the formalists (“elitists”) to criticise anyone else. And, my dears, whoever said thuperbitchy wath dead, I ask you!? - “Like one of those wits who imagines himself endlessly amusing, McClatchy’s poem, “An Essay on Friendship”, rambles on for some two hundred and seventy lines in that excruciatingly sophisticated, three-martini tone peculiar to the academic gentility.”

Anyway, long may pffa stay far ahead of this debate and untouched by the flatulences of minor academe! Regards / Dunc

[woodflies]

For those of you who've read the article (won't be for another day or two for me) how close do Kowit's poems (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?aid=237) (three poems only, includes one villanelle) come to what he espouses?

[romac]

Thanks for posting this link, Howard – a very interesting and enjoyable essay. I am with Kowit most of the way, although I wish he wouldn’t categorise the purveyors of the obscure as the heirs of Wallace Stevens. For sure, Stevens is difficult at times, but I think he fulfils the three characteristics that Kowit cites as necessary for the task of poetry:

Although poetry often attempts to transcend
the limits of language, in an attempt to invent such
an idiom legions of twentieth-century poets have
mistaken mystification for mystery. The real
mystery of poetry is that it inexplicably opens the
reader to that which is all but inexpressible. It is as
though one had used a ladder to climb onto a roof
with a spectacular view and then discovered that
the ladder upon which one had climbed does not,
in fact, exist--to use Ludwig Wittgenstein's
provocative metaphor. But mystification, whether
of the modernist or post-structuralist variety, is
simply the pretense of having climbed anywhere.
Poetry, when it is at its most ineffable, transports
us to places we had no reason to believe language
could take us. What is needed for this task is the
most luminous vision, the most receptive spirit and
the most crystalline possible clarity of
presentation.

Easier said than done of course. But nonetheless worth saying. And worth doing.

Rob

[Rachel Lindley]

This is my response to this essay when I first encountered it two years ago. It still applies.

_____________

Hmm.

I don't want to be contentious, especially since I do support the fight for clarity in poetry. However, I would like to state a personal opinion regarding some of Kowit's argument.

I agree, generally, with his desire to encourage clarity in modern poetry. How one defines clarity, however, is open-ended.

Who are we writing to? Poetry is, above all, a form of communication. If you're writing for yourself, then keep it in your journal. If you want to communicate to others, then it's important for any writer, be it of poetry, prose, or anything else, to consider the audience s/he wants.

Some of the poetry I might consider quite clear, others may find to be unintelligible. Work I find to be, not clear, but a dumbed down nursery school chant, others may find deeply moving and universal in its message.

In other words, I'd qualify Kowit's argument by saying that if you write a poem to be deliberately misleading and obscure, readers will know it. There has to be a reason for writing it, a message the writer wants to communicate. If there's no message, and there's no desire to communicate that message to the desired readers, then there's no point to writing the poem in the first place.

My problem with this essay arises when Kowit begins to assert that what I might consider effusiveness and gush provide the road to such clarity. He begins to muddle his own argument by fighting, not for clarity, but for poetry which is "unashamedly human", whatever the hell that means.

Me, I'd rather get drop-kicked in the head than read large quantities of mush. I'm not an "academic poet" -- I haven't been inside a university in my life, not that that's something to be proud of. Yet in this man's opinion, I appear to be one of the academic elite.

I don't care for obscurity -- in my opinion, Ezra Pound's later work marked the beginning of incomprehensible garbage being passed off as genius -- but neither do I care for the overly sentimental and effusive. It seems to me that those two issues -- clarity vs. obscurity and sentimentality vs. pragmatism -- are very much separate issues, contrary to what Kowit seems to assert.

I find some of this essayist's argument hilarious, especially since the language he uses to argue his point suffers from much of the same academic obscurity he so wishes to avoid.

I was amused at his defense of "unashamedly human" poetry using statements like --

...for compassion, like sincerity and accessibility, is not a modernist virtue...

-- or, most laughable --

On the other hand, McClatchy's use of the word “campy” to characterize a poem about such enormous personal anguish strikes me as rather chilling, and perfectly typical of the crippling emotional disability that he shares with many of his fellow academic poets and literary critics.

In other words, one could easily interpret that to mean "if you don't like this melodramatic, gushy poetry, then you're just a repressed, damaged elitist!" That's not an argument. That's childish finger-pointing. I almost expected to hear "neener neener" at the end of it.

Other than that, though, he's got a point.

Rachel

[Jee Leong]

another interesting essay, Howard.

I don't find the dualisms 'complex-simple' and 'obscure-clear' very useful descriptions, to be honest. They seem to function, in this essay and elsewhere, as judgments rather than descriptions. For this critic, 'simple' and 'clear' are commendable; for another, 'complex' and 'obscure' necessary. It seems to me that a poem can suffer from over-complexity or from simple-mindedness. It can also be flawed by obscuranticism or by blandness. One can argue that a poem must be complex, for it is, after all, a crafted piece of language; it must also be simple, in the sense of being undiluted, in its effects. If a poem appears obscure, what are the causes of obscurity? Perhaps I, as the reader, may be unfamiliar with its terms of reference because I am not its intended audience. Then the question changes to one of intended audience, and how large/varied that audience should be before the charge of elitism is levied. In short, the dualisms beg more questions than they answer.

Perhaps the issue here is better phrased as: what is the writer's attitude towards communication with his/her audience?

Does the writer genuinely want to communicate something to his/her readers? Or does the writer deliberately not want to communicate for whatever reasons (e.g. postmodernist views of language, solipsistic self-expressionism etc)? The latter is what I take issue with, and I do hear a lot of it even in my limited workshop experience. They whine this way - 'this word/image etc can mean whatever you want it to mean' or 'I know what this means even if you don't' or 'This is experimental; it has no meaning' or 'we have different aesthetics' or 'I like how the line just sits there and does nothing, I think it's cool.' Comments like these drove me up the wall. I have since learned to come down from the ceiling and sit on my hands to resist the impulse to box the speaker.

[gecian]

I'm in fairly close agreement with Rachel. The bit about "enormous personal anguish" reminded me of the Vietnam-veteran poet in Garrison Keillor's "Poetry Judge" (posted here a while ago).

I think there're four interlinked issues:

a. Existence + Importance of Subject Matter
b. Extent of Social Engagement
c. Emotional Openness
d. Accessibility

Seems plausible that poems (and, in general, books) that combined all four of these qualities would sell better than those that didn't.

About a., I generally agree with Kowit; I like poems that say something. (However, I enjoy metrical experiments even if they're content-free.) About b., I don't give a damn. I'm equally fond of good poems about personal sentiment and politics and birds: I don't think there's anything wrong with the subject matter of a poem being the author's mind, as long as it's communicated well. As for c., I prefer poems that neither gush nor scream, as a matter of personal taste. d. is, of course, the hardest to say anything about; I think it's bounded by a. -- one's more likely to disentangle a verse if one expects to find something there. (However, contorted syntax can be justified by sound alone; and good riddles can have trivial answers.)

On the whole, I agree with Kowit that poetry ought to be disentanglable. But I don't share his dislike of the three-martini tone, or reticent poetry, or elitist poetry.

[Rik Roots]

A good read. My favourite part was:

Let us not blame our failures on the intellectual poverty of our readers, or on their inability to register complex ambiguities, or on their irritable reaching after fact, or on the ineptitude of their teachers, or on the seductions of the media, or on crass materialism, or on the philistine vulgarity of our culture, or on--well, whatever else seems convenient to blame for our own failures. Let us no longer be gulled into imagining that rhetorical sophistication and verbal panache in the absence of genuine, communicated perception can create a poetry that is genuinely complex, textured, multilayered, exploratory, intuitive and profoundly insightful, a poetry worth careful study. They create, rather, poems that are hardly worth reading through once.

Amen and hallelujah!

[Urizen]

In my opinion, this quoted passage from Carol Muske, in what Kowit calls "the brightest and most eloquent of those published responses" (to Bloom's BBAP essay/introduction),


"...paging through anthologies of poetry, in vain,
looking for the names of women. Surely there was
some other female writer besides Dickinson or
Sappho? Maybe the Countess of Pembroke? How
thrilling it was, back then, to find a female name,
even if it was attached to a relatively uninspiring
poem. It was thrilling just to see that women wrote,
were published. So room had to be made for these
other voices--beyond the best. And beyond The
Best of. [bold type mine]

plays right into Bloom's hands and proves his point.


That being said, I don't agree with much of what Bloom asserts in that essay. His calling Ashbery our greatest living poet is insane, and his linking of Whitman and Ashbery is incomprehensible, at least to me.

I also agree with Kowit that it seems to go against everything I thought poetry was ever good for if a poet writes in such a way as to be deliberately opaque.



Mary Karr wrote an essay called "Against Decoration", which is also an afterword in her book "Viper Rum". I was slightly swayed by her arguments in that essay, and even found myself grimacing at some of the snippets from James Merrill which she uses to make her case. In fact, Karr targets Merrill more severely than anyone else.

(There's some discussion of Karr's essay here, just scroll down a bit:

http://www.citypages.com/databank/19/906/article4747.asp


Thing is, I recently purchased a copy of Merrill's Collected Poems, and I'm completely thrilled by it. The poems are often difficult, but they are beautifully made. Karr has some fine poems, and her work is accessible, but she is nowhere near the poet Merrill was, at least in my very humble view.

The whole argument might be pretty pointless, really. Some complex poems are rotten, some simple poems are excellent, and vice versa.


Bill

[David Mascellani]

Originally posted by Urizen

The whole argument might be pretty pointless, really. Some complex poems are rotten, some simple poems are excellent, and vice versa.
Bill

This is true. However, it is often the case that simple poems are
excellent because they are, in fact, seemingly simple.

This is just to say that often behind their simple diction and
syntax and apparently trite themes lies a whole range of complexities that can only be discovered through further readings,
analysis, and scrutiny.

But, of course, there are simple poems that are simple and excellent.

David