The worst writers patronize us, write down to us, condescend, treat us like simpletons. The worst readers are lazy and dim, without memory, patience or learning, easily offended by affronts to their passivity.
The best writers respect us enough to challenge our sloth and complacency. The best readers welcome the challenge. Here’s what some of the best writers have to say on the reader/writer partnership:
In April 1990, the novelist William Gaddis told me during an interview:
“What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page... What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him.”
William Bronk included this poem, “How It Works (or Doesn’t),” in All of What We Loved, published in 1998, the year before he died:
“The reader has to make it on his own.
The writer isn’t there to help him out.
A work of art’s an encounter somebody had.
You’ll know it when you meet it. Watch for it.”
In 2002, Geoffrey Hill told a writer for the Guardian:
"In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.”
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4 comments:
Patrick,
I am really enjoying Kay Ryan's poetry. In fact, I keep saying to myself, why have I not heard of her until now? I am reminded while reading her poetry of the theory of writing associated with Hemingway viz. "the iceberg theory." When you read Ryan's poetry there is so much more than meets the eye. I think all great art falls under this theory.
My question is would Geoffrey Hill consider her poetry wothwhile because of its simplicity. Hill says,"In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic."
I love Hill's poetry and the challenges and rewards it provides but democratic poetry I would think must leave room for Kay Ryan's poetry as well as the great Geoffrey Hill's poetry.
I guess what Hill is objecting to is pandering. I agree with that. But I'm sure I'd agree with Hill otherwise. All too often these days, poets AND readers conflate "difficult" with "good." Gee, if it must be obscure and difficult, it must be good, right? And if can't get it, then it's my problem, right? I don't think HIll is particularly democratic in his sentiments, I tihnk he's pretty elitist. I'm all for difficult poetry IF the nature of what is being related, or experienced, in the poetry, is itself difficult. I dislike difficult purely for the sake of being difficult, though, as much as I object to obscurity for the sake of being obscure. There's an elitism in that impulse, and a fair bit of egocentricity. Not that poetry has to pander. But if the conflation between "difficult" and "good" continues, you end up with a situation exactly like what we have: poetry is indeed viewed as elitist, and marginal, by the general (populist) masses.
There has to be a middle ground. The thing to remember is "good/bad" and "difficult/easy" are in fact two separate critical axes, and not one. There's plenty of poetry out there that makes you work hard, for no result; and there's some very clear, straightforward, "easy" poetry out there that is deeply rewarding. As Joe says, Kay Ryan comes to mind. So does Hayden Carruth. So do several others.
I like the idea of collaboration, but I think that the writer has to leave the door open wide for understanding to get through, even if it IS otherwise "difficult."
Robert Frost:
"Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do."
Robert Frost, “The Prerequisites,” Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), p. 97, as quoted in Elaine Barry, Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1973), Part 1, “Frost as Literary Critic.” Found at Frostfriends.org.
I first read this poem many years ago. Louis Simpson's definition of American Poetry.
"American Poetry"
Louis Simpson
Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.
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