'Getting Something Right in Language'

Nearly every day I write about things that are important, even life-enhancing or life-saving, that hold no interest for me and that I don’t deeply understand. Some would call this “alienation.” I call it “professionalism.” I’ve earned my living with words for almost half a century as newspaper reporter, editor and science writer, and experience has taught me to accept my limitations, including deep reserves of ignorance and indifference. Like many journalists and former journalists, I’m a generalist, knowing a little about everything, never everything about anything. 

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand – repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

 

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

 

Which is no defense of writers who seek to write like cryptographers, who take self-aggrandizing pleasure in obscurity or incoherence, and set themselves up as an elite priesthood. I find Howard Nemerov’s reflections on the subject refreshing. In his 1959 lecture “The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry,” he writes:

 

“When people are impatient with a work of art they assert their feeling in this way: ‘What does it mean?’ Their tone of voice indicates that this is the most natural question in the world, the demand which they have the most immediate and God-given right to make. So their absolute condemnation and dismissal of a work of art is given in this way: ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything to me.’ Only in those plaintive last words does there appear a tiny and scarcely acknowledged doubt of the all-sufficiency of this idea of meaning -- that there may actually be meanings, which one does not personally possess.”

 

One approaches a poem or any work of art with anticipation, yes, but also with humility and a lifetime of reading and living experience. In another essay, “Poetry and Meaning,” Nemerov writes: “[P]oetry is a way of getting something right in language, poetry is language doing itself right.” Anything more precise than that, for writer or reader, is probably presumptuous.

 

[March 1 would have been Nemerov’s 102^nd birthday. He died in 1991 at age seventy-one. The two essays cited are collected in The Howard Nemerov Reader (University of Missouri Press, 1991).]