'Like Most Hollywood Entertainment'

I haven’t bothered tracking down the source but somewhere Franz Kafka notes that impatience is a form of laziness. When I first read that years ago it seemed self-evident yet had never occurred to me. My patience is most often tested not when reading but when listening to tedious, empty conversation – talk as mere social gesture, without substance, or talk as self-centered sermon or rant. 

I often wonder how much the decline in reading and the spread of aliteracy is associated with impatience or laziness. Movies, television, recorded music are essentially passive media, at least as consumed by most of us. A book, even genre junk, requires a little work. The effort put into reading Dante is quantitatively different from reading a Lee Child novel. Qualitatively, too. Child’s prose is made to be read quickly, without bumps to slow things down along the way. I wonder how often his books are read more than once by his fans. One spends a lifetime reading Dante. (The Robert Pinsky translation this time around, after Ciardi, Singleton and Sisson, and paying more attention to the Italian.)   

 

John Poch is a poet who teaches at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. I’ve read little of his work but found an interesting essay, “Patience in Poetry,” he published in the Sewanee Theological Review in 2013. I'm sorry to say I can’t find an online link. Poch writes:

 

“The appreciation of the great poets, T. S.. Eliot says, ‘is a lifetime’s task, because at every stage of maturing you are able to understand them better.’ For Eliot these poets were Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and Virgil. Outside the task of taking on such expansive poets, any reader must take time to read a good poem. Unless lodged within the confines of a classroom, many will not set aside fifteen minutes for a poem.”

 

Today much poetry – and prose, for that matter – is designed for effortless consumption, to be spoon-fed like ice cream. Nothing can be done about that. I can’t convince anyone that Dante is worth the expenditure in time, energy, curiosity, learning and attentiveness he demands. I can’t tempt you with the rewards, which might sound too much like “Put some sugar on your broccoli.” Poch is very good on this:

 

“There are poems that we read in minutes. They are like most Hollywood entertainment. You witness them, perhaps have some small epiphany, and then you are done. You leave the page or the movie theater and move on to the next thing. But with a good film, you leave the theater reflecting on what just happened to you, how the characters, the plot, the cinematography, or even the costumes not only mirror but impinge upon your life, and this meditation continues well past the drive home and on through the next morning’s coffee.”

 

Poch’s ten-page essay is written as a set of linked digressions and is too rich for me to give you a fair taste. Along the way we encounter the Texas artist Robert Bruno, Colossians 1:10-11, Simone Weil, a meditation on “affliction,” Elizabeth Bishop, more Eliot, Yeats and an anecdote from Poch’s class in which a student asks, “Who’s to say if Dante or Shakespeare is better than anybody writing today?” The poet continues:

 

“With no verbal response from the other students, I replied as kindly as possible, ‘I’m to say. Any poet who has developed a sense of taste is to say.’”