I was at a literary festival in Montreal this past weekend, and I met a man – middle-aged, with a white beard, Canadian – who asked what I wrote. When I explained that poetry lay at the heart of my writing project, he grimaced: “Ah, poetry. I can’t understand it. And I no longer seek it out.”
Early – in my twenties, as a student – I swore to myself that I would never write a poem that I myself didn’t understand. This has proved more complex at times than one might imagine.
The fact is, I’ve spent a good deal of my life teaching “difficult” poetry to students – from T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens to Charles Wright and Louise Glück. I still gravitate naturally to poets like Frost and Seamus Heaney, poets I have very little trouble “following.” But I appreciate the complexity – the necessary difficulty – inherent in some verse, which in its obscurities pushes toward the boundaries of thought and feeling.
My sense is that, at their best, Eliot and Pound, Stevens, and others in the camp of difficulty, move toward a beautiful clarity. I love moments in The Waste Land, in Four Quartets, where Eliot achieves a kind of pellucid beauty – in the latter more than the former, these passages abound. He himself addressed the difficulty of writing in “East Coker,” where he notes that “each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.” I understand that only too well.
His friend Pound actually crumbled in middle age into deep obscurities. The Cantos are general a mess. But I’ve spent a good deal of time with his Cantos, and I do so partly to treasure those breakthroughs into bright light, as in LXXXI, where he writes:
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
There is a stately radiance in passages like this.
Wallace Stevens, of course, can be mind-bogglingly complex, and it requires a huge effort to move through even the best of his poems. Yet I love it when he gathers his wits and writes with absolute clarity and force, as in the last stanza of “Sunday Morning” – an early poem – or in those very late poems where he strips reality of its caked mud, where “After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things.” Stevens seems to me among the finest poets in the language, and I keep his Collected Poems near my writing desk for refreshment, inspiration. I wouldn’t like my life as much without “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Of Modern Poetry,” “The Rock,” and so forth. In a strange way the verbal and intellectual difficulties in these poems makes them re-readable. I keep going back to find them, to see what I’ve missed. And there is always something fresh to find in this verse, where one does find clarity. And yet, as he says in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.” No, not that. “It is a visibility of thought, / In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”
I love the idea of “hundreds of eyes” all seeing “at once.” It’s as if the readership of all eternity trained their eyes on his poem.
A plain sense of things – that lovely phrase of Stevens -- is what I treasure. But sometimes you can’t get there without having moved through dark passages, confusion, clutter. I sense this myself as, over forty or more years, I’ve tried to write plainly, clearly.
It’s very difficult to write clearly, just as it’s difficult to see clearly. I write about the process in “Lend an Ear,” a poem where looking for clarity I liken to walking in the thick of woods:
I move along the ground,
through wiry brush, picking my way,
talking my way
through quiet stretches, word
by word, building a path
toward an opening, where I might say
some things that matter,
fill a silence that insists
in sounding like itself and nothing more.
I’ve always written a lot of lines of poetry in my notebooks – filled page after page with often incoherent scribbling. But I feel an obligation, when I’m actually gathering the lines into a poem that might one day see the light of day, to write in a way that will appeal to the eye and ear of the reader, and will not seem impenetrable.
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