POETRY INTERNATIONAL III
Feature
The Mystique of the Difficult Poem
Steve Kowit
When I was about fifteen I fell in love with Hart
Crane. The poems in White Buildings, The Bridge
and Key West shimmered with the most fragile
and delicate poignance. It was the very music of
the soul's anguish. As for Crane's suicide, that
was icing on the cake: it made the work even more
tragic, more unbearably gorgeous. The fact that I
had only the vaguest idea what he was talking
about, and sometimes not even that, bothered me
hardly at all until I was in my twenties and the pure
music of Crane began to seem less enticing than
the work of poets who, in addition to their
engaging linguistic skills, actually seemed to have
something coherent to say. Although Crane's
pervasive obscurity was more tolerable than that
of poets who were less exquisite musicians, l had
by then read enough incomprehensible poetry to
know that I wanted something more. I wanted
marvelous music to be sure, stunning figures, an
imaginative linguistic playfulness that was
everywhere inspired and surprising, but I also
wanted poems that spoke to me with thrilling
precision and insight. The "ambiguities" that the
New Critics imagined to be at the center of poetic
craft seemed almost always to weaken rather than
strengthen my experience of the poem. Though
my first reading of a poem is likely to take pleasure
in the language, the tonalities, the music and
linguistic sparkle, the intelligence and taste behind
the phrasing, nonetheless, I find myself unlikely to
finish reading a poem if it becomes apparent that
the poet has no intention of communicating much
of anything beyond all that language, all that
music. Far be it from me to invade his privacy. If I
want pure music I can listen to Palestrina and Sam
Cooke.
 At about the same time as my uneasiness
over modernist incoherence was growing, Allen
Ginsberg, himself still a young man, was
beginning to publish a poetry that was more fierce,
emotionally charged, and appealingly human than
anything I had read from his more staid and
conventional contemporaries. And not the least of
his virtues was that he was perfectly coherent. The
stuff wasn't filled with footnotable literary allusions
and hopelessly gnarled syntax and untrackable
metaphoric acrobatics. "Howl" opened up a
territory, at least for me, that the modernists had
spent the first half of the century trying to close off.
Suddenly the doors of possibility had been flung
wide open. There was plenty of freedom, plenty of
room to move around and to do what the avant
garde had never dared to do--write poems in
coherent English.
 And then, when I was twenty-seven, I moved
to the West Coast and picked up Robinson
Jeffers, and was stunned anew. He was as
wonderful a musician as any of the modernists I'd
read, easily as fine and conscious a craftsman, but
his poems, like Ginsberg's, were perfectly
understandable. Jeffers' music was certainly not
as ecstatic or intoxicating as Hart Crane’s, but
then again he never seemed ornamental,
precious, histrionic; he was never without flesh
and substance. Jeffers not only had something of
moment to say but he managed to say it, as had
Ginsberg, without resorting to a hundred
subterfuges, misdirections, ambiguities.
Moreover, Jeffers' vision was larger by far than
that of his contemporaries, those high modernists
who had dominated American poetry during the
first half of the twentieth century.
 Of course, in the background of my life, there
had always been Whitman: larger and wiser than
any poet had been before or has been since, and
everywhere luminously clear. But somehow,
perhaps because he was not of my century, or
because he was a poet of such singular genius,
his ability to speak with the utmost clarity about
even the most subtle and all but inexpressible
matters hadn't been able to serve me as a model.
Under the influence of Whitman, Ginsberg and
Jeffers, the canonical American poets, with their
inordinate love of difficulty, began to lose their
luster. I became profoundly suspicious of the
whole modernist enterprise. As a fledgling poet I
had written enough high-flown gibberish myself to
know its seductions. Though I would continue to
be read occasional poems and passages in
poems that were thrilling, however inexplicable,
the business of writing incoherent poetry seemed
tiresome, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
 This, I fully realize, is a minority opinion, at
least among poets, academics and critics. Though
I imagine the vast bulk of the reading public feels
much as I do--hence their indifference to
contemporary poetry--I suspect many in the trade
will find such an attitude appalling, for
impenetrability is still widely admired. A recent
review in The New York Review of Books claims,
for example, as though it were a sign of the poet's
talent and distinction, that Eugenio Montale "will
lead commentators into all kinds of difficulty when
it comes to establishing the content of many of the
poems." The reviewer, discussing at length a
particular twelve-line poem from Montale's early
collection, Cuttlefish, happily admits that he has
almost no idea what it means, though it is one of
Montale's "simplest" lyrics. "What, overall, is the
poem about?" he asks. "Even with this simplest of
lyrics, the essential nub winds off into a cloud of
possibilities." But this unclarity at the "essential
nub" of so many Montale poems is, so the
reviewer assures us, among the poet's chiefmost
virtues. The genius of Montale's work is achieved
through "a prodigious density encouraging ever
more complex levels of consciousness, and
evoking the finest shadings of emotion colored by
every variety of thought." The reviewer, Tim Parks,
is a knowledgeable reader of Montale's poetry,
and his praise of poetic incomprehensibility is not
at all unusual among those who read poetry
seriously. Nonetheless, if you look at his assertion
closely, you will see that it is little more than a
sophisticated version of the bemused college
freshman's belief that a poem isn't really
supposed to mean anything at all, so that the
reader can have the pleasure of making it mean
whatever he wants it to mean. When Tim Parks
reminds us that "poetry in this century has become
more cryptic, more private, more untranslatable,"
there is, in his voice, no hint of reproach. This
assertion, that "difficulty" is one of modernism's
defining virtues, has been so frequently injected
into the body of contemporary aesthetics that it
has become an unchallenged and toxic part of
its bloodstream.
 In The Best American Poetry of 1990, Jorie
Graham makes perhaps the most eloquent,
lengthy and detailed recent defense of difficult and
indeterminate verse. In one typical passage she
writes:
 When we experience a loosening of setting or
point of view, and a breakdown of syntax's
dependence on closure, we witness an opening
up of the present-tense terrain of the poem, a
privileging of delay and digression over progress.
 This opening up of the present moment as a
terrain outside time--this foregrounding of the
field of the "act of the poem"--can be explained in
many ways. We might consider the way in which
the idea of perfection in art seems to be called into
question by many of our poets. On the one hand,
some might argue today, the notion of perfection
serves ultimately to make an object not so much
ideal as available to a marketplace, available for
ownership--something to be acquired by the act
of understanding.
 In this passage, Graham is recommending
not just the virtues of being "indefinite" about the
poem's setting, but the value of employing a
syntax that guarantees that the reader will be
confused about anything the poet might be trying
to say. The tactical advantage of this seems to be
that if readers have no idea what you're talking
about and are unable to pay attention to either the
narrative or the ideas (because, in fact, the poet
has refused to articulate any), they will be forced
to attend to "the field of the 'act of the poem'," that
is, I take it, to the manner of its saying: the
phrasing, juxtapositions, music, diction, imagery
and such. This, I assume, is what she means by
"an opening up of the present-tense terrain of the
poem," and what she means by suggesting, in a
phrase that seems somewhat inflated for its
occasion, that such poems are "outside time."
Apparently, if there is no narrative, no temporal
instance that is being described, the poem is,
therefore, "timeless." Finally, she seems to
suggest that the idea of a "perfect" poem, or the
attempt to write such a poem, produces something
that, by virtue of being accessible to the general
reader, becomes no more than a contemptible
"commodity." This notion betrays a patrician
haughtiness that one imagines Graham would be
loathe to confess more directly. Elsewhere in that
essay, she writes:
The genius of syntax consists in its permitting
paradoxical, "unsolvable" ideas to be explored, not
merely nailed down, stored, and owned; in its
permitting the soul-forging pleasures of thinking to
prevail over the acquisition of information called
knowing.
For Graham, thinking and exploration seem to
mean no more than being vague and ambiguous
enough so that neither the author nor the reader
can recognize, let alone explore, any genuine idea
or perception. This, of course, is not what we tend
to mean by genuine exploration of ideas but is only
the facade of such exploration, and indeed what is
being recommended in her essay seems nothing
but a poetry of facades. Her introductory essay,
made up almost entirely of this sort of piffling, goes
on for some fourteen pages, all to glorify the lofty
desire of the poet to resist making sense. This is
the open-ended, exploratory, multivoiced,
indeterminate, opaquely textured, disjunctive and
defamiliarizing, closure-free world of postmodern
poetics. And if it promotes a poetry that is "free of
any user," it augurs as well a poetry that is likely to
be free of many readers.
 While Graham wants others to share her
heady excitement over such verse, it is apt to
prove a difficult sell, though her own experience of
such poetry, she insists, is nothing short of
redemptive. Here, in her somewhat overheated
prose, she captures (or invents, depending on
your view of her credibility) the rapturous, revival-
meeting spirit that overcomes her when she
listens to the glossolalia of incomprehensible
verse:
the motion of the poem as a whole resisted my
impulse to resolve it into "sense" of a rational kind.
Listening to the poem, I could feel my irritable
reaching after fact, my desire for resolution,
graspable meaning, ownership....It resisted. It
compelled me to let go. The frontal, grasping
motion frustrated, my intuition was forced awake. I
felt myself having to "listen" with other parts of my
sensibility, felt my mind being forced back down
into the soil of my senses. And I saw it was the
resistance of the poem--its occlusion, or
difficulty--that was healing me, forcing me to
privilege my heart, my intuition--parts of my
sensibility infrequently called upon in my everyday
experience in the marketplace of things and
ideas....
 Mercifully less decorative is Graham's
discussion, near the beginning of her essay,
wherein she admits--though only, I would guess,
as a rhetorical ploy--that she feels some
uneasiness about the enterprise of writing poetry
that resists being understood. Here, it is
interesting to note, the misty cerebral romance of
the rest of her essay is nowhere to be found. Here
she writes in cogent English--perhaps because
she has something unequivocal to say:
Yet surely the most frequent accusation leveled
against contemporary poetry is its difficulty or
inaccessibility. It is accused of speaking only to
itself, of becoming an irrelevant and elitist art form
with a dwindling audience....For how can we hear
that "no one reads it," or that "no one understands
it," without experiencing a failure of
confidence....We start believing that it is
essentially anachronistic. We become anecdotal.
We want to entertain. We believe we should
"communicate."

In the lexicon of modernism, "anecdotal,"
"entertain," and "communicate" are indeed
beneath contempt. They stand with "self-

expression" and "sincerity" as the sort of sorry
business in which only the novice and the inept
engage. But if poets have far more noble goals, as
Graham assures us they have, than to concern
themselves with so tawdry a matter as making
their poems intelligible, whatever these goals
might be they seem too ephemeral and rarified to
attract the common reader, who is likely to find
behind the claim little of substance and nothing of
interest.

 Jorie Graham, one of our most praised
contemporary poets, represents the aesthetic
thinking of those who, like Parks, find difficulty a
decided virtue. Indeed, she envisions a poetry that
is not merely difficult but indeterminate, that is to
say, incomprehensible. And if Graham's rationale
seems a bit murky, what is one to say of
something like this, the opening half-sentence of
an essay by Charles Bernstein, a leading
"theoretician" among the American
postmodernists:
Not "death" of the referent--rather a recharged
use of the multivalent referential vectors that any
word has, how words in combination tone and
modify the associations made for each of them,
how 'reference' then is not a one-on-one relation
to an 'object' but a perceptual dimension that
closes in to pinpoint, nail down (this word),
sputters omnitropically (the in in the which of who
where what wells), refuses the build up of image
track/projection while, pointillistically, fixes a
reference at each turn...
 More reasoned and modest than Jorie
Graham's, and far less silly and dismissable than
Bernstein’s, is the defense of difficult poetry
recently set forth by by Donald Justice, who
argues that certain kinds of obscurity in poetry are
"not altogether destructive" ["Benign Obscurity,"
from Oblivion: On Writers and Writing, Story Line
Press, 1998]. The least persuasive of his
arguments is the curious notion that a poem
without "hidden meanings" is likely to be trivial or
frivolous, an assertion that he makes in passing
and does not bother either to explain or defend.
Nor does it seem likely, from anything his essay
suggests, that he would be able to. Though he
distinguishes a "benign" sort of obscurity from that
form of obscurity for which he has less indulgence-
-what he characterizes as the "blanketing fog that
can creep over everything"--he seems to be
saving his approval, for the most part, for a poetry
of magnificent music which makes the obscurity of
its text seem not only palatable but perfectly
appropriate, a part of the poem's necessary
texture--a quality without which the poem would
be something less imposing and less memorable
than it is. Justice, who makes such suggestions in
the most provisional and tempered language,
argues that "one may be led on, and cheerfully
enough at times, by precisely one's failure to
grasp what is being said. And there is the
excitement, meanwhile, of being in beyond one's
depth." Though it is possible, I suppose, that an
opaque passage or phrase in an otherwise clear
text can be intriguing, and can add a certain color
and excitement to a poem, I am not fully convinced
of it. Though the joy of pure poetic music and
language certainly has its rewards, they seem
ultimately smaller rewards than such poetry would
have were the same quality of language tethered
to intelligible subject matter and perception.
Imagine Hart Crane, for example, writing a poetry
of the same verbal richness and intensity, but one
that was filled with brilliant and fully lucid
descriptions, narratives, characterizations, and
insights. I hardly imagine it would be a lesser
poetry.
 
Justice makes an even more interesting
argument about the success of many of the more
obscure poems of Hopkins, Hart Crane and Dylan
Thomas when he suggests that "the singular
power of such poems seems to penetrate the
emotional system directly, without ever having to
pass through the understanding." But this, it
seems to me, is to make too much of the fact that
one can catch the flavor, subject, attitude and
emotional tone of a passage with only a few verbal
cues. That certainly seems true. But with the
exception of a few heady examples--poets of
glorious musical skill such as the ones Justice
cites--it is hard for me to think of many poets who
can carry the day on their musicianship alone. It is
to suggest, I think, that the content of poems really
is an unimportant aspect. Perhaps that is true for
Justice. I know it is not true for me.
 His third argument is that the obscurity of a
narrative poem such as E. A. Robinson's "Eros
Turanos" might, perhaps, be "expressive of the
very understanding the poem is intended to carry."
By this he seems to mean that the poem's
narrative unclarity might be rooted in--that is, it
might be a consciously formal or strategic
correlative for--the moral complexity of the
situation it purports to describe. I confess at once
that the suggestion seems farfetched, and the
very fact that Justice himself is so uneasy about
postulating it leads me to believe he's about as
unconvinced by it as I am. I suspect, rather, that
he so much admires both those parts of the
Robinson poem that are clear and the prosodic
and writerly skill of the whole that he has allowed
his good common sense to be swayed by a
number of other critics who admire the poem, in
part, for the very reason that it doesn't entirely
make sense. To my taste, Robinson's best poems
are, however subtle in their narrative strategies,
nonetheless perfectly clear. When he fails, which
is often enough, it is because of an inability or
unwillingness to tell his story with sufficient clarity.
"Eros Turanos" has fine passages and, here and
there, admirable moments of complex
psychological portraiture but, in the end, the poem
collapses beneath the weight of its unclarity.
Although Justice wonders if those critics might be
right that its very unclarity is a virtue, he seems
uneasy about the proposition and not entirely
convinced, and his essay ends with the most
modest of claims. For certain poems or certain
kinds of poems a degree of obscurity, he posits, is
simply unavoidable, and with such poems "the
obscurity is no handicap, perhaps even has its
uses--can we claim this much?"

 It seems to me that the widespread critical
belief that poetry needn't communicate has had
disastrous consequences for the art, and that a
shockingly large part of the poetry of our own time
is, with its blanketing fog of obscurity, altogether
unreadable. In the end, neither avant-garde
Language Poets like Charles Bernstein nor well-
meaning postmodernists like Jorie Graham are to
be blamed for this mess. Children of the age of
theory, the postmodernists argue that
communication isn't really possible anyhow and
that no reading of a "text" can be "privileged" over
any other: that is to say, language itself is
indeterminate. But this idea is by no means the
radical break with the modernist tradition that it
might at first seem. It is, rather, its natural
extension: postmodernist "indeterminacy" being
the logical extension--or at least the reductio ad
absurdum--of the defining modernist penchant
for difficulty. It wasn't Charles Bernstein, after all,
but T. S. Eliot who suggested that "meaning" was
a questionable expedient that we could well do
without, nothing more than meat thrown to the
watchdogs while the burglar robbed the house. It
need be said at once that Eliot never practiced
quite so radical a poetics as his remark suggests.
At its best, which is a good deal of the time, his
poetry, however nonlinear, is brilliantly coherent.
Though the various settings of a poem like
"Prufrock" continue to shift disconcertingly, in
Eliot's controlled hands the collaged,
unanchorable narrative, a fusion of interior
anxieties and exterior perceptions and assertions,
remains, however complex and novel, brilliantly
intelligible.

 By the Forties, the fashion for the difficult had
become so pervasive that the subject of
incoherence and indeterminacy rarely arose as a
significant issue in critical discourse. And although
a good number of our best poets are no longer
engaged in that sort of enterprise, and take
pleasure in writing a poetry that, however wild,
subtle and surprising, is perfectly lucid,
indecipherability is still much in vogue, as one can
prove by glancing through just about any
contemporary anthology or poetry journal. This
opacity, which has effectively killed off any
possibility of a large American readership, has
been a reigning fashion in conventional poetry for
almost a century now, and while it is still common
to hear the virtues of difficulty extolled in the
critical literature, it is exceedingly rare to find even
the most tepid dissent. If there are serious poets
and critics who are appalled by this facet of the
contemporary aesthetic, they have been politic
enough to keep their mouths shut. But its absence
from serious consideration is probably less a
matter of conscious decision than the fact that the
ideology is so pervasive it has become an all but
unchallengable assumption, as if difficulty were a
necessary function of what poetry is, a
fundamental condition of the art itself. Which is
why, I suppose, the issue has not been a
significant feature of any of the poetry pie fights of
the past few decades. Fought out at the edges of
the Great American Kulturkampf--that low-
intensity protracted warfare between an
ascendant conservatism and a liberalism that dare
not speak its name--these periodic skirmishes,
often emblematic of the larger national conflict
being waged over America's soul, reveal a good
deal about who we are and what we believe. A few
years back, for example, Joseph Epstein, in a bit
of conservative nostalgia, provoked an amusing
squabble by suggesting that our verse had notably
degenerated since the era of Eliot and Stevens.
Another battle raged over the "neo-formalists,"
who wish to return us to the prosodic rigors of the
past. At the same time, there was the marginally
memorable flap over the deconstructionist
aesthetic of the Language Poets who were either
registering a monumental epistemic breakthrough,
as they themselves loudly proclaimed, or were
merely "long on theory," as Allen Ginsberg once
pointedly suggested. Apparently, many
mainstream poets who smirk at the relentless
incoherence of those avant-gardists delude
themselves with the comforting notion that their
own brand of highly complex, disjunctive, and
imagistically dense poetry is, if one only reads
sensitively enough, perfectly intelligible.
 In the latest poetry brouhaha, Harold Bloom,
a tireless advocate of difficulty in poetry, has
registered his pique at the new multicultural
barbarism that is undermining the Western
intellectual tradition. With the universities' urgency
to teach an inclusive, gender-conscious, multi-
ethnic curriculum, it is Bloom's fear that the
"major" poets and novelists of the English tradition
will be abandoned by the academy in favor of
undistinguished figures whose only virtue is that
they are representatives of various "under-
represented" minorities. At the same time, so
Bloom would have it, the critical establishment has
been seriously undermined by post-structuralist,
and decidedly anti-canonical notions of literature,
language and culture. American poetry is self-
destructing, he insists, under the influence of "the
French diseases, the mock-feminists, the
commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the
hosts of new historicists and old materialists." In
his essay, which appears as his introduction to
The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997
(a later volume of the same series in which Jorie
Graham's essay appeared), Bloom is indignant at
the dumbing-down of the university curriculum as
indicated by the widespread sanctioning of cultural
studies departments: that is to say, all those Black,
Hispanic, Feminist and Queer arrivistes who have
managed to elbow their way into seats at the
academic banquet. More particularly, he is in a
dither over the likes of Lady Mary Chudleigh and
Anne Killigrew having insinuated themselves into
those hernia-inducing tomes that undergraduates
are forced to lug from building to building on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. This reprehensible
attack on the Western canon, he assures us, is a
byproduct of "cultural guilt" and successful
hectoring by "The School of Resentment."
Apparently, in tilting toward affirmative action set-
asides--toward homosexuals, women,
undeserving poets of color, the politically correct
and hyphenated-Americans--these offending
anthologies have been insidiously undermining
the foundations of our civilization.
  Not surprisingly, in the many rejoinders that
have been made to his broadside--most notably
in the Spring '98 Boston Review, which was
devoted to such responses--he is roundly
attacked by a number of poets for his cultural
conservatism and, by a few postmodernists, for
his aesthetic conservatism. Carol Muske, in the
brightest and most eloquent of those published
responses, defends the revisionist Heath and the
revised Norton by recalling, during her college
days,
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.
Several of the other Boston Review respondents
take Bloom to task for one or another of his blind
spots. But it seems to me both significant and
lamentable that not a single essayist responding
to Bloom took issue with what I take to be his most
pernicious assertion: "Authentic American poetry,"
he declares in that bilious introduction,
is necessarily difficult. . . our situation needs
aesthetic and cognitive difficulty. . . it is our elitist
art, though that elite has nothing to do with social
class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain,
race, or sect. "We live in the mind," Stevens said.
This insistence on poetic opacity is questioned
only by those postmodernists among The Boston
Review respondents who insist that poetry ought
to be more incomprehensible yet.
 Apparently what Bloom finds objectionable
among the deconstructionist critics, those
pernicious purveyors of "the French diseases," is
their subversively anti-hierarchic beliefs about
literature and culture, and has nothing to do with
the macaronic density of their language. This is
hardly surprising: the love of jargon-saturated,
dizzyingly complex rhetorical footwork which
those infected with the "French diseases" find so
attractive is not, after all, so different from the kind
of academic flapdoodle upon which his own critical
reputation rests.

 As for his insistence on the very necessity for
difficulty, Bloom is in the absurd position of having
to claim that even Walt Whitman was, "above all
else, a very difficult poet," while asserting with a
straight face that Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and
John Ashbery are Whitman's true heirs. In order to
spin Whitman in the image of poets so utterly
inimical to his spirit, he simply stands Whitman on
his head. On an earlier occasion he had declared
that Whitman's statement of ecstatic longing, "To
touch my person to some one else's is about as
much as I can stand," was the poet's confession
that he found human touch repulsive. An
unreconstructed Freudian, Bloom is capable of
making any statement mean what he wishes it to
mean. Freud's main technique for this kind of
convenient fast shuffle was "reaction formation," a
putative psychic mechanism that transformed
things into their opposites. When a patient said or
dreamed something that confounded the analyst's
interpretation, it was simply a reaction formation:
that is, the patient's meaning was the very
opposite of what it seemed to be. Thus, according
to Bloom, "Whitman's poetry generally does the
opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is
reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more
onanistic even than homoerotic." This, of course,
is embarrassing nonsense. As for living in one's
head, a la Wallace Stevens, that is precisely what
Whitman is at pains to warn us against. When he
tells us that he is "Both in and out of the game, and
watching and wondering at it"--a line Bloom
quotes in his essay--it is not, as that critic
assumes, to register the kind of self-conscious
alienation from life that his favorite modernists
display. Rather, the poet is declaring that he does
not live in thrall to the common delusions of the
ego, but has awakened into the unmediated world:
that he is not an intellect filled with attitudes and
opinions, but an empty, observing awareness. As
for "difficulty," Whitman proclaims: "I will not have
in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to
hang in the way between me and the rest like
curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not
the richest curtains." Against the corollary
modernist principle that poems are made of
words, not ideas, he memorably declares: "The
words of my poem nothing, the drift of it
everything." But the case of Whitman also offers to
us the cautionary example of the dangers of
canonical literary judgements: Our "best" poets
and critics, blind to his genius, dismissed him as a
vulgar eccentric, until the zeitgeist shifted in mid-
century and everyone suddenly noticed his
bearded figure towering above our literature.
 However, the most curious and provocative
portion of Bloom's essay was not his attack on
multiculturalism or his absurd revision of Whitman,
but his attack on Adrienne Rich, whose Best
American Poetry of 1996 was the only one of
David Lehman's annual series from which Bloom
did not draw work for his Best of the Best. Rich's
anthology is emblematic for Bloom of the wretched
state of literary affairs, exemplifying everything
that's wrong with the new affirmative action
poetics. It

is of a badness not to be believed, because it
follows the criteria now operative: what matters
most are the race, gender, sexual orientation,
ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be
poet. I ardently wish I were being hyperbolical, but
in fact I am exercising restraint....Bursting with
sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad
verse, and of much badness that is neither verse
nor prose.
 With this judgement at least three of the
Boston Review respondents unequivocally
concur: one, J. D. McClatchy, is an enthusiastic
advocate of difficult poetry. The other two,
Marjorie Perloff and Reginald Shepherd, disdain
meaning altogether. Perloff finds many of Rich's
choices "relentlessly PC...maudlin, self-righteous,
boring, and ultimately just plain incompetent." A
tireless champion of the poetry of impenetrability,
it is hardly surprising that she would find Rich's
penchant for the accessible, emotional and
socially engaged antithetical to her tastes. For
Perloff, any poetry that doesn't exhibit an
uncompromising indeterminacy smacks of the
platitudinous and sentimental: soap opera
masquerading as art. Not surprisingly, Perloff
faults Bloom, too, for his reactionary poetic tastes,
his inability to appreciate the "genuinely radical
poetry now being written," by which she means the
unabashedly incomprehensible writers whom she
has been championing for the past many years.
 McClatchy's criticism, less idiosyncratic than
Perloff's, is more telling for the fact that it shares
Bloom's particular elitist predilections. The first
poem in Rich's volume, written by a prisoner at the
Pelican Bay State Prison serving a twenty-two
year sentence for burglary, is, he declares, a piece
of "utter banality" and symptomatic of her volume
as a whole. With its "clutter of clichés,
sentimentality, confused syntax, and flailing
gestures," it is a poem that McClatchy finds
downright campy. An attempt to express the
dehumanizing horror of a prison notorious for its
systemic brutality, "In the Tombs," by Latif Asad
Abdullah, is indeed an unsuccessful poem, but not
because of sentimentality or platitudes. Rather, its
flaw is a more common one: the inability to make
its case with the incisive power that its subject
demands. 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. For
such writers any unarmored feeling is to be
avoided at all cost, a need that is likely to make the
distancing strategies of obliqueness and opacity
seem appealing. Given that pathology, one
understands why to such writers "sincerity"--a
word that both McClatchy and Bloom use as a
smirking pejorative--would seem threatening.
 Actually, Abdullah’s poem about Pelican
State--one of her collection’s few unpolished
pieces--is not at all symptomatic of the Adrienne
Rich anthology, while the weaknesses of Bloom's
book can, I believe, be fairly characterized by
McClatchy's own lengthy contribution to that
collection. 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. More ruinously,
the poem's narrative thread is wilfully obscure.
McClatchy, who is by no means an untalented
writer, and whose poems, though sometimes
uninteresting are almost always skillfully
composed, tells us in his little explanatory note at
the end of the volume that certain sections of "An
Essay on Friendship" will only be understood by
readers familiar with Renoir's film, Rules of the
Game. Clearly, then, the poet has only the most
minimal interest in communicating much of
anything with his reader: whether or not he is
understood is of little concern to him.
 Not far from McClatchy's endnote in the
Bloom anthology is another telling one, in which
Richard Wilbur wryly reports that after his wife had
read his poem "Lying," she remarked, "well, you've
finally done it; you've managed to write a poem
that's incomprehensible from beginning to end."
But immediately Wilbur assures us that on second
reading she found it "quite forthright" (no doubt
with a little cuing), and then tells us that he makes
no apology for the fact that the poem requires
several readings. "Provided it's any good, a poem
which took months to write deserves an
ungrudging quarter hour from the reader." But
Wilbur's scolding the reader for not spending
enough time puzzling out his poem misses the
point. One is reminded of Norman Mailer's
apology, some decades back, for having used as
an epigraph to one of his early collections of
essays the admonition: "Do not understand me too
quickly." Older and wiser, Mailer had come to
understand that if even experienced readers were
misapprehending him, the fault was his own:
clarity is the writer's responsibility, not the
reader's. Surely when Richard Wilbur's poems are
a joy to read, as they so often are, it is because
that exquisitely deft versification is the brilliant
vehicle for ideas and arguments rendered with
lapidary clarity. Here, for example, are the final
stanzas of that wonderful "Aubade," in which he
argues to his beloved that staying in bed is the
most reasonable of her options:
    Think of all the time you are not
  Wasting, and would not care to waste,
Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.
Think what a lot
    Of time, by woman's reckoning,
  You've saved, and so may spend on this,
  You who had rather lie in bed and kiss
Than anything.
    It's almost noon you say? If so,
  Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebud-theme of centuries of verse.
If you must go,
    Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
  And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some
fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.
 Though he believes adamantly that "strong
poetry is always difficult," it is noteworthy that
Harold Bloom includes in The Best of the Best a
good number of poems that are perfectly clear,
and these are the poems that are most likely to
raise the hair on the back of one's neck: poems by
May Swenson, Kay Ryan, Amy Clampitt, Allen
Ginsberg, Ed Hirsch, Philip Levine, and Molly
Peacock, among others. Donald Justice is
represented with a memorable elegy for Henri
Coulette in which the poet asks his friend to
"Come back and help me with these verses/
Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you
remember from life." Although Donald Hall has a
strained exercise in vatic rage, an ersatz-
Ginsbergian rant that strikes a note decidedly
false, it is followed by one of his exemplary poems,
this one about Jane Kenyon's dying, a poem that
is the very model of simplicity, clarity and
unadorned honesty. The two poems together
make a fine study in the dangers of the postured
and the virtues of the sincere, the authentically
felt. Also of note are two stunningly powerful and
perfectly accessible pieces by Louise Glück. In
"Vespers," the narrator argues with God for having
let her tomatoes die:
   ...I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in
consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am
responsible
for these vines.
 All told, Rich's anthology is just about as good
as Bloom's, its major virtue being that she has a
lively eye for the coherent and the unashamedly
human, the openly emotional and exuberant kind
of engaged poetry that many American poets have
been writing since the 60s. Were there
anthologies filled exclusively with the work of such
writers, American poetry would have a fighting
chance of regaining its rightful audience. Rich
assuredly does not agree with Bloom that the
aesthetic is an autonomous realm independent of
political and cultural ideologies, or that poetry is
ruined by social engagement, or that a less
rarified, intellectualized poetic is the death blow to
our literary culture. Not surprisingly, there is a
good deal less here of the mannered rhetoric that
pervades Bloom's choices and a good deal more
of a poetry awake to the world outside of the poet's
head. Since a good two-thirds of Rich's offerings
are by well-known, well-respected poets, and
since her volume contains, as he grudgingly
acknowledges, the work of several of the same
writers that appear in his own, Bloom's claim
against it is seriously undermined. Surely it was
not discerning taste but sheer petulance that kept
him from being able to acknowledge how many
fine poems she has brought together in her
collection. He might not have been able to
appreciate the emotional power of Raymond
Patterson's "Harlem Suite" or Luis Alberto Urrea's
long, rhapsodic, open-hearted elegy for his father,
not because he harbors any racism--he most
likely does not--but because that sort of gritty,
heart-centered, anti-intellectualized poetry, which
owes nothing to the tradition of Wallace Stevens,
is the sort for which he has little patience. Though
Bloom's abhorrence of explicit social compassion
might have made him immune to the powerful,
history-drenched poems of Alicia Ostriker and
Wang Ping, and to the fine, socially engaged ones
of Ann Winters, Chase Twitchell, Gary Soto and
Alma Villanueva--for compassion, like sincerity
and accessibility, is not a modernist virtue--there
are several pieces in her anthology that would
undoubtedly have interested him had he not been
in such high dudgeon. He would likely have been
drawn to W. S. Merwin's "Lament for the Makers,"
with its nicely jagged, Dunbar-esque rhythms and
off-rhymed couplets, especially given its generous
sprinkling of literary gossip, and it is hard to
believe he wouldn't have given serious
consideration to "Touch Me," a Stanley Kunitz love
poem that is surely going to find its way into
numerous anthologies of twentieth-century verse.
Both poems share the traditional metrical skills
that Bloom, for all his admiration for Ashbery, most
admires.
 Rich's anthology also contains finely made
pieces by Reynolds Price, Jane Kenyon, Naomi
Shihab Nye, Yusef Komunyakaa and half a dozen
others that would certainly have merited his
attention. She is to be congratulated for looking
beyond the rhetorical commonplaces of
conventional poetry and including pieces that are
far removed from the academic mainstream. Not
the least of the poems she chose for her anthology
is a sestina by Katherine Alice Power, an antiwar
radical who is presently serving an eight-to-twelve
year sentence for participating in a bank robbery
back in 1970 which ended in the murder of a
policeman. Her surrender in 1993 provoked
enormous national publicity and debate. Power's
impressive and touching sestina for her son is a
useful example of how to employ a form that even
in the hands of competent poets tends to sound
forced, formulaic and insincere. On the other
hand, the clunkers in the Rich anthology share
with Bloom's clunkers the same overriding flaw:
they're incomprehensible. And by this I do not
mean to suggest that clarity determines the quality
of poetry: most emphatically it does not. Surely
much of the most hilariously inept and amateurish
verse being written is perfectly intelligible. 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.
 And yet for certain poets and critics of our
time, as I have been at pains to point out, obscurity
is an overriding virtue. What kind of poetry is it,
then, that they want? What might it look and sound
like? In the texts I have been examining, the most
explicit answer to that question comes from
Reginald Shepherd, the third Boston Review
correspondent who, implicitly at least, can find
little merit in a poetry that is coherently engaged in
the world beyond language. Shepherd, like
Marjorie Perloff, rejects any poetry that makes so
much as a grain of sense, for such poetry,
according to him, refuses to "honor language,"
something that is done, apparently, by treating it
as an end in itself. Shepherd wants a poetry of
"strangeness and opacity," one that exhibits a
"resistance to communication... which restores
language to itself," criteria with which Perloff would
surely agree. Understandably, Shepherd is
reticent to attack Adrienne Rich's anthology
because it contains one of his own poems, so his
example of what poetry should not be is drawn
instead from Bloom's Best of the Best. He faults
Bloom for canonizing Amy Clampitt, whom he
characterizes as an erudite and amiable writer, but
one "for whom language has no independent
existence: she has something of greater or lesser
interest to 'say' and she says it more or less well.
But poetry is not versified thought... nor is it
amiable or well mannered." In reiterating the
aesthetic stance of the Language Poets, it seems
curiously off-point for Shepherd to single out Amy
Clampitt rather than a less exuberant poet. Surely
one hopes there was a reason for his choice
beyond the cute pun on her name, just the sort of
sophomoric "word-play" that postmodernists are
often unembarrasedly given to. But Shepherd
could not have chosen a more inappropriate
example. Surely there are few contemporaries
who seemed as utterly in love with the succulence
of words, the intoxicating pleasures of language. If
anyone of our era ought by rights to have been
characterized as a poet who was language-
centered, it is surely Amy Clampitt, a poet who
manages to be wildly intoxicating with her
language while remaining perfectly intelligible.
This is how "My Cousin Muriel," a poem about her
dying cousin that Bloom wisely chose to use for
The Best of the Best, begins:
From Manhattan, a glittering shambles
of enthrallments and futilities, of leapers
in leotards, scissoring vortices blurred,
this spring evening, by the punto in aria
of hybrid pear trees in bloom (no troublesome
fruit to follow) my own eyes are drawn to--
childless spinner of metaphor, in touch
by way of switchboard and satellite, for
the last time ever, with my cousin Muriel...
But this sort of delicious and truly language-
centered writing makes far too much sense for
Reginald Shepherd, who tells us in his essay that
poetry ought to be an escape from meaning.
Shepherd concludes his brief essay with four lines
from a contemporary poem that he admires
"because something is happening in them that
happens nowhere else." This is his exemplary
excerpt:
Vagrant, back, my scrutinies
The candid deformations as with use
A coat or trousers of one dead
Or as habit smacks of certitude.
 In the presence of such writing it is difficult to
know what to say. Surely in the prison house of
language, poets writing in this manner have opted
for solitary confinement. If one is going to "escape
from meaning" and foreground other qualities, one
would imagine that either music, striking linguistic
and figurative invention, or deft and original
phrasing would be evident. If one is going to be
excruciatingly difficult or downright
incomprehensible, we need in compensation other
virtues. One needs, at the very least, the intensity
and profound musical and linguistic skill of
authentic poetic composition. One thinks of the
evocative, heartbreaking music of Hart Crane, or
the coryambic and often rigorously measured
verse of Dylan Thomas, or the syntactically
wrenched and passionate strangeness of Vallejo,
or the hypnogogic dream-swirling Dionysian
difficulties of Hopkins or Berryman or Rimbaud or
Cesaire, or of Robert Lowell's early work with its
headlong velocity and gorgeously gnarled
intensities, or of the strange, disquieting magic we
encounter in someone like Antonin Artaud, for
whom surrealism was not so much a novel
technique as a desperate means of plumbing his
tormented depths. "Resistance to communication"
the passage Reginald Shepherd has quoted
certainly exhibits. But flattened of affect and bereft
of music, this kind of silliness doesn't even have
the virtue, any longer, of novelty. That such lines
restore language to itself seems questionable--to
put it mildly. Given that the defining property of
language is communicability, shouldn't this sort of
thing be called "Anti-Language 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. Our period's infatuation with the
opaque has been, in the end, a seriously
misdirected effort. The most eloquent response to
that wrong turning was made by Robinson Jeffers
more than seventy years ago, when the modernist
agenda had hardly begun and long before its
eccentric notions had come to dominate aesthetic
discourse. Prescient as ever, Jeffers wrote in the
introduction to his Random House Selected
Poems:
 Long ago, before anything included here was
written, it became evident to me that poetry--if it
was to survive at all--must reclaim some of the
power and reality that it was so hastily
surrendering to prose. The modern French poetry
of that time, and the most "modern" of the English
poetry, seemed to me thoroughly defeatist, as if
poetry were in terror of prose, and desperately
trying to save its soul from the victor by giving up
its body. It was becoming slight and fantastic,
abstract, unreal, eccentric; and was not even
saving its soul, for these are generally anti-poetic
qualities. It must reclaim substance and sense,
and physical and psychological reality....
 Another formative principle came to me from
a phrase of Nietzsche's "The poets? The poets lie
too much." I was nineteen when the phrase stuck
in my mind; a dozen years passed before it
worked effectively, and I decided not to tell lies in
verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel;
not to pretend to believe in optimism or
pessimism, or unreversible progress, not to say
anything because it was popular, or generally
accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles,
unless I myself believed it; and not to believe
easily. These negatives limit the field; I am not
recommending them but for my own occasions.
 Let us, by all means, have a poetry of the
most incandescent verbal pyrotechnics, of the
most restlessly experimental and original design.
Let us have poems that astonish the reader at
every turn. Let our poets attend to making it new
with nearly as much fervor as they attend to
making it true. But on those occasions when we
fail to communicate, let us no longer imagine we
have succeeded at something larger and grander.
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. Harold Bloom
notwithstanding, our situation demands aesthetic
and cognitive clarity.

 "They have the numbers, we the heights" is
the heroic epigraph Bloom uses for his dyspeptic
rant against those who would open the doors of
what he calls our "elitist art" and let in some air.
They are words attributed by Thucydides to the
Spartan commander at Thermopylae. No doubt
Bloom, our self-appointed Keeper of the Canon,
imagines himself the heroic captain of the last
small band of stalwart Western aesthetes, holding
the gates of the Temple of Art against the raucous
assaults of the parti-colored resenters, the Great
Unwashed. But the very mean-spiritedness of his
attack belies the pretense that he represents
some nobler and higher ground. The only heights
that the defenders of the aesthetic of difficulty
have to offer us are the heights of arrogance,
exclusivity, and self-aggrandizement, and the only
effect of composing one's poetry from such
heights is to insure that it remain chilly, windy, and
unlikely to be heard.

Steve Kowit lives in Potrero, California. His handbook for writing poetry,
In the Palm of Your Hand, is the best-selling book of its type at amazon.com.
He is currently at work on a non-fiction book about the mass illusions
we live by.