More "Poetry? What? Are you kidding?"
Recently, I wrote a piece about how people can be hoodwinked into believing bad, even incomprehensible poetry is good. And that they can be made to feel less than smart for not recognizing this so-called quality, much less comprehending said poetry.
Thank God for someone like the writer Mary Karr who has the guts to say, simply, that some poetry is, indeed, incomprehensible. Just as you thought it was. It’s critics who make you feel dumb. Which you are most certainly not.
Finding your own way in literature and art in general can be difficult. But it can be hindered by critics who are always ready to tell you what you don’t know or understand.
Take the case of Robert Frost’s celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Most likely you know it, or have heard of it. It has those famous last lines, “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”
Well, leave it to a critic to tell you that you don’t know what this poem means. Maybe you thought you did. But…no!
David Orr, a poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, tells us that, look, “the poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”
You didn’t know that? What’s the matter with you?
And, by the way, the fact that Robert Frost is immensely popular? Loved by so many? Orr tells us, “This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable.”
Does it make you uncomfortable that Frost is known and read by so many people? It doesn’t? Well, maybe you’re not up to Orr’s standards, dear reader. Hang your head.
To blazes with critics. Yes, you can learn from them, but, as Chico Marx said about Harpo once, “He’s honest. But you have to watch him.”
The writers I trust who write about literature are other writers. In terms of Robert Frost, I’d suggest, Homage to Robert Frost by Nobel Prize-winning fellow poets, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Or the poet Randall Jarrell’s appreciations of Frost in his book, Poetry and the Age.
Those blokes will steer you right. If, in fact, you need steering, which you may not. Don’t let the Orr’s of the world get into your head. So many critics write from their brain and not from their heart. They make arguments, not celebrations. They have a motive in their writing, and that motive is not always to help you grasp the poem.
Career, maybe?
Is some good poetry difficult? Yes, it is. Because it’s trying to express the inexpressible.
But you don’t need me to tell you that.
Happy holidays!
Grateful I came along when Randall Jarrell was poet in residence at UNCG there. Some of my most memorable education in literature! Just maybe you take two paths. Take one don’t like it and try the other! David “Downer”! Otherwise Happy Holidays!
My favorite incomprehensible poet is the late John Ashbery, much acclaimed, much awarded, much praised, and still utterly incomprehensible, quite deliberately.