G - What trouble with poetry&;#063;

The approach to poetry as performance is not one I am comfortable
with. It implies we are to expect the poet, a figure traditionally of
low public profile and little income, to compete with cinema and music
- to instantaneously woo us with verbal pyrotechnics and profundity. I
have no problem with verbal pyrotechnics and profundity, but we have
plenty of that to go round. Profundity especially seems all to easy to
trip over, if you read a newspaper suited to your politics.

The complaint that poetry is boring therefore doesn't strike me as
relevant. For most people I know, all poetry is boring and overrated.
The whole sorry lot. Not worth bothering with. What's the point? And I
don't believe those people are missing out by not reading poetry
either. Even for those I know, including myself, who like poetry very
much, the vast majority remains boring. Inaccessible even. This is not
the point, so far as I see it. Long may it continue to bore and
alienate people - long may the poet be a lowly figure, and long may we
have to trawl through poetry collections to find something worth our
while.

Because this state of affairs is not due to most poets being incapable
of writing effectively, but due to the nature of poetry, as a mode of
discourse, as a practice more akin to conversation than to fireworks.
Poetry is a channel of communication far more pure and focused than the
novel or the screenplay. It relies less on techniques of manipulation
and more on intuitiveness, on the poet's ability to be honest, rather
than cunning. It seems natural and appropriate therefore that we will
only ever fall in love with a handful of poets, maybe a handful of
poems, and that we can expect to enjoy all poetry no more than we can
expect to be friends with everyone we meet. Those people that love
poetry as a whole, rather than finding they love only a fraction of it,
are more likely to be enamoured with the process of language than with
the 'heart' of the piece.

As a trainee academic, I can understand that. I enjoy the investigation
of language too, to an extent. I see no problem in poems whose meaning
can only be unearthed through rigorous discourse - in fact, the most
vital work often survives due to its ambiguity - due to the potential
for radically different people to interpret it in radically different
ways. This is, as far as I can see, the principle reason why
Shakespeare is such a vast and intriguing subject for analysis. That he
is enduringly popular too is largely connected with his dramatic skill.
Should the poet be a dramatist?

I also have one foot firmly in the territory of your average reader,
who would rather 'feel' the worth of what he is reading, than examine
it. This is why the only volumes of poetry I keep reading are Cohen,
Layton and a handful of others. They're the only ones that really sock
me like that - if I were a reviewer, I'd claim that Cohen and Layton
write poetry that socks you like no other. That's not to say this is
true of any reader other than myself, let alone *every* other reader. I
think it is down to me as much as Cohen and Layton. In fact, I don't
think I'd like it as much if I didn't feel they were more for me than
the majority. The comparison is important - I see no reason for a poet
to write with the firm intention of contacting everyone in the world.
We aren't a predictable, dribbling mass. What's wrong with a medium
that works through our differences, rather than our similarities? There
needs to be a balance, of course - but the pleasure of poetry is, for
me, distinctive because of it's privacy. How well we understanding it
is not just a feature of our intelligence, our ability to solve
puzzles, but our experiences. Images that rise from the page like
holograms for one person could be dead in the water to myself. Obscure
little lines that make no apparent logical sense may delight me for no
discernible reason. The poem doesn't have to be a code - and obscurity
does not prove that it has been written as a code.

So I sit between, say, R. Jaunsen, who's piece inspired me to write
this, and Bryan Appleyard. Jaunsen takes the view that the vitality of
poetry comes from being instantly understandable. Appleyard claims that
a poor education is responsible for the populous choosing what he sees
as the 'wrong' favourite books, the unacademic ones. Jaunsen wants
poetry to be rendered accessible through greater simplicity, while
Appleyard sees it as *our* fault that we cannot access it, a fault that
must be redressed. Defying them both, I would not want poetry to be any
less obscure, and I would not want the population to be made to
comprehend it. I don't see any reason to push the two together, so that
we all agree on who the good poets are. Disagreement is vital - privacy
of experience is vital. The rarity of poems that sock us in the brain
is the very reason the practice of reading and writing poetry is unique
to me. The moment I understand poems in exactly the same way as
everyone else, I'll declare it pointless.