Thread: Obscurity
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Unread 09-15-2017, 08:20 AM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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My basic rule is that I like enjoy obscurity if the process of unraveling it is pleasant, and dislike it if it feels like wading through sludge. It's generally more enjoyable when the poem has some kind of beauty, some pull of the language even before you understand it cognitively. Then the reading/unraveling experience is one of deepening pre-existing joys. If it's just dense without beauty, it's possible that attractions will reveal themselves on decoding, but why expect it? Why bother?

Authors I take to exemplify this beauty-before-understanding requirement include: Wallace Stevens, the few Ashbery poems I've read (the first few in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror), Geoffrey Hill.
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