"Surface" and "depth" are both metaphors when we're talking about poetry. It might be useful to speak more literally so that we know we're all talking about the same things.
By "surface" the posts above seem to mean "a single clear, literal meaning" or "the semantics and syntax that are usual in prose." When Barbara talks of "depth" she appears to mean the poem's main statement: the significance of particular, individual experience rather than the sweep of history.
Chris has a lot to say about technical matters, some of which I think of as surface, while others I think constitute depths. Sound devices like alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme; word play and double meanings; meter and its subtleties--those are surfaces as much as plain meanings are. Image and description, especially when they start to shade into allusion, stop being purely surface for me. The poems Chris points to as deep--as containing things for the reader to discover under the plain meaning accessible at first reading--aren't all favorites of mine (though I love some of them dearly) because I happen to prefer the gobsmacking kind of poem to the deep-thought kind. "Deep" can just as well be interpreted to mean "profoundly moving" rather than "multivalent." Do we know which we want here?
Even "accessible" is a word we could argue about. Your "accessible" might be my "impenetrable." I sling around bits of Latin in poems, and some of my old high school friends who bought my book out of curiosity were baffled by those words; on the other hand, I'm left in the dust by references to up-to-the-minute pop culture stuff.
This being the Mastery board, we're supposed to talk here about the greats. But to me, the more interesting part of Barbara's topic is contemporary poets and whether any of them succeed without making the perfect literal sense that Barbara seems to be asking for.
|