[Don Jones]

Well, I am not the final arbiter of what is accessible and what in contrast is obscure, but my placing Felix Dennis at one end and Geoffrey Hill on the other is not a bad attempt.

To make a clearer case of an ideal balance between the two extremes, I just thought of our very own Wendy Videlock. Now she is a very literary writer in that she knows her stuff, yet her poetry is accessible and very enjoyable to read. Plus, like Dickinson, her hero, she makes you ponder what is written. More than once I have had to re-read a Videlock poem numerous times to get beyond her simple diction floating on the surface of her poems. Her simplicity beckons beyond its sheer and squeaky clean surface.

She is a wonder that Wendy. Perhaps she is at the mid-point between the two chaps mentioned above? Again, I'm not making final judgments.

Perhaps, to echo the other thread to which this is a parallel twin, the issue is how much literature is behind a text. I had a Russian literature professor who once said that "literature takes more from literature than from life." I gave him a scowl to which he said in front of my fellow students, "screw you!" A man after my own heart. We became friendly after that and had at least one chat about literature. Good man. Good memory. My take at the time was that literature takes more, or at least as much, from life as it does from literature--as Felix Dennis seems to do.

In reference to poetry that may be less accessible we may also speak of style or how the language is used. Not the way the language is expected to be used but how it is reshaped to spark thrilling insights and associations. Helen Vendler once wrote, I paraphrase, "a great poet is first a poet of the language." This can mean a number of things but from her admittedly ivory tower perspective she means that the "greats" imprint their style and manner onto the language, that they in effect forever change they way we read the language and they way it can be used.

Geoffrey Hill in contrast to Dennis and Videlock is obviously deeply embedded in the mesh not only of the history of the English language and its ocean of texts but of other languages as well (the Joycean revolution). I admit I love being challenged but that could mean a poem difficult on its surface or one with a riptide in clear waters, which pulls you out into unannounced depths - like Ms. Videlock's poetry.