I'm not sure why Zuk says that easy poetry must use either rhyme or meter. There's plenty of free verse that easily meets his remaining criteria for easy poetry. Some of those poems have recently been quoted on another thread, in particular a couple of poems by Kunitz that are certainly easy and natural and comprehensible but which do not employ either rhyme or meter. And there are many, many other examples that could be mentioned, e.g., Robert Hayden's "Those Sunday Morning", one of the best poems I know, or most of Walt Whitman. After Zuk properly sets up Jorie Graham and John Ashbery as the poster children for difficult poetry, he fails to fill in the blanks and show us why Kunitz, Levine, Lux, Matthews, the free verse of Roethke, Walt Whitman, etc., are not practitioners of easy poetry.
He also fails to take into account some of the joys of obscurity, discussed in another recent thread here. Or to confront the type of poetry that requires a bit of work to get close to, but then goes down as smoothly as does easy poetry on first reading. It took me years to get comfortable with Emily Dickinson, for example, but once I sort of "cracked the code" she turned into one of the poets I am most comfortable with.
In short, I found much in the Zuk article to be sympathetic to, and his affection for Frost is hard to fault, but I didn't find his reasoning all that convincing, and his essay comes across to me more as propoganda for a certain approach to poetry than as a reasoned argument. It's an approach I'm quite fond of, of course, but it's not the only approach, and not the only approach taken by various poets I suspect we all admire.
|