[Barbara Baig]

I have been fascinated by the discussions going on recently on a couple of threads, discussions which are raising questions about what "good poetry" is and what "contemporary poetry" is. Long-time Sphereans may heave resigned sighs--"oh, no, not THIS again!"--but I thought it might be interesting and useful to move the discussions into one place (away from comments on a particular poem) and have some conversation about these matters. (I hope I'm using the correct forum for this; if not, someone please let me know.)

Shaun, your last comment on the "Picnic" thread pushed me into action here, and I hope you don't mind my quoting a part of it. You said that "a major problem with poetry today [might be that] a lot of poets tie themselves in knots by trying to make something deep, symbolic, and logical...then decry that readers don't have enough imagination to decipher them. When you think about some of the best poems (and by "best" I mean the classics that are anthologized time and again), most of them have depth, yet are also very accessible."

I agree with what you say here. It seems to me that many poets today are praised for work that is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary reader. Why is this? Why has mystifying the reader become an aesthetic value? Whatever the reasons, it seems to me that many aspiring poets believe that making sure their readers understand what they're talking about is not important. Perhaps they are afraid of seeming "too simple"; perhaps they are drunk with words; perhaps they just think it's the reader's job to figure out what they are saying. But most readers are not willing to do that. They need what I think of as a "surface" of the poem that is accessible, that makes some kind of sense (unless nonsense is intended, of course!) And then--the real difficulty--there needs to be "depth," something below the surface of the words that resonates at a deeper level than simple meaning. What techniques do the masters use to create this resonance? For instance, from Hardy ("In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'")

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

(Yes, there are words in this poem that we now consider old-fashioned, but Hardy died in 1928. I think it's fair to say that his language would have been clear to his contemporary readers.)

So, how do we make poems that are both accessible and have depth?

I think one thing we can do is to make that "surface" as clear as possible, to ask ourselves, "Would somebody who isn't me understand what I am saying here--and here--and here?"

I am sure there are many people here who will disagree with everything I've said. So, let's continue the conversation!

Barbara

[Chris Childers]

I was hoping you were going to explain what's deep about the Hardy poem. It seems to me to rest on a pretty obvious opposition, between the mundane and the grand, or the individual and the state. It makes a claim for the continuity of human life and experience across times and places, in spite of differences, which is not an original idea. The reason the poem is effective has to do with technical elements: though the stanza is 3-2-3-2, the fourth line is significantly faster than the second, until the third stanza, which reverses that movement. The first three lines, with their clashing stresses ("man harrowing," "old horse,"), and the rhythmical heaviness of line two ("slow, silent") mimic the ungainly stumbling of man and horse, while the last line's speed has something in it of the brevity of life. The knotted rhythms persist in the second stanza, until the beautifully placed "Dynasties" (the only other tri-syllable up to that point is "harrowing") contrasts in register and speed with what has gone before; the rhythmical signature of the word, its top-heavy capital letter, makes it feel like it's toppling right there in the accelerated fourth line. That feeling is amplified by syntax: the first main verb (not in a dependent clause) is "will go." Before that the two sentence fragments, each balanced with 'only', suggest the stasis of agrarian (and, according to Hardy, all) life. The third stanza reverses the rhythmical movement of the other two; the first two lines are quicker, moving with the lightness of love and the swiftness of youth; the clashing stresses of the last line ("their story") seem to throw "one last long lingering look behind." In that stanza as well "cloud" seems to me a lovely word, a bit of mysterious prestidigitation as the "annals" morph into (mushroom?) clouds, then are blown away, leaving only the "dividing and indifferent" not blue, but sky of night. There is alchemy of substance and time; the sun sets within (behind?) the verb. So it seems to me such depth as this poem possesses is a matter of technique and imagery. (Naturally, the grim particulars of S1 and 2 as well prevent this from being a mere abstract and obvious utterance.)

In general, I tend to find 'depth' in surfaces that are initially a little opaque, that demand a little more work but invite one in under the surface. I'm thinking of things like repeated motifs, multivalent imagery, pointed allusions, unity of form and content (which itself is a kind of metaphysical statement about existence), suggestive paradox, consideration (preferably covert) of religious or philosophical topics in a way that takes a subtle but meaningful stand, and psychological complexity. Some examples of poems I find "deep" are "Lying" & "In Limbo" (Richard Wilbur), "Black Ice and Rain" (Michael Donaghy), "Lost in Translation" by James Merrill, "The White Lie" (Don Paterson), "An Arundel Tomb" & "Church Going" (Larkin), "Among School Children" by Yeats, Eliot's "Four Quartets," Keats' "Nightingale," Herbert's "Prayer." & many more I'm sure. Hardy's depth seems to me mostly psychological and personal. His anti-religiousness is fearsome but a little one-dimensional (with the exception of "The Oxen"), his poems move me but don't often make me think. It's likely I haven't spent enough time with them. I greatly value depth but often feel as though others don't or they have very different attitudes toward it than I do, so I will be interested in what emerges from this discussion.

Chris

[Roger Slater]

Chris, do you think "Nightingale" is "initially a little opaque"? I would think it is a good example of what Barbara is talking about, a poem that is accessible on its surface but deep nonetheless.

[Maryann Corbett]

"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.

[Chris Childers]

I mentioned "Nightingale" (though on second thought the "Grecian Urn" might have been a better choice) because there is a complexity of argument; Keats goes from listening to a bird into an escapist, synesthetic fantasy to a longing for death to a final aporia. Acknowledging that death-longing, perceiving its kinship to art and art's timelessness, an unapologetic desire to flee the "fever and the fret" into the seductive dark of music/art/poetry/death--that seems to me deep. Maybe it's not a surface-level opacity so much as the poet speaking from a place that few of us either get to or admit that we've been.

I'm not sure I really buy Maryann's distinction between "gobsmacking" poems and "thought-provoking" ones. Maybe most would consider "Dulce et Decorum Est" a gob-smacker; it seems to me a brilliant, vivid, powerful piece of rhetoric. There is no real doubleness, other than the fact that it's a double sonnet; metaphor is essential to depth, I think. Rhetoric, powerful as it can be, is fundamentally shallow.

Technical matters start shading into depth when contemplating them starts to lead you toward eternal verities. I guess for me the real thing essential to depth is reader involvement: if you tell me that art is long and time is fleeting I'll say I know, and I've moreover heard it a thousand times; if I arrive at that thought while contemplating metrics, or see in a sentence fragment the essential immobility of the human condition, as in the Hardy--that holds some weight. A characteristic of metaphor--good metaphor, the kind in Herbert's "Prayer"--is that it demands interpretation and elicits contemplation. Insofar as "My Last Duchess" is deep, it is the technique that's deep: the disguised heroic couplets become a subterranean metaphor for the entire show the Duke is putting on. (Well, there are other deep things there too, such as the "objectification" motif.) Ultimately I may consider the "deep" poem one that leads me somewhere deep in myself; but it can't do that without piquing my curiosity and getting my brain going.

Many probably feel that often interpretations of such poems seem like exercises in cleverness on the part of the critic, to point out clevernesses on the part of the author. Some (and I could name names) would liken it to dissecting a flower rather than marveling at its beauty. All I can say is that poems that work this way work their magic before analysis. Layered language has a profound effect pre-analysis, and it is often the case that many subtle effects and ideas that take pages to elucidate are often first perceived with a palpable shock or excitement, a bolt of brightness (I'm thinking of Matthew Arnold: "a bolt is shot back in our breast"--that's layered language!)--but their natural concomitant effect is the desire to analyze, to elucidate, to trace back the linguistic labyrinths to the deeper insight that is concealed in its revealment. As Heraclitus says, the god whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks forth nor conceals, but gives a sign. Or, as Emily says,

Heavenly hurt it gives us --
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are.

In my view deep poems can be clear and accessible, but it is not their clarity that makes them deep. "Acquainted with the Night" is perfectly clear, but its depth comes from its "unwilling[ness] to explain," and the way the terza rima and imagery join into a tight-lipped hint about the universe and its god. None of that is accessible, exactly, but it is palpable, and it is felt on multiple levels at once, and it is that doubleness (or tripleness, or quadrupleness) of a deep poem understood feelingly when read or recited, pre- or post-analysis, that gives poetry its frisson, for me; that takes the top of my head off. I can be moved by a poem emotionally, but if I'm not also engaged intellectually in some way, it isn't playing the full instrument.

Because anything that can be misunderstood, will be, I should add that I am not against accessibility, I am FOR layers; on the other side, I am not against doing a little work as a reader, provided I feel repaid. I AM against obscurity for its own sake and an ultimate feeling of bafflement. (That is, bafflement about Life is fine; bafflement about, What the hell did I just read? is not.) Obscurity is not depth any more than is clarity, but it's easier to pass off as such, and that's maybe where a lot of the resistance comes in.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Certainly a worthy topic for debate and one which should be reflected on at regular, or irregular, intervals. Though we may not achieve consensus, some grains of sand may end up as pearls.

This is better than pontificating in a thread, as I recently did, but seems to be posted in the wrong place too. No one who might be participating here are yet among the masters.

The tradition of the masters: the classics & how they did it. (Metrical Poetry & Free Verse.) ** Note again that it's for the work of masters, NOT your own poems! **)

Above emphasis not mine.

I think it is properly a GT thread, illustrous thoughts have been thunk there too. The petty distinction being that when in days to come one wishes to re-read, GT is the place one would look to find this kind of community debate. As a quick review of the topics in each will show.

It is a staff decision of course.

[Tim Love]

Yes, "depth" is used in several ways. Some little points -

• I recently read that the parables weren't supposed to be easy - "for those outside [i.e. non-disciples] everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand" (Mark 4:11-12)
  
  
• It seems to me that many poets today are praised for work that is quite incomprehensible to the ordinary reader. Why is this? (Barbara) - because "the ordinary reader" has changed? The ordinary reader has at least a Creative Writing degree now, and has read lots of modern poetry. Perhaps there's felt to be less of a need to offer an inviting surface.
  
• making sure their readers understand what they're talking about is not important (Barbara) - I'd guess that nowadays "to understand" is less likely to mean "to be able to paraphrase". Perhaps the paraphrasable element was always the least important part, the easiest to talk about. It's rather harder to say why you like a melody or a Pollock, or an Ashbery

[John Beaton]

The ordinary reader has at least a Creative Writing degree now, and has read lots of modern poetry.

Q.E.D.

John

[Alder Ellis]

It might be interesting to survey the history of criticism to see when "depth" became the main denotation of scale or extra dimension of meaningfulness. It seems to me it used to be "height" -- i.e., "sublimity." Poetry used to be praised for raising the mind to a higher level. Now it is praised, not exactly for lowering the mind, but typically for delving down into a dark realm of underlying, often insidious causes. The psychologizing bias of this extends to an implicit condemnation of the old value, "sublimity," insofar as "sublimation" is considered to be really a form of repression.

Of course the sense of "deep" suggested here is probably not usually what is meant by the term: rather, something like "thought-provoking" or "with a non-obvious layer of meaning." At the same time, poetry has not altogether abandoned sublimity, even if the term seems antiquated.

In a rationalizing context (characteristic of criticism) the only difference between "depth" and "surface" is the time or effort it takes to achieve an understanding of it. Once the "depths" are understood, they are no longer depths, they too are surfaces. But of course the poems we value most highly (or deeply) are rarely if ever poems we fully understand. A great poem fills the mind in such a way that it thinks you, instead of you thinking it. (I think I'm stealing that conceit from somebody -- maybe Harold Bloom.) It would not have this power were it fully reducible to rational interpretation. "Depth" in the sense of that which eludes rationalization (without sinking into nonsense) might be a good measure of value, then, if perhaps needing certain qualifications. "Sublimity" might be a better term, though.

Chris, I wrote the above before seeing your second post re. poems that "work their magic before analysis." Yes, and analysis need not kill the magic (although it might). Your points are more subtle than mine, maybe we don't ultimately disagree. The example of "Acquainted with the Night" is also instructive: a perfectly "clear" poem which resonates in a complex way with a larger context. A great deal of poetic meaning, invariably hard to pin down, is generated by a poem's relation to historical & cultural contexts. This, too, is "depth."

The idea of esoteric meaning, such as the meaning of Jesus's parables (referred to in Tim's post) not meant to be understood by everybody -- he who has ears to hear, let him hear! -- is yet another possible application of "depth." Here the achievement of correct interpretation would imply, not simply an explication of what had been obscure, but a change in one's own being, an initiation. Explication reduces things to one's existing mind. But the proper understanding of a parable demands a "change of mind" (metanoia). This is always a powerful idea in poetry with such notable outcroppings as Rilke's cry "you must change your life!"

Throwing up roadblocks to easy understanding can be a valid way of challenging the reader's attention. It can also be a defense mechanism for pretense or confusion. It can be the result of mere sloppy thinking or laziness. It's up to the reader to figure all this out; that's the fun of it.

[Janice D. Soderling]

It sometimes happens, when reading through a poetry journal or anthology, that suddenly a poem will seize the mind and the reader understands a deeper significance that isn't expressly stated. It is as if the poem rises from the page and briefly takes possession of the entire universe.

I remember a few poems that affected me this way. One was Federico Garcia Lorca's Romance Sonambulo (I don't remember the translator), another Eugenio Montale's Forse un mattino andando in un'aria di vetro in the translation by George Kay, another Caesar Vallejo's Los dados eternos (I believe the translation is by Michael Hamburrger. There have been other instances I could mention but these three are indelibly etched in my life. I can't say why. Impeccable translation can't explain it, though no other translations of the Montale poem will ever serve me as well as the Kay one. That I was in some way receptive to the content at the time in my life I first encountered the poem obviously is not with significance.

Only slightly lower on the scale of this profound reaction is the sense of oneness with the poet/poem I received at first reading and with every successive read of widely disparate poems, poems that for diverse reasons remain in the mind. Frost's Acquainted with the Night is in that category, as is Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Lucille Clifton's Miss Rosie and Josephine Jacobsen's Gentle Reader, Cavafay's Waiting for the Barbarians, also e.e. cumming's somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond. There are others, many others. Dana Gioia comes to mind, Anthony Hecht.

Everyone has a list like this, favorites for personal reasons, but even more perhaps they are memorable because of superior craftsmanship which makes the poem accessible; it is there for the taking. Though it is less common, I remember a few specific instances when I have been affected this way by prose.

An essay collection to which I often return is Anthony Hecht's Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry. I would rather quote his appreciation of the work of Richard Wilbur than waste the time of others with my own thoughts on accessibility and depth that can't contribute a fraction of the below:

First of all, a superb ear (unequaled, I think, in the work of any poet now writing in English) for stately measures, cadences of a slow, processional grandeur, and a rich ceremonial orchestration. A philosophic bent and a religious temper, which are by no means the same thing, but which here consort comfortably together. Wit, polish, a formal elegance that is never haughty or condescending [… ] and an unfeigned gusto,…[…] But in a way I think most characteristic of all, his is the most kinetic poetry I know: verbs are among his most conspicuously important tools, and his poetry is everywhere a vision of action, of motion and performance. […] for again and again in Wilbur's poems this admirable grace or strength of body is a sign of or a symbol for the inward motions of the mind or condition of the soul. It is remarkable that this double fluency, of style and of perceptions, should be so singularly Wilbur's own.

(my emphasis in red).

Consider the elegant simplicity of Thyme flowering among rocks. I'd love to reproduce it here but will link to a site that has copyright permission. http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/13/iv.full