[Rhina P. Espaillat]

There is an excellent essay on Howard Nemerov as a nature poet, by Jan Schreiber, on this website: www.n2hos.com/acm
As it happens, on that same website, a man named Zuk has posted an essay on "Easy Poetry" that is thought-provoking and deals with distinctions that ought to be of interest to 'Sphereans. I recommend both.

[David Anthony]

I was interested to read Zuk's well-written essay.
What is the world coming to, though, if it's necessary to explain and defend the notion of clear writing in good English?
Regards,
David

[Janet Kenny]

Rhina and David,
As I read the excellent Zuk article I wondered why it was that from the age of 11 years I had read and acted Shakespeare with no sense of alienation? I decided that clear vernacular writing survives more easily than other type of writing.

I haven't as yet read the Nemerov article but am looking forward to it. Harvey Stanbrough introduced me to Nemerov. He is hard to find in Australia. I love what little I have read.

Thanks Rhina for this link.
Janet

By the way I was refused access to this post three times.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 04, 2004).]

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Clive Watkins]

I very much agree, Roger. To make an easy pun, many aspects of the piece are very facile.

Clive

[Chris Childers]

I'm much more with Roger. The essay actually annoyed me extensively, in that he seemed to be giving pedantically dogmatic critiques of the online workshop variety to poems written in a different age under a different set of rules. Now, it may be he was only taking old poems and saying that writing in this way is no longer acceptable (which I agree with), but it felt much more like a value judgment of old-fashioned conventions. Further, his comments about what is 'natural' and what isn't seemed based entirely on his own everyday practices, like he's criticizing other dialects by his own; he might as well criticize poetry written in other languages, too, for not being in English. In fact, that's what a negative judgment of archaic conventions is like: there's absolutely no reason why poetry should be 'natural' rather than 'artificial,' why poets should not be allowed the sub-semantic obscurities of poetic syntax, etc.; and if you love poetry, you should try to become familiar with and able to appreciate all the different poetic languages, not just your own. And, of course, much that is difficult is worth the effort: others more intelligent may not agree, but for me Shakespeare and Milton *are* more difficult to read than pulp fiction, but infinitely more worth the effort.

The most valuable poems to me are the ones that are not obvious but that force me to think about them, and in doing so teach me something new.

[Janet Kenny]

I'll post something better when I find space to think more about the article in question.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 05, 2004).]

[A. E. Stallings]

The essay has some useful things to offer, but I think the author gets off to a very unpromising start with the dichotomy of difficult/easy--surely it is obscurity/clarity he is concerned with. Jabberwocky may be syntactically clear, but so is most of Ashbery, whom he deems difficult. (Indeed, many would argue Ashbery is a form of nonsense poetry.) Whether Jabberwocky is "easy" is another matter. As Alice says, "It seems very pretty, but it's rather hard to understand! . . . Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are!" (That's Ashbery for me...) "However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate." Frost is clear as a bell, but the poems are often more ambiguous the closer you look at them. Is this easy?

I'm also a little concerned that the author refers to the line-breaks in the seduction scene in the Wasteland as awkward... er, not awkward, surely; rather, iambic pentameter?

I would invite folks here who have considered responses to the essay to send them to the editor at Expansive Poetry Online--they like to publish letters, and it would be nice to see a dialogue. Also, a good stepping stone to publishing some prose (Chris?)

Rhina,
Many thanks for this posting.
I've put Zuk on the back burner, but was most grateful to have the Schreiber/Nemerov reference, as I'm currently trying (with limited reading time) to plug gaps in my knowledge of 20C U.S. poets. Shortish, lucid articles are very welcome.
Margaret

[This message has been edited by Campoem (edited January 06, 2004).]