[Tim Murphy]

For the record, I write not for MFA graduates, but for farmers, hunters, climbers, trekkers, and sailors, none of whom are schooled in poetry. I can assure you that neither Dick Wilbur nor Tony Hecht wrote their poems with MFA graduates in mind. When Dick was teaching at Harvard in 1952, the English faculty proposed a new program, an MFA in creative writing. Dick and his equally young friend, John Updike, the only real writers on the Harvard faculty, put the kibosh on this scheme, arguing that young writers should be studying geology or astronomy.

[Maryann Corbett]

Because I'd like to see Barbara's questions get answered as she asked them, I'll try to tackle at least one, and perhaps I'll be able to tie it into the specific discussion of the poem above.

Barb asks, among other things:

Tim and John said that these days the ordinary reader has a degree in creative writing and has read lots of modern poetry. Do you all agree with that? Do you imagine your readers as highly educated in modern poetry?

I'd answer: Not all of them, but quite a few of them. The typical Spherean who's submitting poems to magazines is submitting to poetry magazines more often than to general interest magazines, because there are more slots for poems in poetry magazines. Those magazines are read primarily by other poets, and those readers have made a study of contemporary poetry even if they don't have MFAs.

Was this true for Wilbur when he wrote "Thyme Flowering Among Rocks"? The poem (I'm guessing here) was probably published individually before the book in which it appeared, which I think was The Beautiful Changes, out in 1947 [editing back in: Nope, I was wrong; it's from Walking to Sleep, a much later book]. At midcentury, general magazines still did publish quite a bit of poetry, not all of it meant to appeal to the most highbrow audiences. (See, for example, Phyllis McGinley and Elizabeth McFarland and the awful brouhaha about Anne Morrow Lindbergh's first book of poetry.) My searches turn up "Thyme" in The New Yorker; perhaps it was first published there--can anybody verify that? [The New Yorker issue date is 1986, as it turns out.] That would suggest that the poem was felt to have both broad appeal and enough subtext to stand up to scrutiny from expert readers.

(I see I've cross-posted with Tim. I'm going to avoid the issue of whether MFA programs should exist or not, since they do, and simply end on the note that nowadays we have to assume the audience knows something about poetry.)

[John Beaton]

Barbara, with respect to your post #12, I cited Tim L's definition of the "ordinary reader" as evidence that a problem exists: in my view, poetry has swung too far away from the general public.

Like Tim M, I write and recite primarily for non-literary audiences.

John

PS I cross-posted with Maryann.

[Michael Cantor]

I don't believe in drawing a line between "literary" and "non-literary" audiences, and I believe that precisely what makes many of our greatest poets "great" is that their work is accessible enough to appeal to an intelligent reader who does not have an MFA, or even an MA - but strong and "literary" enough to impress (possibly on a different level, or in a different manner) an audience of dedicated and poetically-educated poets.

Personally, this is what I try to do in my own work. I spent forty years working in industrial organizations - managing factories, dealing with bankers, selling to engineers - and I try to write poetry that is accessible to the technicians and business people with whom I worked - that they won't find opaque and inbred. (Whether they will like it or not is another issue.) At the same time, I also aim at an audience of inbred poets, and would be delighted to impress the living hell out of the MFA and Sewanee crowd. My approach to most of this is to try to write poems - most of the time - that function on two or three levels, but that don't require a reader's knowledge of, say, Greek mythology, to work. When I write about rarified settings or situations (and I've done this often enough with Japan, as one example), I try (not always well) to introduce enough basics so that you don't have to be a Japanophile to follow the poem.

Does it work? Not very often, I'm sure. But, then again, I'm not "great". I think the point is that I don't in believe in the approach that you sometimes John, which I regard as popularizing or "writing down" to the audience (and, actually, you only do that some of the time - your better poems strike me as working on multiple levels); nor do I believe in some strong dividing line between the "ordinary reader" and us hyper-sensitive and hyper-educated poets. I think we should attempt to aim at both, and that a good poem - good poetry - can do just that.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

I don't believe in drawing a line between "literary" and "non-literary" audiences, and I believe that precisely what makes many of our greatest poets "great" is that their work is accessible enough to appeal to an intelligent reader who does not have an MFA, or even an MA - but strong and "literary" enough to impress (possibly on a different level, or in a different manner) an audience of dedicated and poetically-educated poets.

Yes, this is the crux of it, in my opinion. Think about it: it's typically at high school age that people are introduced to some of the most celebrated poems. Analysis reveals a great deal of meaning, and some of these poems have enough depth to prompt extensive university discussion, scholarly essays, and in a few instances, entire theses...but at their very core, they are accessible. Writing a complicated trope in a simple way tends to bear more lasting fruit than writing a simple trope in a complicated fashion.

[Chris Childers]

Because we’re all coming from different places, naturally tangents are going to arise, and parts of the main argument will vary in interest to different people (e.g., I’m much more interested in questions of “depth” than “accessibility”). I want to address what I perceive as the conversation's three tangential threads before moving on to the main one (in a subsequent post). They are: 1. the question of clarity and obscurity, considered as incompetence and charlatanism; 2. clarity vs. obscurity, considered as valid literary techniques; and 3. what should we expect of our audience?

1. As Barbara notes, both clarity and obscurity can be used as masks for poetic weaknesses. It’s a commonplace that poems can be incompetent in any number of ways. They can be too obscure (unintelligible); they can be too clear (no mystery or interest; elicits a “so what?” as Barbara notes); they can be technically incompetent, lack vividness, have inappropriate clashes in register, be out of touch, etc.. Moreover, we will always think we see charlatans—people writing crap who have managed to trick other people into thinking it isn’t crap. Sometimes clarity and technique may serve charlatanism; presumably, Julia Ann Moore was so widely published because people thought she was good (not that she had either of the aforementioned virtues). There’s also the general sense on the free verse side that rhyme and meter (and the poeticizing diction thought to go along with them) may deceive people into seeing substance where it doesn’t exist; the pleasing tinkle of a rhyme may disguise ineptitude and idiocy. On the other side, a poet may invoke a kind of shamanistic obscurity, a refusal to make sense, as a smoke screen and hide behind it as a genius too profound for thee (ahem, Jorie Graham). That’s what bothers Barbara and what AE may be referring to when he mentions “throwing up roadblocks to understanding" just because. If any of this is done naively, it’s incompetence; if on purpose, it’s charlatanism. We are right to decry it and to puncture it when we see it; the naïve should be enlightened, the charlatans exposed. However, we must remember that 1) reasonable people can differ on the question of what is competent, and 2) when we attack particulars on the level of principles, we may be right in the particular, but wrong in the principle. The polemical mode forces us into generalizing emphases which always provoke counter-emphases. Sometimes polemic is necessary, and useful; in this discussion, I prefer to leave aside questions of competence and focus on the Real Thing.

2. Clarity and obscurity, when used competently, are both valid poetic techniques with ample historical precedent*. Bill mentions Milton’s desire to “fit audience find, though few.” We may of course go back with this idea much farther than Milton. Callimachus desired to avoid well-trodden paths, to write for a coterie of the learned, and he was imitated by many Latin poets, such as Catullus and Propertius. The desire to limit one’s audience, and the acknowledgement that not all opinions are equal, is no new stance. Obscurity—or more accurately, elevation, distance from common speech, “poeticism,” and difficulty—is built into Indo-European poetics at a very great historical remove, and less with intentions to separate the poet (Bill’s “Look at me, I’m a poet, I’m special”) than to separate the verse, used in ritual or celebratory occasions, from everyday speech. It may be that rhapsodes in the classical period, and certainly the Romantics, shifted this idea of specialness from the poetry to the poet, and of course the attempt by poets to elevate themselves above the run of humanity is an old story. In any event, that a poem be “marked” in some way as a poem, elevated from the run of water-cooler conversations and advertising jingles, seems important. Both difficulty and clarity can be involved in this process, but neither is decisive. The only point that really needs to be made here is that both are characteristics which a competent poem can employ to produce intended effects. Both are valid in theory, if not always well-employed in practice. Anyone, however, who doesn’t count among poems she loves both some she understood immediately on first read, and some she had to do some work to absorb and enjoy, is likely have some ideological blinkers on.

*I notice I didn't say anything about historical precedents for clarity, but we could start with Euripides and continue the line through Dryden, Wordsworth, and Frost. Anyway, most people here don't need to be convinced that clarity is often a virtue.

3. What should we expect of our audience? Should we write for MFAs? This is obviously a question everybody has to answer for herself, and, since I began writing this post, some (Michael Cantor, E. Shaun Russell, with both of whom I agree) are doing just that. For what it’s worth, my feeling is this: literature is the context for literature. It is fine and appropriate (not to mention thoroughly traditional) to write poems that engage with the entire gamut (both synchronic and diachronic) of their literary context. But I also don’t believe in, or approve of, a literary exclusivity, that walls a reader out who doesn’t know the story of Boreas and Orithyia, or who can’t trace ottava rima back to the Renaissance epics of Ariosto and Tasso. & I agree with Philip Larkin, when he says, “I believe that art which takes its origin in other art is less likely to be successful than art founded in unsorted experience." However, if sorting through that “unsorted experience” involves literary contextualization, formal subtleties, layering of language and motifs, or the poet's going to a deep place in order to lead a reader there—well, that’s poetry, friends.

More coming soon. (Duck!)

[Barbara Baig]

I'm thrilled that so many of you have taken the time to participate in this thread, and I am gaining much from this discussion. Thanks to all of you! I hope you will forgive my not responding, in Sphere tradition, to each person individually.

I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I think of accessibility and depth (or whatever you want to call them) as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I agree with everyone who has said a good poem has to have both. My question is: how do we write poems like that? What can we learn from the masters that will help us (maybe I should say, me) write poems that are both clear and many-layered?

I don't really consider this "my" thread--I started it simply in hopes of getting some discussion going--so I don't mind if it goes off in other directions. Having said that, though, since what I'm most interested in is the "how do they do it?" aspect of considering mastery, I hope some of you will want to examine the Wilbur and Merrill poems from that point of view--a pointing of a finger at a place in a poem and saying, "Look at this! Look how he did this!" Gregory's comment about, and examples of, Wilbur's ability to create "a memorable phrase using an abstract noun" is the kind of thing that gets my practical little mind going: ah, it says, here's another technique I can try out! (As Eliot said, "Amateurs borrow, professionals steal"--and I need to steal all the techniques I can!) And that technique of Wilbur's is particularly interesting because one writing teacher mantra these days is "don't use abstractions."

Janice, thanks so much for posting the poems. I leave comments about what makes them work so well to those more experienced than I am.

Barbara

[Chris Childers]

I found AE’s point about sublimity and depth fascinating, both because it would never have occurred to me, and because I really feel that I value depth more than sublimity, and that deep down this makes me a Romantic (rather than a Classicist). It’s interesting that Latin “altus” can mean either “high” or “deep,” depending on context; that is, it indicates verticality, without specifying direction or relationship. “Deep” vs. “high” has a lot to do with where we’re standing; though we wouldn’t say this, the ocean’s surface could be “high” if we’re on the bottom of it, and a mountain “deep” if we’re on the summit. Our terminology is much more subjective than the Latin.

Why is this of interest? As opposed to sublimity, “depth” is a largely subjective notion; AE associates it aptly with a “psychologizing bias.” Another way of putting it is that “depth” is internal while “sublimity” is external; depth leads down into our own abysses while sublimity scales the heights of the human spirit. In the presence of the sublime, the spirit swells, moved by mists in the valleys and the snow on the peaks, and the sun, still higher, hidden behind clouds. We see the mind of God in the mountain, the Forms of Plato in the hidden sun; or we thrill to the soaring spirit of Satan, in which is embodied the infinite capacity of mankind to endure all hardships, even hopelessness, with dignity and pride. We are, as AE says, moved beyond ourselves; the sublime is always tinct with awe, and not a little terror, a feeling of our own smallness in the midst of immensity. Come to think of it, the Hardy poem above may be more sublime than deep, as it places tiny, stubborn, static humanity within the wide-angle lens of the rise and fall of Dynasties. By contrast, the “Nightingale” may be a “deep,” rather than a “sublime,” poem, since Keats retreats somewhere deep within himself, where he bids us follow.

The language I instinctively adopt in discussing the sublime (“soaring spirit,” “tinct with awe,” “in the midst of immensity”) is self-evidently old-fashioned; the music I associate with it is a kind of syrupy bombast, of Wagner, Strauss, and John Williams, music that tells us what to feel, as if we couldn’t figure it out on our own, as Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay clearly believe. One can’t help but wonder if the great wars of the last century and their aftermath have anything to do with our preference for “depth” to “sublimity.” Certainly the charisma of a Hitler still has a lot to do with the disdain and suspicion in which we hold rhetoric; perhaps the greatness of our atrocities (as well as the mediocrity of our officials, increasingly apparent with the advent first of television, then the internet) makes us more and more cynical, or at least suspicious, about the greatness of our nature. It may seem safer to devote our energies to sorting through our own inner workings, rather than arranging the state, or history, into a system, that is, to reach inside rather than out; more modest, and more harmless, to cultivate the spirit’s loam instead of its crown.

When I think of the sublime, the poem that springs immediately to mind is Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” a passage like this:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there--how hideously
Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,
Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.--Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
None can reply--all seems eternal now.

Upon rereading (it had been a while), I see that Shelley’s poem is using nature to reflect on the workings of the mind. There is depth as well as height. The “ravine of Arve—dark, deep ravine” comes racing out of various caves, flashing like lightning, rolling for ever: the collective power of human genius, from its deep springs leaping. Mont Blanc, towering above, suggests superhuman power, probably the Platonic forms. The poem certainly invites our participation in decoding its imagery (“where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of waters;” “Teach the adverting mind”); ultimately, Shelley is interested in the relationship of the individual to the group, and of humankind to nature, a unity of inner experience to outer perception. The poem is both sublime and deep.

However, Shelley’s poem isn’t “deep” in the same way as Keats’s, mentioned above. In Keats, the depth is psychological; in Shelley, it’s poetic. Shelley’s poem shows the poet doing what the poem asks us to do: Shelley contemplates and interprets the sublime scene before him as we are asked in turn to contemplate and interpret the poem; the creative poet-speaker becomes a model for the creative poet-reader. It’s a parable-like attempt to lead us, by eliciting our active involvement, towards a more profound perception of and relationship with nature. The poem is also clearly grounded in both philosophy and psychology, and some of its depth comes from the sources on which it draws. As Shelley says, his own waters have “a sound but half their own;” the other half is from the greats on whose shoulders he stands.

Bill claims not to know what “depth” is, then advocates a sort of “beautiful complexity.” I’m trying to answer his question, at least from my perspective, and perhaps only for my own benefit. In my view, psychological depth is the proper opposite of sublimity. However, poetic depth has to do with the construction of a poem: aspects that pull the reader out of the temporal main stream of the verse, under its surface, or beyond it, and invite her to contemplations of another sort. These, I think, are mainly relational: of the writer to the reader, or of one poem to another, or to philosophy, or of patterns and motifs within the poem, and maybe more—echoes, say, which are relations of words, or concepts. Whether “depth,” or the related “layers,” is actually the best metaphor for this effect isn’t clear to me, and it would be interesting to see if older critics discuss this phenomenon, and if so, how they describe it. “Complexity” is not a bad stab; while “depth” suggests a vertical layering, “complexity” suggests horizontal intertwining. “Depth” hints at shadow meanings, that what lies beneath the surface is somehow dark or dangerous, that its discovery would be, at best, a mixed blessing. In its psychological implications, it may be mystical; rather than ascend the heights towards the summits bathed in light, we are rappelling down into the darkness of the self, terrified of what we may find, but drawn along nevertheless. Poems that model this descent with their organization or arrangement may be “deep” in both the senses I describe.

With that friends, I rest for the night; time to rappel down the dream-cave. Wilbur and his thyme will have to wait. (Or, somebody else could take a stab at it!)

Chris

PS.: By the way, Barbara, one way you could make a start towards writing the way you want is not to defer to the other “superior writers” here; you know, killing the Buddha and all that. Not everyone agrees, but I am quite confident that for me flexing critical muscles also strengthens poetic ones; you might consider taking poems that do it for you and trying to articulate why--that is, do what you want the rest of us to. I think I've learned the most from Eratosphere over the years not from the critiques I've received, but from those I've given.

[Janice D. Soderling]

but I am quite confident that for me flexing critical muscles also strengthens poetic ones; you might consider taking poems that do it for you and trying to articulate why--that is, do what you want the rest of us to. I think I've learned the most from Eratosphere over the years not from the critiques I've received, but from those I've given.

I'll co-sign that, Chris. Drive-by crits that are thrown up solely to qualify for posing another poem are worthless, both for the critter and the poet.

What one really learns from is careful critting, not writing, by trying to take apart a poem and find its good and bad sides--opinions are only opinions but you soon learn who is talking through their hat and who has gray matter between their ears; the poet learns to sort it out by doing a counter analysis.

My debt to the Sphere is huge, not only from the thoughtful and helpful crits I've received but by being pointed in new directions, writers I hadn't heard of, tools I had never tried to use.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I'll do like Maryann. Barbara asked:

Janice quoted Anthony Hecht on Wilbur's "superb ear." Setting aside questions of innate talent, and also setting aside the requirement that one read, read, and read--how do skilled poets develop that "ear." How did any of you do it?

I think there is a certain parallel with Edison's statement:

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Some brains are hardwired to be good at math, or have an inate ability for poetry, or you-name-it. The next requirement is having the circumstances and time to develop that talent or ability, and finally it all boils down to working at it, studying it, sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I think it helps to be exposed to influences at an early age. Though not religious, I am sure that my childhood exposure to the beauty of the psalms and the rest of the KJV Bible, and to the "Golden Treasury" in our home, then learning to read early (to keep me quiet they said) and a school librarian who allowed me to take out some (though not all) books--such as the Greek myths--that younger children weren't allowed to read were formative.

When there was nothing else to read, I read the dictionary (still one of my favorite books), and I got my sexual education there, if my betters had understood what I was learning they would have banned it. ("know" - to have sexual intercourse with.) I loved the big dictionary that was so heavy it was on a stand in the library.

To learn poems by heart at a young age is certainly beneficial and all the poems I learned were formal verse--Tell me not in mournful numbers, Once upon a midnight dreary, Black as the pit from pole to pole, Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day, The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.

Memorizing long passages from the Bible is likely better for developing a "good ear" than being brainwashed by advertising jingles and slogans, though both may be equally destructive from the soul.

An aside. Does anyone remember the children's card game "Authors"? At an early age, I knew who wrote what and went to the school library (the only one we had in the backwoods) looking for the books. (Don't answer that, it's off-topic.)