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In Praise of Difficult PoetryThe much-maligned art.

By Robert Pinsky
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007, at 10:56 AM ET

(Continued from page 2)

YOU WERE WEARING

You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.
In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.
Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me,
"Do most boys think that most girls are bad?"
I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom
on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.
"No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together
And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.

Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair.
We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville
As well as with illustrations from his book Moby-Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.
Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?"
I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.
You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.
In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

Koch's poem is difficult for one who wants to be solemn about it. It is not a trivial piece of writing; like Herbert's "Jordan" poems, it thinks seriously about the relation between expectation and experience. Koch brilliantly leads us into questioning our habits of understanding—a kind of generous teasing that is one of difficulty's attractive forms.

Sometimes dense extravagance of language expresses an ecstatic feeling, too intense—and in a way too clear—for the poet to fill in every step. The writing needs an expressive, reckless sweep. Here is Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick":

NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Rather than comment on this poem, I urge that readers go to the Favorite Poem Project, where Seph Rodney, who describes himself as "a Jamaican immigrant," reads and discusses Plath's poem. The way he says the poem, and what he has to say about it, demonstrate the nature of understanding, as distinct from that lesser thing, interpretation.

To some extent, reading poetry for pleasure is a matter of accepting the general idea and allowing details to be difficult. With the title of this poem, Wallace Stevens makes clear his attitude toward the idea that poetry should be soothing or genial. The poem's main idea is equally clear, though particular moments may be obdurately unsettling (and unsettled):

POETRY IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast:
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own ...

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

People who wish poetry were more friendly and soothing sometimes refer to Shakespeare as both great and easy: the ultimate crowd-pleaser. But what about his poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle"? The poem is indeed very pleasing if you don't try to understand it as though it were part of some tricky question on a Scholastic Aptitude Test. If "The Phoenix and the Turtle" were an academic test, or a mere puzzle, rather than a work of art, this scholastic funeral speech for two married birds would be supremely difficult. Yet the bard seems to approach the difficulty, and the scholasticism, as great fun. One way to read the poem is simply to enjoy Shakespeare's way of imagining how a community of birds might hold a funeral for a perfect, paradoxical couple: the Phoenix, symbol of solitary rebirth (without coupling), and the turtledove, symbol of happy coupling.

Here, then, is Shakespeare having the last, exuberant, and resistant word in this bouquet of difficulty:

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Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's latest book of poems is Jersey Rain.
"Michaelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia …" from Zeppo's First Wife by Gail Mazur © 2005; reproduced courtesy Gail Mazur and Chicago University Press. "You Were Wearing" from Thank You, and Other Poems by Kenneth Koch © 1962, renewed 1990; reproduced courtesy Kenneth Koch Literary Estate and Alred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc. "Nick and the Candlestick" from Ariel, by Sylvia Plath © 1966 by Ted Hughes; reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, and Faber & Faber, London. "Poetry Is a Destructive Force" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens © 1954 by Wallace Stevens, renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens; used by permission of Alred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc., New York, and Pollinger Limited, London.
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