The best volume of poetry I read this year was probably Ben Lerner’s 2010 book Mean Free Path. I must admit that – though I was intrigued enough to buy it in the first place – I was somewhat surprised by how much I ended up liking it. To put it simply, my tastes tend toward the more accessible and less experimental in poetry, and Mean Free Path has a definitive lean towards the other end of the spectrum. It thrives on loose ends, disruption, and recursion (though this disjointedness is put together in a surprisingly musical manner). I was thus pleasantly surprised when I found it to be one of my favorite books of poetry I’ve read in recent years.
Now fast forward to the present. I am currently struggling through Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems and finding myself quite frustrated on occasion. There are poems I just can’t make heads or tails of, no matter how many times I re-read them. I don’t think such a reaction on its own is surprising. Opaqueness of meaning is a trademark of many poets coming out of the Modernist era, and Thomas with his surreal imagery and remarkably dense language is no exception. However, when I started thinking of my reactions to both Lerner and Thomas, it did make me start to wonder about what makes a difficult poem difficult, and if there are any peculiar circumstances that makes certain poets even more difficult to individual readers.
While most of the points I’m about to discuss are off-the-cuff and not strictly scientific, I do think there is something to this line of thinking.
First, and this is a somewhat elementary point, one needs to consider that poets are writing from a particular time and place. The more alien the time and place may be from the reader, the more difficult it is to understand the poet’s meaning. In the case of Thomas, the culture and language of twentieth-century Wales is not so alien as to make writing from that period difficult, but when one adds his occasional foreign-sounding word choice on top of his already thick poems, it certainly doesn’t help.
But to develop this point further, I think one needs to consider how personal the poetic vision might be when considering a poem’s difficulty. Thomas’s vision seems to me intensely personal, and his poems are laden with symbols and meanings that are originating out of this vision. If one compares this to the poetry of one of Thomas’s contemporaries, say T.S. Eliot, then perhaps what I’m saying becomes a little more evident. To my eyes, Eliot, another “difficult” poet, is much easier to read then Thomas. I think one could argue that part of this is due to Eliot’s verse dealing more with issues of broader cultural impact. Overall, I believe it’s much easier to relate to such verse and find points of access by which one can interpret the poetry.
Now to return to Lerner. Not only am I reading poems by a contemporary whose peculiar cultural references are more or less familiar, but I believe he is also writing from within a certain zeitgeist to which many people can relate to – i.e., his writing overall deals with larger, more cultural themes than they do with uniquely personal visions. Even though stylistically Lerner might be difficult in many ways, he is writing on a peculiar fragmented, pre-packaged, and marketed culture that many of us can relate to. Personally, this was enough to give me a point of entry into the poetry, while I frequently found such an entry lacking in the verse of Thomas.
Obviously, this discussion is only looking at a couple particular poets in very broad terms, and rereading it now, I’m already starting to think I'm somewhat off-base. I’m sure there are many exceptions to these points that can poke very large holes in whatever kind of theory I’m trying to craft here. If anyone has wandered over to this post and has any thoughts to share on the topic, please do so.
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