Dear Peter,

You wrote:

'He [Peter Porter] puts too much into his poems -- hardly ever writes
simply.
Look, I don't mind whatever people want to write, as long as they're serious
in intent and want to communicate with an audience. I think poetry is in a
giant mess at the moment, and the public has given it an almighty thumbs
down. Are they wrong? I don't think so. And I don't think poets themselves
realise how out on a limb they all are at the moment. There are too many
writing who have nothing to say imo. We have all been subject to American
imperialism vis a vis their poets, and I don't think there's
a single one in the 20thc to equal Dickinson and Whitman. Is that just me
being antediluvian, or could it be true? I liked Stevens- still do, but he's
too cold for me, and I don't like the imported French aesthetic- the first
sign of a baleful disease that's eaten into a once-great Western tradition.
Oh well, you got me going... Sorry.'

My reply:  I agree that Peter Porter is packed (he'd be the first to admit
it) with cultural allusions: it has been his aim to comment on the times.
As he has seen it this has meant Mahler has been more
important for his purpose than say Mussolini, and the slant has come from
his love of music, no bad thing in a poet.  Anyway, my question about
Porter was on account of his Australian origin and completely by-the-way.

If you deplore the "French aesthetic" you deplore Modernism (and all
the -isms that followed) from Eliot onward.  Poetry was getting "difficult"
in Europe once symbolists like Mallarme & ironists like Laforgue and
hermeticists like Cattafi and Ungaretti carried Baudelairean scorn of
bourgeois optimism away from directness and towards obliquity.

There is a good account of why poetry is now written only by poets for poets
in the 1991 Atlanta Monthly article at
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm .

Here's a quote from that article:

'But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades
of public and private funding have created a large professional class for
the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers,
graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in
universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for
contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was
once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are
made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell
Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last
Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets.
But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful.
Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now
it is a proven marketing strategy.'

I personally don't lament 'poetry for poets' any more than I lament
'mathematics for mathematicians'.  What we don't have, however, is a race of
writers who make surveying poetry as exciting for educated readers as the
popularising of high-class mathematics and science.  One reason is that
there are millions writing poetry, many fewer doing mathematics and science
(even as a recreation).  Again, I don't care.  If poetry is arcane and
cannot address the concerns of 'the common man' as that species would like
his concerns addressed, too bad.  I wrote a few words about obliquity in
poetry once, as follows.

-- I've been thinking of Poetry and Intelligibility.  Poetry is, on the
whole, condensed and contrived.  It is therefore usually harder than prose
to understand and must be read more slowly.  This is one reason why it's not
widely read.  It is not my intention to condemn the difficulty of poetry;
nor shall I moan about the size of its readership or propose another
movement towards simplification.

Many types of technical prose are also difficult for the casual reader.
There are these special vocabularies and uncommon concepts.  Terms like
'cash flow', 'top-down', 'quantum states' may superficially sound
understandable, but to know their full meaning one needs to have had the
benefit of long study.  In the same texts it is possible to encounter terms
that are not so guessable, such as 'bull market', 'protected scratch space',
'hadron'.  Books full of jargon like this are for specialists.  Is poetry
too, then, written for specialists?  In a way, yes.  Poetry doesn't have a
unique jargon or unique concepts; its difficulty comes another way.  A
mixture of strange, rhetorical effects makes it readable only by a minority
who have chosen to study it.

Now prose, the reports and the opinion columns of newspapers; books for the
lay reader on academic subjects; and of course novels, all come in a range
of forms.  What is difficult to one reader is not to another.  Some prose is
not easy at all, but nor is most poetry.  I'll show how it is that certain
habits of obliquity have become common among poets, so common that they
hardly know quite how oblique they are being.  I choose one of my own pieces
as an example.

                I Fed

        I fed the monotonous shore
        under my eyelids.

        Waders in mud.
        Red horizon.

        I sought you under old tiles
        past the resin of chairs,
        mud in my mouth.

        No taste there, only
        abandoned boats.

An untrained reader would, I believe, need to look at this more than once.
When I speak of untrained readers I mean those not used to poetry.  I would
myself need to be very alert, if this had been by someone else, to get it
first time.  This applies even to the first two lines:

I fed the monotonous shore / under my eyelids.

The more I go over this the more I see what could be missed by a quick
reading which understood just the bare sense: 'I looked at the shore'.  What
does 'feeding' the shore 'under my eyelids' mean?  I pause.  Perhaps the
words suggest droopy eyelids and an inattentive gaze.  It could also suggest
eyes that are shut, or shut after gazing.  'Under my eyelids' feels like the
vision was stuck on the eyeballs.  Anyway, although 'feeding (or feasting)
one's eyes' on a sight is not an uncommon figure of speech, twisting it
round so that the sight is fed into the eyes is unusual.  It's no wonder I
read this more slowly than prose, and have to re-read it to get closer.

Waders in mud.  /  Red horizon.

Two very abrupt, descriptive utterances.  Two sentences without unnecessary
verbs.  The feeling supplements the previous 'monotonous shore'.  I have
also to pause to take in the fact that this is a shore which leaves mud
behind, not sand.  Such shores are found in land-locked, silted harbours.  I
have an idea that people who wade in mud for a living collect cockles or
attend to baskets left to catch crabs.  But 'waders' don't have to be
people, they could be birds.  Birds might be the first and preferred image
of some readers.  As the writer and not some possible reader, I won't tell
what I had in mind: I see no reason to block out the options.

A red horizon could suggest morning or evening.  I have my own preference.
The quiet brevity of the facts has created an atmosphere of melancholy, or
perhaps peace: at this point there's still a choice.  I keep this choice in
mind.

I sought you under old tiles / past the resin of chairs, / mud in my mouth.

Suddenly there's a new puzzle.  Who is this 'you'?  To poets a 'you' is
usually a lover or a close friend.  One has to read quite a lot of poetry to
know that.  It's possible that here the 'you' refers to some other type, a
parent or child, or some supernatural or mythical being, or God, or the poet
himself.  Only a knowledge of how the writer usually employs this pronoun
could lead me to suspect one of these more abnormal usages.  Usually I would
assume a woman.

The scene has shifted to an interior, into an old house (on that shore, I
assume).  Why past the resin of chairs?  Resin is secreted from beneath the
bark of fir and pine trees and is not the same as sap.  In furniture, traces
of natural resin would have long gone.  Would the poet have known that an
important hard resin is rosin, used in varnishes?  Would many readers know
that?  Does the poet seek his lover in an old house beyond the past of the
chairs, back past to when they were trees even?  (That's deep!)  Or does he
just push aside the varnished furniture?  Or are we to imagine the chairs
still exuding the smell of pinewood, with 'resin' used loosely?  Or does he
remember the smell they once had?

There's something rich about 'resin', however it's taken.  There was
something rich in the past of the lovers, in contrast to the feeling of 'mud
in the mouth' in the lonely moments when he seeks her again in their old
meeting place by the shore.  There are suggestions but no direct answers.
This is stark poetry, and it proceeds by indirection.  It finishes:

No taste there, only / abandoned boats.

No taste in that place without her, just as there is no taste but mud in his
mouth on his revisit.  The whole muddy shore is inside him, behind love's
lips, even the abandoned boats.  The house and the boats are bereft.  He
goes to a place where he and she used to meet and finds nothing to remind
him of her.

Something like the above (even its ambiguities) would occur, I suggest, to
the practised reader of poetry fairly rapidly, but I'd be a fool to think
that even an intelligent reader who never reads poetry at all could read it
in the same way.  The reader of poetry would linger over the piece, go back
to those two occurrences of 'mud', even wonder perhaps if an abandoned,
upturned boat on a mudflat might not resemble the upper palate inside the
mouth of the observer.  There is no clear story, just a suggestion of one.
There is an atmosphere of regret, nostalgia, for anyone who cares to stay
with the piece.

Absence of clear story keeps readers away.  Obliquity keeps readers away.
Readers of any anthology of modern verse will find this poem by no means the
hardest of exercises.  If anything, it's on the easy side.  Elsewhere in
poetry books abound allusions and lacunae and unusual syntax all much harder
than any here.  Practised poetry readers take anthologies in their stride,
even accepting some types of total obscurity (if exciting enough) as one
kind of experience to expect.  If poems could be once-off products, hung on
walls and perceived as paintings are, the best would go for high prices.
But they are infinitely printable, so have little value as objects, and
cannot be 'taken in' at a glance like paintings.

But I see no cause for complaint.  Poetry has often been difficult, read by
elites, not a caviar to be wasted on the general reader.  However, the
elites now are self-selecting, being mostly writers of verse themselves.
Not all small magazine subscribers and poets (the two often the same) know a
lot about poetry.  There are certainly many standards and tendencies around.
But one does not have to know a lot to pick up a few of the current habits.
I say that not disparagingly.  It's possible in the arts to absorb
unconsciously fragments of methods and tradition, and to put these to good
use despite one's ignorance of origins.

When Tillyard wrote of obliquity, he quoted much Yeats and Eliot (sound
scholarly types), and with the sort of fastidiousness which believed that
one day 'culture' would 'once again become more standardised'.  His terms
for kinds of obliquity were ones I'd use too, but I'd apply them more
roughly.  His use of 'allusion', for instance, refers only to literary
echoes such as he finds in Eliot's Whispers of Immortality, where he points
out that 'Grishkin is nice' and what follows is a reworking of some verses
in Gautier's Carmen.  It seems to me that allusion covers much more than
nods to other literature.  It includes references to anything in an indirect
way.  Thus, silted harbours are alluded to in the poem above.  Metaphors
(like 'I fed'-no literal feeding went on) allude (1) to the subject or
referent (the resting of eyes on a scene), and (2) to the object or
comparison (the ingesting of a mouth).  Difficulty occurs when it's not
clear what part of a story, or of someone's anatomy, a storm of a metaphor
might refer to.  Symbols are the same, and symbolism is almost second nature
to some of us: do my 'abandoned boats' symbolise anything?  They must do.
In sound boats you travel, alive.  Wrecks can get you nowhere.

If allusion is high on the list of what makes for difficulty, structure must
be up there on the same level.  Structure is in everything, from the
morphology of words (are some of them coined, like Hopkins' 'leafmeal'?), to
syntax, to verse-form, to the total arrangement of parts (to the 'plot', if
you like).  It is often no longer a poet's aim to present a story, scene or
argument in simple terms.  'Great' simplicity is achieved with great effort;
other sorts of simplicity can look arch or lifeless.  A common feature of
difficult structures is omission; but the absence of words can be very
telling, even if one has to work everything out, read between the lines.  Of
course structures can go the other way and be superbly proud of a heaping-up
of neo-gothic effects.  If there are difficulties of structure in I Fed, it
is of course caused by the big holes in the slim outline, in what is not
said.

These, as I see it, are the two constituents of difficulty in verse:
allusion and structure.  Obliquity (in the wide way Tillyard uses it) is not
always difficult.  What he calls obliquity of rhythm, for instance, is no
more than subtle effects, to be noticed and appreciated or not, though none
of his examples is obscure.  One may be puzzled as to why a poem is laced up
in a rhythmic form which itself, and not the syntax, makes it hard to read
smoothly, but one will hardly be put off the meaning by prosody alone.  In
free verse in its more minimalist forms one might be puzzled too by the line
breaks-why 'the' occurs at the end of a three-word line, for example.
Again, a puzzle but not an impediment.

I suppose I should add, as a third difficulty, 'voice': who exactly is
speaking?  What's the tone here?  Were these facts got from first-hand
experience?  Is this autobiography or fiction?  It might surprise you to
know that I Fed is not a piece of private confession.  When I wrote it, I
felt that I was indeed dredging up and using some personal matters, scenes
from my past, feelings I might well have entertained about someone, or about
some composite of lovers, if I had ever stood in a place like the one
described.  I was calling upon the personal, as one must.  But I was
creating a fiction, specifically in response to reading Brian Cole's
translations of Cattafi.  So there you have allusion again, not only 'What
sort of voice is this?' but also, 'Is this voice related to other
literature?  Is it saying anything about that corpus?  I didn't mention this
before because I didn't want to spoil the fun.  But now you know the truth.
I was faking.

All the best.  Alan.





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