Attempting to pick up some of the various strands:

The questions I asked are real not rhetorical questions to me: they nag at
me when I think about writing poetry. I don't know whether they are solvable
or not; and if they are, whether I can only solve them for myself - in my
poetry - or whether they cannot be solved by any amount of thought, only by
change in society.

That is, with Peter's posting in mind, I have no ambition to found the
Church of True Poetry. People will do as they do . . we all have our own
strengths . . any attempt to impose any one conception of any art is bound
to fail unless one has the NKVD as backup (and what disaster when one
does!): I take these propositions to be joyful facts.

So I'm not against 'difficult' poetry at all. I suppose what I had in mind
in my original posting was an attitude I think I see in some poets (and tell
me if this a false surmise) which is: "The world out there (outside poetry)
matters immensely. I demand that a poet shows an acute awareness of this
world in her/his poetry, but I don't demand any more than -awareness- of the
world, ie. I don't mind if the poet and poetry has no interest in putting
this awareness into practice." I think that a poetry that ignores all the
suffering in the world, that ignores the mechanisms that the world runs by -
politics and economics - can be as great as poetry that is interested in
this. I don't want to create a school of self-absorbtion, but I do what to
repudiate what I see as a certain strand of thought in some contemporary
poetry and writing about it: that awareness of economics and world-politics
is what is 'important'. No one way of looking at life is essential to
poetry.

This so easily slips into reductivism: I'm not saying economics should be
out. But it's only one way.

I suppose I feel a contradiction in the thought I imagine as behind certain
contemporary poetry and talk about it. It is acceptable for a poet to write
poetry that makes no attempt to speak to the world outside the poetry scene,
yet not for that poet to make no mention of it (the world outside poetry) in
their poetry!

Maybe I misunderstand poetry: perhaps poetry -is- about the going back to
your solitary room and writing about (not for) the world. Whitman wanted to
write for America and failed: he didn't get the audience he wanted, the
runners, bellboys, ox-tamers, slave-sellers - he got poetry readers. His
language is what I would put forward as one example of simple (he was trying
to change people, so much so that he thought some time after the first
_Leaves_ of founding a new religion with a passage from his poems read each
day!) It wasn't his fault: he couldn't change society. Likewise I would say
Pound in his prose works used simple language to try and change people.

At the root of my thinking is a conception of audience as wider than those
who produce the art. I think all successful art -must- be aware of its own
circumstances - of who it is aimed at, who reads it etc. Larkin never (so
far as a reading of the letters showed me) worried at all "Who is reading my
poetry? Who am I writing for in writing in the way I do?" He didn't have to,
because he sent his best poems to magazines, then sent the best of these
totalling appx. 64 pages to a publisher: accepting this process as
certifying his poetry as poetry meant that he did not have to think, if he
did not want to, about who the poetry was for.

Am I the only one who thinks a poet can be impoverished when they are read
only by poets? Emily Dickenson's bent was privacy: mine isn't.

To break off in answer to Richard: I was using Prynne as a marker, poetry
that is I would think indisputably 'difficult'. (Marx etc. could be simple
when they wanted to.) I meant simple and difficult in the obvious senses:
what takes less or more time for a reader to feel they have some grip on. (I
know: which reader?) I didn't mean that all difficult poetry was
inward-turning, but I hope I've gone some way to answer that above. Simply:
at moments when it matters very much that someone gets your message how do
you speak? That language was what I was getting at with the word 'simplest'.

Best to all,
James


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