Difficult Poems
All the secrets you need to finally understand those head scratchers!
We hear it a lot:
I don’t get poetry!
It’s too hard!
Why can’t they just talk normal?
Poems make me feel dumb!
A hard-to-understand poem stole my best girl!
Etc…
But don’t worry! I know exactly what you need to do in order to understand every poem in the world.
1. Motivation
What motivates you to read and get poems? Do you want people to like you? Do you want SMART people to like you? Do you want to make yourself smarter? Do you want to distract your brain from literally everything?
There is no wrong motivation - but there’s a chance that certain motivations will only get you so far. Once the smart person you want to impress gets a bowl haircut and joins a yoga cult in the desert, knowing what effect enjambment is supposed to have may no longer be of use to you.
So why do you want to “get” poems that challenge you? It’s okay to not have an articulated answer to that, but you don’t owe poetry anything, you don’t have to force yourself to swallow that cauliflower blueberry smoothie because the packaging says its “healthy.” You can get your essential minerals somewhere else!1
And for me, the tried and true motivation that works is, “do I like it?” And there are lots of ways to like poetry!
2. What’s your in?
Kenneth Koch once said something like “if you don’t get a poem on the first reading find something you DO like about it - maybe a line that gets you dancing or an image that stays with you. What else can you do?”2 His point is that maybe the poem offers you a hand to help you into and through its murky waters. But in order to see that hand, you have to be looking for it. You have to be open to the poem and give it a little trust that it might have something for you. Trust that you do not owe it.
But maybe you are open to it, and you can’t find your in. Maybe you grab the hand and it pulls you under. Maybe it’s a dead end and you have to return to the surface to try and find a new entry point. Maybe you give up - that’s FINE. You can always try again later or never deal with poetry again and just sell guns to the King of Ethiopia like Rimbaud.
Whenever I am trying to think about how to feel about poetry, I just think about how people act when they talk the same way about music. While there is tons of music that I can’t find my entry point into, I don’t get mad at the music for it. Or sometimes I can tell that if I just devoted a lot of time to understanding the cultural and musical history that led to, say, prog rock, I might develop a deeper appreciation for it. Which is to say I think I COULD understand it, but I don’t have enough of #1 ⬆️ there to do it.
3. What is understanding? What is getting?
I wrote a lot about our desire for poetry to mean something here, and that fundamentally applies to a large subset of so-called “difficult” poems. Perhaps trying to divine exact meaning or story or resolution or concrete messages or the code of symbols from our poems is a fool’s errand. (Is there a nicer way to say “fool’s errand”?) It’s a nonstarter. You won’t ever understand the poem or get it because it is evading understanding by design.
“Why would you make something that you didn’t want people to understand?” you might ask. Understanding is a cool thing we can do with our brains. A real victory for our species. It can be comforting. But it’s only a small fraction of what it means to be human. We can also make our fists into weapons or get the munchies or have PTSD or laugh until gasping or taste halva for the first time. One time some high school friends were stoned and they all swear they saw a tiny horse caught in a spider web. A tiny horse! All of them saw it! I don’t think I want to understand everything that was going on there. I don’t need to get what they saw. This way is better.
4. Practice
Every muscle needs to be used in order to get swoll so returning to the same poem repeatedly can be continuously rewarding. I feel like I enjoy many more poems in a deeper way the older I get and the more I read and hear.
So let’s try it! Here’s what I would consider to be a difficult poem by Lyn Hejinian. It’s called “Fissure”:
The wheel catches the jet stream just in time for supper and all that can be said is we knew it was coming I circumambulated the Bible study in time for tomorrow and she never unearthed the real origin of palms Psalms bring comfort to the suffering of suffering and shoveling into sidewalks only works if you’re very big or very small and means fuckall to the rest of us in the everyone else They do not make shovels that size They do make a million shovels a day Shovelmaker hide your face and your profit Raise a stave in Communion Scrape the bottom of goblet with the stubble of your treble cleft chin Store His hours in your cheeks like vulgar chipmunks Spit it out, monk Get on with it What of your vow to me? What has silence vowed in return?
What the hell is going on??? There’s some like religious stuff in there but also shovels? Chipmonks? Silence vowing to you?
The truth is, I don’t know. I especially don’t know because that is not a Lyn Hejinian poem but one that I just wrote for funsies. But the thing is - it IS funsies! Maybe it’s only funsies to me, and Lyn Hejinian would be super offended that I did that. Is it okay if it’s only funsies to me?
In fairness to her, here’s an actual Hejinian poem (untitled):
A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions
and I hold that names begin histories
and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending
to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden
and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs
can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness
can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once,
my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet
and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend
to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish
my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow
indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see
the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere
between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me
and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains
and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases
are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all
in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.
Regardless how I feel about it, how do YOU feel about it? Did you give up just to move on to this part? Did you smile at any point in the poem? If so, what is that smile?? Is it funny to pretend to be a truck in Mexico that waddles efficiently? Why? Is it all “‘all in fun’”?
Maybe read it again. Anything new happen? Are you sick of being asked questions?
Lyn Hejinian comes from of a movement of poetry called Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) and part of its mission is to find the ways words and phrases (possibly like colors) can hold feelings and meanings separate from their literal ones. I have talked major shit about language poetry in my life, but I think my problem with it was a feeling that the poems are looking down on me for not “getting” them. That there is a room with very smart people somewhere that really gets this and those people think I suck. If I was in that room, I would pretend to like it as much as them just to get out of there - like someone pretending to speak in tongues just so they can make it to the end of the service before speeding away from the Pentecostals forever.
But suppose I only have my collective experiences as a cis-het white 42-year-old american in the anthropogenic mass extinction, what can that hypothetical person do with a poem they don’t understand? The options seem to be:
Read it, give up
Don’t read it, waterski
Read it, try to do something with it
like it
don’t like it
AMBIVALENCE
read it again
All of those options are correct. All we can do is take these little word thickets and run them through the wood chipper of ourselves and look at what comes out the other side. I don’t know whether Lyn Hejinian thinks I’m a dummy, but it doesn’t matter. I just have this poem and me and we will make something together or not.
5. Do. Do not. There is no try.
I think what Yoda means by that is basically to adjust your attitude, Luke. The X-Wing doesn’t care if you lift it out of the swamp. It can stay there forever or it can live to blow up Death Stars another day. But getting mad about it, getting mad at the task you’re attempting, the only outcome of that anger is dysregulating yourself and getting no closer to where you want to be, with or without a spaceship. The traffic doesn’t care that you’re late. The grand canyon doesn’t care that you think it’s beautiful. The poem doesn’t care if you think it’s hard or if you like it. Do you care?
Maybe I will write a different post about this, but say you do actually feel like you’ve come to an understanding with a difficult poem. Don’t be a dick about it! You do not own the One True interpretation of that piece; you can only ever experience it as yourself. And if you try to forbid others from bringing their own identities to a piece of art you feel mastery over, then you are not only disenfranchising them but you are also shutting out views that could deepen, widen, and otherwise embiggen your own reading of the piece.
So there you go, you now know exactly everything you need in order to understand every poem. And the longer you live, the bigger that understanding can grow and change. Lucky you!
That said, if Beyoncé told everyone that Dream Songs was essential to read in order to buy tickets to her shows, a lot more people would be working to figure that thing out.
I should really try to hunt down the actual quote but someone stole my copy of Making Your Own Days.