NYTimes: Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think

[Bouvre]

 

From the New York Times article.:

 

Misleading presuppositions about the nature of poetry are not just a problem for young readers. Many young poets, however, confuse being deliberately obscure with creating a deeper mystery. Good poets do not deliberately complicate something just to make it harder for a reader to understand. Unfortunately, young readers, and young poets too, are taught to think that this is exactly what poets do. This has, in turn, created certain habits in the writing of contemporary poetry. Bad information about poetry in, bad poetry out, a kind of poetic obscurity feedback loop. It often takes poets a long time to unlearn this. Some never do. They continue to write in this way, deliberately obscure and esoteric, because it is a shortcut to being mysterious. The so-called effect of their poems relies on hidden meaning, keeping something away from the reader.

 

I don’t know what writers of stories, novels and essays eventually discover for themselves, but I can say that sooner or later poets figure out that there are no new ideas, only the same old ones — and that nobody who loves poetry reads it to be impressed, but to experience and feel and understand in ways only poetry can conjure.

 

 

 

[Hornshire]

Indeed.

 

We also found this line to be resoundingly pertinent:

 

It begins with reading the words of the poems themselves.

 

Too often, it seems, people circle the building looking for some sort of entrance, determined that it can't be the lit up set of doors in front, with  the "pull" sign. First impressions are dismissed, not even processed, as though there is some path to the subsequent thoughts that is wholly disconnected from the initial reading.

 

There's also this stigma that not having a complete understanding makes any partial sense of meaning worthless, which is completely untrue. If this were the case, nobody would know anything. People need only engage with material to get out of it what they can, and when ready for more,

go deeper.