A Slightly Malicious Poetry Puzzle Perhaps Intended to Confuse and Mystify

Keats House in Hampstead, England taken just prior to reopening on 24 July 2009 after restoration, costing  £424,000 from a Heritage Lottery Fund grant.  On the right is the Heath Branch Public Library. Wikimedia Commons

By Joan L. Cannon

The longer time goes on (and it goes on more than I thought it would), the more impatient I get with what seems to be deliberate obfuscation. At the risk of raising too many eyebrows, I’m going to cite my favorite examples of this. At the risk of libel suits, I won’t be specific. I’m talking about the kind of poetry that has become too often the choice of poetry editors in prestigious magazines like The New Yorker,  which is the prime example in my reading experience, followed closely by too much that shows up in Poetry.

Besides annoying me what baffles me about a poem with a title I can’t connect to the text is why the poet wants to be bothered to offer what seems a slightly malicious puzzle. Is this some passive/aggressive response to his or her own problems? Is it just to see how many hopeful poetry lovers can be snared in a verbal Tanglefoot more than one remove from the Objective Co-relative (that always defied explanation anyway)?  I might be inclined to forgive a comment or suggestion in the beginning of the work that says it’s intended to confuse and mystify.  Since that doesn’t appear, the reader is left wondering if it’s a necessity to belong to yet another secret society.

This is not to claim that a poem should ever be prose that’s been type-set in short lines and/or rhyme to disguise itself. The point of poetry, to me, is its ability to imply more than it states, and make it a pleasure for the reader to recognize resonances in his or her own life, or suggests new perspectives and places to investigate. Sure, I’m willing to ponder a metaphor, slow down to search for the congruent image, savor the music. I expect to come away, even from the first reading, with the sense that the words aren’t in a foreign language, or a code to which I don’t own the key. I even expect to reread.

While the target of these remarks is primarily contemporary poetry, they apply equally well to advertising, politics, too much journalism, and anagram crosswords. The latter, however, present a challenge that can often bring real satisfaction because it’s possible to guess and eliminate and ‘think outside the box’ and get the answers. For the rest, at present I have a feeling that as an octogenarian I’m being discriminated against.

Most of us have long since learned the folly of accepting at face value most of what one reads in the papers, but the Internet makes that bit of cynicism laughable. Politicians are shameless, and most interviewees on Public Television have perfected the art of not answering — at length — the questions put to them. It’s enough to make a person stick to soap operas and Masterpiece Theater. A poet, though, seems to me ought to have an inverse motive. Surely his or her objective is to engage and kindle that wonderful spark of recognition with the artistry of suggestion, inference, uncommon but recognizable  references … to cause a frisson of laughter or tears or identification and resulting satisfaction.

 So I come back to my initial point. Most people read poetry (if they read it at all) for the pleasure of it. I get very irritable when the author makes that impossible on purpose — very much like the ‘modern’ artists and composers who seem not to care a whit if their production is pure fraud. Of course, they get a way with it a lot because no one can figure out how to prove it’s bogus.

Maybe beauty isn’t everything, or maybe I have an antique attitude that started off in high school when I read Keats. All truth is, of course, not beauty, nor all beauty truth, but it would be a better world if more artists and public figures and leaders could at least try to combine the two in a way that would benefit those on the receiving ends.

©2014 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com