Approaching the "Inaccessible" Poem

Most of the daily language we use values efficiency and utility: I'd like a pastrami on rye with mustard. We rely on our words to be sturdy and clear. We, not surprisingly then, are inclined to praise the that displays a reasoned and coherent meaning, well-developed, connected and intact. These types of poems, also, were the reliable models used to initiate us into poetry in grammar school, the ones that, because familiar, make up our inner definition of what a is and does as it stops by woods on a snowy evening. And so, many of us coming upon the poem, discard its associative leaps, its disruptions, the pressured silences of the poem's white-spaces as so much chaos and mumbo-jumbo. Why is this published in this journal, we say, a prestigious journal, no less! I can make absolutely no sense from it. More like the symphony or the Rothko painting, these poems present us with tones, atmospherics, possibilities, but unlike a painting or symphony, we may begrudge them this haziness because we are so accustomed to expect language that's stable, that focuses for us its sense, makes clear its meanings. We thought we'd offer—in this installment of the poetry forum—a few thoughts meant to defuse the angst of diving into the wreck of the difficult poem. few thoughts meant to situate such poems and then a humble attempt at enjoying and mining one inaccessible poem. Before Deconstruction, it was William Carlos Williams who called for the to become not a static object of a thing, but a of action. He proposed sweeping changes from top to bottom of the poetic structure—its scaffolding, its armature (281). He roused writers to open their poems to new ways of managing the language. Primarily it means to me opportunity to expand the structure, the basis, the actual making of the poem (291). Williams' essay was based on a talk given at the University of Washington in 1948. And then through the lens of poststructuralist theory we began to sense ways in which words are homeless, are like the planets (Coetzee). Words are wanderers in our minds; they call forth all sorts of idiosyncratic senses and memories and meanings. Contemporary poets currently writing the inaccessible make the a field for the slip and slide and search of words and images in transit—active—in motion. They may not be interested in the as still life. Unlike the logical structure, the is an existence which can incorporate contradictions, inconsistencies, explanations and counterexplanations and still remain whole, unexhausted and inexhaustible, writes A.R. Ammons in his essay A Poem Is Walk. How fruitful and haunted by suggestion become a poem's gaps and interstices, its hesitations and contradictory doublingsback. And so here we are right at our fears and uncertainties: the places where we feel dumb, or accuse the of incomprehensibility. But the inaccessible is not a lesser than: it awakens us to the process of reading, the play of meanings and overlaps. In visual art we notice the play of brush stroke or light and dark; we see how the composition overall can provoke a certain mood or fleeting thought. This is a promising frame of mind in which to wade into the moving current of the inaccessible poem. Emily Dickinson—writing in the late 1800s—was way ahead of her time, reaching intriguingly for layerings and a rich simultaneity of meanings in her poems. We must relax our grip somewhat on cracking the poem's code, wresting meaning from and thus dampening all other enjoyments afoot in the poem. Anyone who's taught rhetoric or composition or essay writing at any level, soon finds that it's those students who can best frame a provocative and compelling set of questions in response to the topic who make of their writing the richest process, the most intriguing and successful product. What question features, what types of questions are inwardly devised helping students map out a step that allows for the topic or analysis to open up into a fruitful, well-developed paper? If we are to help students gain practice in framing these questions, we need to put them in the middle of texts that puzzle and provoke questioning so that