Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry

Reading the Difficulties

Reading the Difficulties Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan in the soothing (and parodic) voice of the self-help guru, Charles Bernstein reassures readers in his “The difficult poem” that “Difficult poems are normal. They are not incoherent, meaningless, or hostile” (Attack of the Difficult Poems 4). He also helps readers identify whether they have encountered a difficult poem by providing a handy checklist of five questions. This checklist asks the reader whether he or she is struggling with hard-to-understand vocabulary and syntax or feeling “inadequate or stupid” as a reader. But the checklist concludes with a question of transformation: “is your imagination being affected by the poem?” (Attack 4). While funny and frequently selfdeprecating as a creator, teacher, and critic of difficult poetry, Bernstein tips his hand with this final question. There is much more to the experience of “difficult” verse than deciphering non-traditional surface features. What is a “difficult” poem? Certainly difficult poems have always been with us. Listen to students of literature; they find poetry daunting, regardless of time period and prosody. The work of emily dickinson can be “difficult” with its spare metaphoric compression. The tapestries of cultural referents in both eliot’s and pound’s verse also can be “difficult.” But what difficulty characterizes contemporary innovative american poetry? according to Marjorie perloff, this poetry is so challenging that much critical discourse either “dismisses the new work out of hand as simply too opaque, obscure, and disorganized to reward any kind of sustained attention” or emphasizes the work’s relation to “a particular theory or an alternate discourse” and thus sidesteps the poem itself (Differentials xix). The contributors to Reading the Difficulties— both academics and non-academics, many of them poets—eschew such critical misdirection. Through readings and responses that are both typical and atypical of interpretive essays, they ponder what sort of stances open up readers to verse that deliberately removes comfortable cues that lead to compre- 2 Fink and Halden-sullivan hension. They seek to characterize the aesthetics of reception for innovative poetry, and they frequently encourage encounters with innovative verse in ways commensurate with their poetics. as Bruce andrews claims, “a writing that is itself a ‘wild reading’ solicits wild reading” (Paradise & Method 54-55). The contributors to this volume probe what such readings might be and how reading innovative verse might in manifold ways be “re-staged,” to borrow andrews’s verb (“poetry as explanation” 670). The “difficult” verse of the following poets inspires the writing of our contributors : ron silliman, Hank Lazer, Charles Bernstein, tan Lin, sheila e. Murphy,JohnBloomberg-rissman,HarryetteMullen,stephenratcliffe,Myung Mi Kim, Lisa robertson, tom Beckett, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, bpnichol, and Lisa Jarnot. some of these poets are considered Language poets, others can be classified as Conceptual poets, and the rest might be broadly characterized by the catch-all descriptor “post-Language.” even in such a diverse group, their common difficulty may stem from their resistance to expectations for a relatively unified vision of dominant cultural values. They avoid expressivist cohesion; rarely in their poetry does a single unified self lend coherence. instead many selves may compete for attention, and, if a distinctive self appears, it quickly morphs into something other. innovative difficult verse also is frequently non-narrative and not personally disclosive in a confessional sense; however, private references drawn from lived experiences of worlds may abound. as Bernstein asserts, “difficult” poetry “may actually provide a good deal more immediacy and affect than much of the more ‘i am my subject matter and don’t you forget it’ variety” (“poetry scene investigation ” Attack 245). in addition, difficulties in contextualization mark innovative poems—not that they are devoid of context; instead the collaging of multiple contexts invites unexpected context-building. innovative verse problematizes referentiality to deliver worlds in abundance; it’s not the “death” of the referent, per se, but “rather a recharged use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has” (Bernstein, “semblance,” Content's Dream 34). innovative verse’s difficulty is hardly formlessness; instead, especially in the cases of Conceptual, concrete, and oulipo poetries, it is often driven by experimentation and play with acknowledged prosodies and formulae. as oulipian-influenced poet Christian Bök explains, the innovative poem “makes a sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought” (qtd. in The /n/oulipian Analects 76). Here “sublime” is...