"Goes the Logic" - George Ttoouli on Simon Turner on difficulty in art

Reading Simon's review of Geraldine Monk and Tim Atkins in issue 2 of Horizon, I've had this overwhelming desire to extend his ideas on 'difficulty' in art. (It will become apparent that this article is really about reader empowerment, but I am first writing out my logic-springboard.)

As Simon writes, "more often than not there is a shade of judgement in the use of the term: poetry is difficult when it refuses to give up its secrets in one sitting, when not every page is left justified, when the poem doesn’t round off neatly with a twee and epiphanic observation from the author’s own life."

I'm not entirely satisfied by this. Too often the 'avant' is dismissed by the school of quietude (to borrow Silliman's term, which makes life easier for me, but doesn't mean I'm politically allied to it, though I'd guess neither is he from recent asides - the 'Seth vs. Ron' link) in terms that mimic the easy dismissal of 'experimental writing' by the SoQ: 'difficult' is a shallow term, one that shouldn't be trusted. Why should I then trust a similarly simplistic rebuttal - even if I agree with the idea?

I think the argument warrants a full scale trebuchet behind it. Let's put it into terms that count. Here's one example of difficult: a DJ at an 'alternative' music night (yes, all attempts at definition of genre are bullshit) opens his set with 'Paint it Black' by the Rolling Stones. All present are in agreement that it's a great song; they rock out. His next track is a cover of 'Paint it Black'. So are the next 45 minutes of music. By different bands. Remixes. His own remixes. Versions cut with a dance track. Every version of the song he could find, for nearly an hour. After the fourth or fifth version, the crowd is becoming abusive. Several versions down the line, the dancefloor is clear, questions as to the DJs state of mind, mental health, need of being forcibly removed, are discussed. Two or three of the DJs friends are still laughing. After half an hour of versions, even the DJ's friends are beginning to get tired.

At some point, people might actually tune into the song and think, 'I used to like that song. Why?' At that point, the art kicks in, yes? You know, at that point, you're experiencing a real dialogue with the art. No art without participation, as the Arts Council England might point out, if it wasn't so busy counting heads.

For 'difficulty' then, I'd prefer to advance the notion of 'unexpectation'. I think most of my arguments with 'straighter' readers boil down to matters of expectation. I like poetry that surprises me, because it doesn't operate on the terms I've become accustomed to - it forces me to participate. Just as the crowd at a music night expect a DJ to play a set of tracks - some new, some classic, some that create a certain energy, others that give you time to go to the bar and refuel, and a Spice Girls track at the end of the night to clear the place and let the staff close up - similarly, people are used to reading poetry in a certain way and for a certain kind of meaning.

Take for example, this phrase of Simon's in reviewing Monk: "using the full spread of the page, á l’Olson, as a primary component in the generation of meaning". Ignoring the hilarious, though horrible, bit of frenchaise referencing, do people really expect a poem to use the full spread of the page to generate meaning? Even your 'average, diversely-attuned reader' (or ADA readers) doesn't come to a page of poetry expecting poetry to generate meaning in that way, though well done to Simon for pointing out how well Monk does it. As ADA readers, we do expect to be pushed to reinterpret our personal biases, perhaps, or to hang our preconceptions by the door.

What I'm interested in is trust and empowerment. When a reader comes to a poem, or book of poems, and says 'I want it to do this for me' and then throws the book across the room when it doesn't, the reader has failed, not the poetry. When a reader comes to a poem and says, 'this poem wants me to read it in this way' then the reader is doing well from the off. Pretty good, anyway, in my books.

From there, the reader can say, 'Yeah, I read it in this way and got something from it,' or, 'So I tried to read it on the terms it was asking, but ultimately it didn't leave anything but sand in my mouth'. That's a fair review. I'm trying to draw a distinction here between 'elevating oneself to the level of the poem' and being willing to see what a text wants from me, what kind of demands and rewards it might be offering. From there, any reader, ADA, common, dyslexic or merely a lonely, unadjectivised reader, is entirely justified in burning that book, or giving it to a local charity shop.

Again I say, I'm not arguing for 'right reading' here. Leave that to reprographics people. This is about the right for a reader to trust their instincts. In that regard, I'm certainly not arguing against someone who's read the full gamut of poetries available to them and chosen what they like. I do that a lot myself.

If you so happen to choose a 19th Century Romantic aesthetic over a 1960s Black Mountain aesthetic because you've read both and list one way, not t'other, fine by me. If you look into it and decide the SoQ's for you, or the Avants, fine! (You're an asshole if you choose wrong, but that's OK, I still like you. No, I take that back. Simon tells me I should take that back. Oh, nevermind.) You've done your work. You're (hopefully) open minded enough not to close down all other texts of a type of writing entirely. Sure, don't spend too long on the areas you know you've a history of boredom with, but don't get zealous about it: the differences in artistic experiences validate your personal tastes.

So it's the fear of the unexpected I have a problem with. Sure, too often, 'difficulty' is mistrusted because readers feel they need a PhD in The Phallic Symbolism of the Ampersand in the Poetry of Philip Larkin; or Correlations between the Rise of Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Lyric 'I' in Late Twentieth Century British Poetry; or The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse; or Using Prairie Polyculture Systems to Understand the Long Poems of Elisabeth Bletsoe, etc. (Yes, better rein that in, having too much fun - but any others, please add them to the comments.) I don't like being made to feel stupid by a text either.

If readers can be taught to accept the unexpected, to interpret intention (and suddenly the image of Will Smith in 'Men in Black' shooting an eight year old cardboard cut-out in the head for carrying a textbook on particle physics springs to mind) then they can also be empowered to say what they want about a text's qualities, no matter how average or outside they feel from a system.

My main worry is that readers are deliberately excluded by certain critics and writers on the basis of their 'lack of knowledge'. Readers are made to feel insecure, inexpert, inadequate, insufficiently skilled, when it comes to making certain judgment calls on texts. It worked for the Chicago school in defence of their absurd deregulation of the financial markets (as Naomi Klein has said elsewhere) and it's used time and again by cliques of writers to defend varying degrees of shoddiness, or simply as a lash-out response.

And it damages readers. I feel like I need to start a campaign: "Reader! Do you feel like you've been pissed on by a critic, or a writer, for being too common to get what they were writing about? Well, never fear. It's OK to think a writer is shit, if you put the effort into reading their book and still didn't get it!" But that word 'effort' is loaded. At what point is a reader justified in rejecting a writer's work?

I have my biases and I don't hide them, but I do try to mediate them. Some negative critical arguments are justified, measured. If a reader can put their back into an attack and not simply fling about clichéd appraisals (e.g. 'reads like a cryptic crossword clue', or 'doesn't have any rhyme', or 'why is it all left-justified?'), then I'm wiling to give that reader the right to their expression.

Ultimately, there needs to be room to allow for all kinds of reading and writing: lazy reading, skim reading, automatic writing, validated reading, invalidated writing and the kind of reading habit that is prepared to take a text on its own terms. All of these are subjective assessments and the reader decides when to commit their time and energy, and how, as does the writer.

Writers should take responsibility for the fact that their writing is sometimes skewiff and not blame readers. And readers should be prepared to have their criticisms levelled if they aren't willing to appraise a text to the point they can rustle up a cogent response. (It's a bit late in the day, but I guess I should distinguish between a 'recommendation' - I liked/disliked - and a 'review', which weighs up a text's strengths in some kind of context.)

Difficulty, for me, is less about the quality of a text, more about the attitude and preconceptions a reader brings to, or the relationship the reader establishes with a text. If you can't overcome that barrier between your own version of reality and the reality a poem presents to you, then you're living a pinprick away from reality. Good luck maintaining the illusion, but from where I'm standing, you're missing out.

Simon Turner - Multiple Things

Philip Larkin: Britain's greatest postwar writer. Apparently.

There is a very interesting article in the current issue of Pomegranate, in which Emily Tesh lays into the notion that the sole function of any young poet is the finding of one's voice. Tesh's chief complaint, aside from the argument that the critical focus on voice is an example of lazy reading, is that sticking to one voice fails to reflect the multiplicity of the world as it is currently lived by the majority of people. She writes:

"If I had to describe what life in the twenty-first century is like to a passing time-traveler, I’d call it multiple. Different media are everywhere, blaring a hundred thousand different messages that reach our ears as a dizzy mess of thoughts and fashions and brands. The world wants us to know that iPod and iTunes are meant to be together like attractive models making out, that McDonalds eaters everywhere are lovin’ it, that you should just do it, that property prices are rising or falling again, that all right-thinking people hate the Iraq war and George Bush, that all right-thinking people hate immigrants and gays, that Elton John went to a party last night and that people are starving in Africa, that shares in X company rose point three percent the other day and that this is the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah and that that was My Chemical Romance with Teenagers and that COMING SOON from New Line studios and that A-levels are being devalued and that A-levels are just fine and that you should look both ways before crossing the road..."

Work written according to the precepts of voice within this epoch is automatically a failure, precisely because it is an exception to the rule of modernity. If novels, movies, and kid's cartoons can keep up with the pace of technological and communicative change, why not poetry? It's a sound argument, and one which - perhaps accidentally - manages to restate some central issues in the ongoing clash of civilizations between the mainstream and the alternative poetry scenes. On the other side of the Atlantic, Ron Silliman made much the same argument in a post on his own blog back in 2003 (March 14 to be exact):

"Imagine the life experiences of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading in the United States the year 2003. This person lives in a society in which the Talking Heads had a hit record singing the zaum poetry of Hugo Ball in 1977. The most surreal songs of Bob Dylan were released – and not on any indy label – some 36 years ago. Eminem crams in more social observation into any given quatrain than some Pulitzer poets have managed in their entire careers. Ditto songwriters like Townes Van Zandt or Dave Carter, to pick on a completely different musical genre, or groups like Public Enemy & NWA. And Van Zandt & Carter are both dead, and those rap groups already consigned to the remainder bins of history. Or consider, for that matter, Prince, another golden oldie who managed a career without the benefit of a word for a name for several years. The most popular motion picture of the past two years had substantial portions of dialog spoken (with subtitles) in Elvish. To pick another medium altogether, television, the audience coming to this reading will have had everything from the close attention to the spoken that is Buffy, to the narrative ambiguities – including the backwards speaking dwarf – of Twin Peaks to the multiple layers of Max Headroom, all in the range of recent references as they gather to hear somebody read a poem. This is in 2003, 172 years after the first of Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems. Over a century after Rimbaud & Lautréamont. Forty-seven years after Allen Ginsberg published Howl, a book so obscure that it made him a millionaire. All of the above, up to & including the Vampire Slayer, require at least as much sophistication in communication skills on the part of their various audiences as the poem submitted by Noah Eli Gordon. And when we consider the number & kinds of discourses that occur simultaneously on a single screen of CNN’s Headline News channel – let alone consider the signage visible at any instant as we walk or drive down any commercial street in America – we see that it is the surface of the univocal poem [...] that is the deviant experience. Whether or not we approve or disapprove is entirely another matter – but the one-dimensional surface profoundly is the exception to our experience of language, not the rule."

Sorry to offload so much text from other sites, but both Tesh and Silliman put their case so much better than I might have been able to in rehashing it. In essence, both writers are expressing a sense of boredom with the well-made poem, with neat conclusions and easily definable surfaces; both are pressing the case for 'multivocality' as the default experience of language in the everyday and, by extension, as the ideal mode in which to produce poetry. One would have thought that this was old hat, considering that modernism exploded onto the scene some time ago, and has been thoroughly declawed over the decades ever since. But this is not the case, and in a critical environment where Erica Wagner can declare Philip Larkin to be England's most important postwar writer and not be laughed all the way to the moon, these debates between ease and difficulty are all the more pressing [1]. If one expects these arguments from Silliman - he has, after all, got his finger on the pulse of modern poetry in a way that many of us simply don't have the knowledge for, and besides, his aesthetic affiliations are certainly of the multivocal stripe - it is heartening to hear them emanating in nascent form from a young poet-critic. Find a copy of Zukofsky's A as soon as possible, Emily: it'll knock the univocalists clean out your ears.

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[1] Jorie Graham, at a recent reading at Warwick University, noted the essential problem in the use of the term 'difficult' to desribe poetry, as it tended to put people off, and open up the critical field for popularisers like Billy Collins to fill the gap, and decalre simplicity 'in', at the expense of more complicated writers. (Neil Astley's is effectively fulfilling Collins's role in a British context.) Graham favoured 'complexity', as it is much less of a loaded term: 'difficulty' when applied to artistic productions is only ever two dainty semantic steps away from 'elitism', and no one likes elitism, do they? So, following Graham, 'difficulty' is hereby banned from Gists and Piths for good, unless the context calls for it - for example, 'I have difficulty reading Ian McEwan, because his books are awful', is acceptable; 'J H Prynne is a difficult poet' is not.