A Quote by Billy Collins
I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
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Etiquette does not render you defenseless. If it did, even I wouldn't subscribe to it. But rudeness in retaliation for rudeness just doubles the amount of rudeness in the world.
There is a big difference you see between privately letting someone know that you're displeased, whether they've done something they may not be aware of, and just rudeness - and you do not have to tolerate rudeness, by any means.
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
Let's face it, the U.S. government is woefully, woefully behind in all of its policies that affect the use of technology.
I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
In exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd
Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.
Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He's the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.
I don't mean to be rude—" he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable. "Yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often," Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely.
National security is a place where the private sector could be helpful because the government is woefully behind the technology curve. But secondly, the bureaucratic processes that have been in place since 9/11 are woefully inadequate as well.
That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.
Poetry can explain individuals to ourselves, and change our attitudes, and help us see the complexity of the world, but the kind of poetry I follow isn't going to change public opinion directly. Other art forms can - if you're a TV writer, you have some interesting challenges, or if you're a country musician, somebody like Brad Paisley. But poetry not so much.
It is so tempting to return rudeness with rudeness!
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