Tectak raises the question of whether there's a point to obscurity in poetry in this thread.

(02-15-2012, 09:04 AM)tectak Wrote:  But the point is, there IS NO point in obscure verse, except to those who covet it and assign purpose to it; criticise it but at your peril. Because something appears to be nonsense only makes the judgement of it more prone to misconstruance, and that is the extent of the risk that the writer makes. The risk to the critic is much greater because whilst great poetry is constructed according to universally accepted ( or at the very least, recognised) rules, to judge outside the guidelines can lead to the king's new clothes scenario.
What am I babbling on about? Just this. If anyone writes anything which someone does not understand then what is written has failed by some criterion.Live with it or change it. The critic, well intentioned, may say " I fail to grasp the meaning in stanza 2"..........this may well be a statement!

There is an excellent essay by poetry editor John C. Goodman addressing precisely this subject, entitled Obscurity in Poetry.

Goodman begins by linking contemporary "obscure" verse through the ages of English poetry, from the kenning of Anglo-Saxon poetry to the riddle poems at the turn of the last millennium, along past Donne (always and forever my favourite poet) and the metaphysical poets, into the surrealism and symbolism that so heavily influenced the postmodernists. He writes:

Quote:Rather than dismissing non-narrative poetry because it is difficult to understand, a productive approach is to try and discern the writer’s underlying poetic and ask why a poet would want to write something abstruse in the first place. Language is what we use to communicate, so why would anyone intentionally write something incomprehensible?

The answer has a lot to do with the way our minds work. Our minds are constantly attempting to knit the world together and the tool the mind uses to structure reality is association. Our minds are associative engines continually binding our fragmented experiences together into a unified whole. Where there is no association between discrete events, the mind will supply one.

and later:

Quote:One artistic reaction to this psychological trap was Dada which sought to disrupt conditioned responses through the introduction of the random and unexpected. Surrealism followed soon after with the incorporation of images from the only place where we are free from our conditioning: the natural symbolic language of dreams. If our lives – and even our creativity – are directed by uncontrollable subconscious forces, why not give up the illusion of conscious control entirely and go straight to the source, the subconscious mind? For the Surrealists, psychic events are just as meaningful as physical events and the subconscious is a viable source of both experience and artistic subject matter. Symbolism, as found in dreams, is the natural, innate language of the psyche. That we symbolize before we can talk as evidenced by a child too young to speak who has already formed an attachment to a blanket or stuffed toy – the object is a symbol of security. We have to be taught to speak, but we don’t have to be taught how to symbolize.

Since it's already been written so very well, I would encourage everyone to read the full article. It is lengthy, but worth the time.

A couple of years ago, my nephew wanted to do a Masters in Creative Writing. He was put off (and his literary French mother nearly exploded) when told he would have to do a dissertation on this. The high point seems to be him getting around to saying 'January, February'. I suggested the University was out of its mind, as defrauding people in this way was plainly actionable.

It is occasionally useful to look at extremes to determine where truth lies. It is quite endearing that old Paris is clinging on to this stuff -- but if Mr Chopin has a statement, I don't want to hear it. And with such a name!

I think Goodman is misrepresenting the history of poetry, just as I think what Tectac said is being mis-characterized, as I think he meant it was senseless to purposefully write in an obscure way.
Of course such things as Beowulf, kenning, or even Lord Randall, will, from a contemporary perspective seem obscure, but I can assure you they were not for the people of that age. Instead of being obscure, they were reflective of that ages way of communicating. It is also erroneous to compare visual art to poetry. Art is non-verbal and acts on the visual sense, so it imparts its communication in a different way than does poetry. Poetry uses written communication as it mode, and written communication has certain rules that are generally agreed upon in order that we understand what the person is saying. Because of it's mode of communication, writing falls under certain constraints that are not germane to visual art. Visual art does not need one's understanding to have an effect. However visual art does fall under one constraint, it has to be able to be seen.
For poetry, the corollary of being unseen, is to be unclear. To write in such a way as to make what is written unintelligible, is to make poetry invisible to the reader. Unfortunately people have been conditioned, not to mentioned cowed into accepting that obscurity, or inscrutability is equivalent to profundity. Still, we see the effects of this type of self devouring in other areas of art, such as Jazz. At one point Jazz had become so technical and intellectual that it was in danger of becoming a dead art form. Fortunately the Basso Nova, or California Cool movement breathed new life into it by allowing it to reconnect to its audience. What almost happened to Jazz should serve as an object lesson to poets. To move into an idiom that the reader cannot comprehend will lead to poetry becoming a dead art form, which seem the direction it is already heading.

Dale

Well, the educators and their prejudices are quite another story -- I have little time for the homogenisation of poetry, or the assertion (nay, command) that this is the one and only way to write poetry, that this is obsolete and irrelevant, that these are the rules and if you break them, you have not written a poem. What the academics -- and a good number of poetry critics -- fail to realise is that "rules" in poetry are only trends, conventions accepted according to popularity. Without the rule breakers, the avant garde, poetry like all else in the world would remain in stasis, and what's the point of that?

Now, obscurity. I'm not advocating obscurity merely for its own sake. That to me is like a scientist who writes only in his own lofty jargon so as to seem more intelligent than anyone who isn't "in the know" while actually failing to say anything that hasn't been said better -- and understood -- a thousand times before. Often, saying something plainly is the best option ("the roof is on fire"), however there are some things that are more complex, that require exploration on the part of both the poet and the reader and that are damaged by bald statement as that closes the idea off to further thought. Some things should not have a full stop.

That doesn't mean that I excuse bad writing, however it's incumbent upon the reader to determine (and with close reading it should not be too difficult) whether the "obscurity" (I really dislike that term) is deliberate and leading to a concept/set of concepts or whether it's just plain nonsense. It's perhaps also the prerogative of the reader to decide that he/she doesn't want to follow the steps required and thus decide at the outset that it's not worth bothering, therefore it's nonsense -- however I tend to think that if just one person comes to my poem and takes meaning from it, in such a way that it's obvious they've connected and not just extracted meaning from the ether, then my job as a writer is done.

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(02-15-2012, 11:53 AM)Erthona Wrote:  Of course such things as Beowulf, kenning, or even Lord Randall, will, from a contemporary perspective seem obscure, but I can assure you they were not for the people of that age. Instead of being obscure, they were reflective of that ages way of communicating.

I knew you were old, but I didn't realise you had firsthand experience of Beowulf's origins :p

To my mind, what many people deem "obscure" in poetry simply taps into my preferred way of communicating -- taking pleasure in the journey without requiring knowledge of the destination.

(02-15-2012, 12:10 PM)Leanne Wrote:  Well, the educators and their prejudices are quite another story -- I have little time for the homogenisation of poetry, or the assertion (nay, command) that this is the one and only way to write poetry, that this is obsolete and irrelevant, that these are the rules and if you break them, you have not written a poem. What the academics -- and a good number of poetry critics -- fail to realise is that "rules" in poetry are only trends, conventions accepted according to popularity. Without the rule breakers, the avant garde, poetry like all else in the world would remain in stasis, and what's the point of that?

Now, obscurity. I'm not advocating obscurity merely for its own sake. That to me is like a scientist who writes only in his own lofty jargon so as to seem more intelligent than anyone who isn't "in the know" while actually failing to say anything that hasn't been said better -- and understood -- a thousand times before. Often, saying something plainly is the best option ("the roof is on fire"), however there are some things that are more complex, that require exploration on the part of both the poet and the reader and that are damaged by bald statement as that closes the idea off to further thought. Some things should not have a full stop.

That doesn't mean that I excuse bad writing, however it's incumbent upon the reader to determine (and with close reading it should not be too difficult) whether the "obscurity" (I really dislike that term) is deliberate and leading to a concept/set of concepts or whether it's just plain nonsense. It's perhaps also the prerogative of the reader to decide that he/she doesn't want to follow the steps required and thus decide at the outset that it's not worth bothering, therefore it's nonsense -- however I tend to think that if just one person comes to my poem and takes meaning from it, in such a way that it's obvious they've connected and not just extracted meaning from the ether, then my job as a writer is done.

How polite you are! I forgot the clip:

[youtube]mg3NrR7_jYk[/youtube]
video embedded/mod

Ah, now your first post makes a bit more sense... I thought you were being deliberately obscure

Watching that clip I was reminded of Monty Python's "man with a tape recorder up his nose"... which I liked a whole lot better... but I would never say it's not poetry, simply that it's not to my taste.

"To my mind, what many people deem "obscure" in poetry simply taps into my preferred way of communicating -- taking pleasure in the journey without requiring knowledge of the destination."

There are actually problem I see, and neither have anything to do with your writing. One is what I call affectation poetry. It is the ad hoc abandonment of punctuation and grammar because evidently the only poet they ever read was eecummings. I don't think most of the time this is purposeful, they are probably just misled about what poetry is, and think it isn't poetry if you use punctuational. The second problem I call, "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks", is purposeful obfuscation, so as to give the appearance that there is something of depth or profundity when there is not. What they both have in common is that they both sacrifice clarity in writing for things that do not improve the poem. Deviating outside of the norm is fins if you can give a justification for it other than, "that's just how I do it". Certainly we all experiment to some degree in order to push the envelope, what kind of poet wouldn't, but I think you have to have a rational for doing so. You know as well as I that on sites like AP, you can scribble out whatever gobbledygook you want, and if you play your cards right there will be people who will tell you it is brilliant, and how it touched them, how profound, simply because they are people pleasers and also know nothing about poetry. And since they can't tell good poetry from bad, they praise everything. That way no one can accuse them of not "getting it".

In terms of obscurity, something is obscure if you are not knowledgeable about it. Sometimes people purposefully use obscurity in order to obfuscate the fact there is really nothing of value in their writing, that is where it crosses the line. We all have our areas of expertise in terms of general knowledge, and so we may mention something to us seem common knowledge, when in fact it is for most people obscure, to me that is acceptable, because there is no intent to manipulate by doing so.

Dale

I don't disagree with any of your points -- one of the prime objectives of this site is to avoid entirely the sycophancy and smoke-blowing of most "poetry" sites (your example being particularly apt). Many people have joined here and left soon after because they do not find the instant praise and worship that they crave, and while I think it's a shame they don't try something different, I find it difficult to mourn the loss. It's only through education, through sharing our experience and understandings and then challenging people to "push the envelope" (I do love that phrase) that we can rid the world of the scourge of cummings clones and Plath pretenders (no disrespect intended to either cummings or Plath, but their disciples are largely degenerate) -- perhaps if they learn why their idols used the devices they did, they will use them properly and then advance the techniques so that poetry is richer, not stagnant or heading backwards.

Yes, it is vitally important that people learn the difference between good poetry and bad, and are not afraid to say that there is a difference, rather than "anything that comes from the heart is equally valid and how the poet expresses himself is personal so you can't correct it". It is also important to recognise that there are many different styles of poetry, some not even created yet, and definitive statements of the "this cannot be" type are in many cases counter-productive.

Very few poems are beyond redemption. They may never set the world on fire, but if they're posted in a critique forum I consider it my responsibility at least -- and I understand that not everyone feels the same way -- to help them reach their potential so that the writer learns from the experience and isn't afraid to try a little bit harder next time. Poets are a temperamental lot, you may have noticed, so I find it best not to discourage them if there's any hope at all

Ed,

I know that you are not asserting that it is, but that's not poetry, that's psychology. On top of that, it is nothing new. When you are doing things to study how the mind tries to create some kind of order out of distortion you have left poetry. And really, what he is doing is really pseudo -psychology/neuroscience. Of course if a person knows nothing about research into this area, it would be easy for them to be duped into thinking he was on to something profound, but really this is old hat. I mean Rorschach has been around since 1921 and it relies on this same principle of making sense out of distortion, so Chopin was about 60 years behind the curve. He was pretending to discover something that had already been examined 60 years earlier.

I do not understand how playing around with an old tape-recorder is either poetry (Leanne) or Psychology. Although no doubt sincere, the guy is a phoney by any sensible standards. He must have been around in the days of 'tachisme' or 'action-painting', which, as a student at the RCA my sister indulged in, in our back-garden. This involved her placed several gigantic tubes of paint (needless to say, supplied free of charge) on a canvas; she then cycled across these, they squirted out, and she cycled back and forth. She then set fire to the paint, but somehow preserved a burnt canvas. And that was it. She moved on, and paints beautifully.

Was it Art? Is le feu M. Chopin poetry? I think the question needs to be put differently. Why do the practitioners of such-- and in terms of Art, this is much more true, with installations---feel the need to attach what they do to the coat-tails of Art and Poetry? Why not singing? Or carpentry? Plainly, there is an attraction which the old fuddy-duddy poets and painters have, people who wrote poetry when you would have been under no illusion that it was anything but that, and people who painted actual paintings so-called because the were painted, and by a skilled hand.

I suggest that if you create a new art-form, you should be sufficiently proud of it to give it a completely new name. M Chopin did not-- he stuck to French 'sound poetry'. Nor, perhaps for financial reasons, do the installation brigade. I can enjoy some of this stuff, although frequently it comprises one idea spread thinly over a long period of time. However, it is not painting, nor is it sculpture. And a match-stick on a record-player -- not poetry. Otherwise, the word must comprise everything: my left-over muesli, some pink glasses I have, a double-decker bus, my scarf-- not representations of these, but the things themselves. The word then would have no more meaning than 'stuff'.

One cannot, I suppose, get more obscure than addressing a person in a foreign language. But that made me wonder, looking at things a little differently. I was brought up Catholic in the days when Mass had to be in Latin. There is no doubt that the intoning of this had a great effect :
'Credo in unum deum' began the Creed, and then a bit later, a thunderous 'Deum de deo, lumen de lumine, deum verum de deo vero' (Lit:God of(from) God, light from light, True god from True God'). I do not know to this day really know what that meant, nor many of the other bits. But the sound of it all! If occasionally, I hear the same stuff in English --it is just flat. So, totally obscure, more than M Chopin, yet.....

But whatever the effect of the Latin Mass, for that matter, and much more poignantly, the Russian Creed, and 'Lord Hear my Prayer', or even the 24 hour Qur'an recital competitions of the ME, it is not poetry. Maybe not quite music either. So join M Chopin & invent your own categories!

.
Erthona typed: "Instead of being obscure, they were reflective of that ages way of communicating."

Substitute all sorts of things (like "person's") for "ages" in the above.
"Obscure" is as impossibly subjective as "meaning". Japanese poetry
and building evacuation instructions written in Japanese are obscure
(to me?).

I think of poetry as a way of organizing symbols. The symbol could be
a photograph, a tape recording, a musical note. Words on a page are
absolutely "visual". Obscurity has to do with your interpretation of
what's before you. It's not only interpreting a symbol, it's interpreting
what IS a symbol as well.

As said above, the mind tries to make sense of "stuff".
Poetry is a fun way (for some) to play (with) this tune.

Or:

< eye witness >

watching
tilts the limit
works the connection
of what you saw
and
what i'll do

soon
these small words
(i measured this one
at less than a centimeter)
these small words
are all we have
no music
or even
(if you're reading this)
a voice
just the ability
to appeal
to the prejudice
that lives inside our heads

and these small words
dismiss them if you will
are always
the ones that kill

- - -

This thread came out of 'Once in a while meltdown'. In it, tectac observes that great poetry is written according to universally recognised, or at least accepted, rules. I have obviously been barking up the wrong tree. Can someone let me know what these rules are?

(02-18-2012, 04:40 AM)abu nuwas Wrote:  Can someone let me know what these rules are?

No, but if you find out, tell me and then confiscate all my pens, because writing poetry will have become very mundane and I'll probably just go off and become an accountant or something.

Seriously, there are conventions in all writing so that the reader has some solid ground, and any changes to these conventions should be deliberate, not just "i writeout capital letters because cummings did and he's like totally the bestest" or (worst of all) "that was how it came out of my heart and that's the pure art don't disturb it or you'll ruin its soul".

(02-18-2012, 05:04 AM)Leanne Wrote:  

(02-18-2012, 04:40 AM)abu nuwas Wrote:  Can someone let me know what these rules are?

No, but if you find out, tell me and then confiscate all my pens, because writing poetry will have become very mundane and I'll probably just go off and become an accountant or something.

Seriously, there are conventions in all writing so that the reader has some solid ground, and any changes to these conventions should be deliberate, not just "i writeout capital letters because cummings did and he's like totally the bestest" or (worst of all) "that was how it came out of my heart and that's the pure art don't disturb it or you'll ruin its soul".

Who'd a thunk? Leanne no longer cares
That a made thing is a poema?
Instead she sits and blankly stares
And vaguely wonders what it means
That a thunk thing is called noema;
Or why she rhymes, while counting beans.

l think the most common reasons for writing 'my way' are a) that that is what you have done forever (me) ; and b ) that you were never exposed to tuition, and choose to assert, that however you write, is valid: (les autres).

I am more sympathetic than you over 'from the heart' poems. In Another Place, I have read some heart-rending poems, by a woman whose husband suddenly got, and died from, cancer. But then I am a crap critic, as I always make clear.

I'd have thought the origins of this discussion to be more substantial, an interesting read thanks for being public. x

It doesn't take much to set us off.

Who needs substance when we live in the abstract?

(02-19-2012, 06:37 AM)Leanne Wrote:   It doesn't take much to set us off.

Who needs substance when we live in the abstract?

Reality is dream stuff that such is made on.

I'll drink to that, Ray.

(02-19-2012, 06:50 PM)Leanne Wrote:  I'll drink to that, Ray.

And just how abstract is that!

P.S. Is there such a thing as haggis tofu? (I mentioned
previously that its existence could not entirely be ruled
out and thought you, being somewhat an expert in these
matters, might weigh in with either an opinion or an example.)

Ah yes, the delightful hafu, the most noble end for any legume wishing to be processed and eaten by men with badgers for beards and women with bearded badgers...

The trouble lies with finding a suitable casing, as no sheep has the stomach for tofu.

I am sure there's a suitably obscure poem waiting to be written and then misinterpreted by antiesotericists.