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Poet Roundtable
6.
AOTW: Many people say, "Poetry --- too difficult for me." Could you convince them they're wrong? How?
Robin Robertson: Poetry is --- and should be --- difficult, in the same way as any serious work of art. All art requires an engaged commitment from the receiver. You do not expect to "understand" a great symphony on first hearing --- though there will be melody lines that will encourage you to listen to it again. If a poem can be wholly grasped on one reading it is not, in my opinion, a poem.
Mark Ford: I'm not sure I'd want to, anymore than I'd want to convince people to go hang-gliding or rock-climbing. Poetry always has been, in general, a minority interest. Those who like it, like it... of course you have to try it before you know whether you do or don't like it, but in my experience people are as likely to be turned on to poetry by "The Waste Land" as by "If" or "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." There's plenty of "easy" poetry, and the sales figures of, say, Billy Collins in America or Carol Ann Duffy in Britain suggest there's a huge market for it. Over the last fifty years avant-garde poetry has never succeeded in becoming popular or financially remunerative in the way avant-garde painting has, but it survives nevertheless, and I'm often struck, when I consider the history of poetry, how in the long run the poets who become canonical are nearly always the ones who attempted something new and therefore 'difficult' --- though at the same time there is much 'difficult' poetry which is no good at all. The current diversity of the scene means all who read contemporary poetry have to develop into connoisseurs of chaos...
Daniel Mark Epstein: Read them Homer, Catullus, Robert Burns, Whitman, Blake, James Whitcomb Riley, and early Robert Creeley.
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