“I don’t like poems...
that make me feel stupid.”
I heard this recently from a friend with multiple earned degrees. I’ve heard it from high school students, too, and have felt it myself.
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pre-9/11, and overhearing a conversation between two tweedy professorial types about something that sounded like physics, it being all mathematical and scientific. Between them on the table, next to their pastries and mugs of freshly brewed coffee, was a small orange box of the sort that might contain hazardous material. Two mysteries were afoot: the contents of the orange box and whatever on earth (or outer space) those two were talking about. Despite my own multiple degrees, their conversation was, for its level of siloed sophistication, utterly beyond me. And yet it did not make me feel stupid.
Rather than feel stupid, I suddenly felt an unexpected surge of deep gratitude. Gratitude that, at the next table over in this funky, upscale cafe, such brilliance was hobnobbing among us and likely in the process of solving one of the thornier problems of our day.
I wish the feeling had lasted longer. No sooner had it arrived that it was replaced by a chilling thought: What if they’re not good? What if they’re serving someone whose vain ambition regards us little people as expendable and our suffering as collateral damage? Try as I might, I could not get back to the simple gratitude of just moments before. The best I could do was figure that if their designs were nefarious, then certainly they would not be discussing them openly in a crowded Cambridge cafe.
One thing for sure, the two weren’t in the least concerned that I might be listening. Which makes their cryptic science chat very different than poets’ deliberately public-facing poems.
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What does poetry offer us who are willing to listen?
So much depends upon “who” the “us” are. Are ”they” Great Books or Brit Lit scholars, perhaps amateur aficionados of the Western literary tradition? Well, certain kinds of poems can confirm them in their specialized knowledge by dropping all manner of allusions to the literature they love. The problem here is that this kind of poem often makes me feel if not stupid then very poorly read, and I imagine the cognizanti patting themselves on their backs. Yet I also know, because they’ve told me, that even my poems, that intentionally steer clear of highly specialized language (with a few ambitious exceptions), have confirmed some readers’ supposed inability to “get” and enjoy poetry.
But—and this is huge—there are scads of poems out there that offer far more than bafflement or intimidation.
In my own case, when, in the early 80s I was casting about for how to make poems in conversation with theology and faith, I happened upon Denise Levertov’s poem, “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus.” And then, in the 90s, John Berryman’s poetic sequence, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” Though both are major poets who utilize language here and there that could be a stretch for a reader, neither aims, in these poems, at overwhelming their readers with specialized language throughout. Together they pointed the way forward for me as a writer. As well, in the 00s, when depressed after being laid off in the wake of the 2008 recession, it was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 that in many ways saved my life. Mind you, I’m not a huge fan of Elizabethan literature, but his poem has a clarity and appeal that speaks across centuries.
On the receiving end of poetry, so many poems offer all kinds of comfort or confirmation, guidance or life-saving perspective. On the making end, poems offer poets a way of singing that is particular to their voices, a way to explore what it means and how it feels to be infinitesimal, sentient, carbon based lifeforms…, on a tiny yet glorious, sometimes life-threatening planet…, in an incomprehensibly vast, magnificent cosmos. And of course, there are poems, too, that make us weep or laugh out loud.
Any poet who sets out to write a poem to make others feel stupid, or keep inferiors at arms length, or bless the Muses that they’re not like their lessers, I’ve zero respect for, no matter their “art” or place in the poetry universe.
Such a poem is, IMHO, like an oil lamp—which may be quite spectacular—that has no or precious little oil.
May their lamps go out -- and soon -- who think to elevate themselves at others' expense. (And I am a diehard T. S. Eliot aficionado - he who is thought so opaque as to be impossible to "get".) But there's vast gulf between pedantic / uppity poetry and The Hollow Men or The Journey of Magi or Four Quartets. And yet another poet I love, William Carlos Williams couldn't stand Eliot's work--found it stuffy and supercilious. He's the one who said, "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow" and "No ideas, but in things" -- two of the best things ever said in a poem.
I think this is why poets like Rupi are popular- because any person can flip to any page and think "yup, that makes sense to me." Likely amplified by our increasingly short attention span, the idea of working through the meaning of something, or the language of it, has lost any merit in itself. I assume people would rather an idea be plainly spoken even if that misses the point entirely (some things I can only wrestle out in prose and poetry). But yeah, I never cared much for people who use convoluted language to keep themselves inaccessible, or to mask over relatively simple concepts.