On National Public Radio yesterday, a letter was read from a listener in California, who took issue with some attitudes of Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (featured in an earlier show).

The listener questioned Kooser's populist, accessible, Hallmark greeting-card approach, driven by the wish to make everybody comfortable.

He said poetry was still the "K-2" (near Mt. Everest) : the summit of precision in language, thought, feeling. Said something like, "if you take away the mountains, there will be no more mountain-climbers."

Well put, I thought...

The popularizing impulse - whether well-meant or self-serving - is a characteristic of publicists, middlemen, spokespeople, fundraisers, educators everywhere. It's not limited to the "mainstream".

Its opposite, though, is not necessarily "difficulty" (in any simple sense!!!).

Shakespeare usually shows up in debates about difficulty. Precise & expansive; popular & deep.

Yeats really wanted that, too. He wanted it so badly, & maybe he partially achieved it. Irish folksingers still set his poems to music.

And Eliot's polemics, and Pound's. Either the "dissociation of sensibility" (Eliot) or the tyranny of bad empires & economics (Pound) is blamed for poetry's internal dessications & external humiliations.

I was intrigued by a certain moment in Carol Christ's study mentioned here earlier (Victorian and Modern Poetics), when the Victorians felt it necessary to turn away from the "classic" Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, etc.) :

because the Romantic mind, shadowed by solipsism & egoism, no longer seemed capable of authenticity in the face of science & industrialism & various intellectual orthodoxies - the Victorians had to find ways of distancing themselves from that Romantic unity. & thus turned to a new poetics of sensation, irony, dramatic masks & personae - foreshadowing the Modernists.

What I'm groping toward here is a relationship between precision & complexity in poetry, and this notion of a "lost unity" of poetic expression (which some found in the Romantics, some found in the Metaphysicals & Shakespeare, some found in Antiquity, etc.).

& it seems that the 20th century experiments with abstraction and self-contained symbolic structures no longer fully satisfy us as a response to this crisis. Postmodernism is the register of that dissatisfaction : but further irony, and further engagements with aleatory, dissociated aesthetic modes, don't seem to resolve anything either (a register of dissatisfaction is not an affirmation).

I don't have the answer(s) at the moment; but anyway, that NPR listener's comments rang some bells for me. Poetry is rare - mountainous - because it seeks both precision and wholeness.

Poetry's serious side opens up a certain space for its aesthetic reception, for real enjoyment with understanding (these are intellectual exercises). Attention, everybody.

Better shut up now & get out the hiking boots.

Robert A's latest grid over at Samizdat is more interesting (to "the me") than previous schemata. Hinsley's essay sounds good too : I like the idea of revamping the application of the term "doggerel".

However, I think you have to take schemes of general trends, or bracketing of kinds of poetry or qualities of same, with a big grain of salt. Do we really need or want to evaluate poetry, in comparative terms, based solely on specs derived from an ethical-philosophical measure of the status of the self?

How do we determine the mixture of literary guile involved in a poetics of the non-self (say, in various versions of Language- and & other postmodern poetries), which is, nevertheless, an act of assertion rather than one of empathy with an Other? How do we evaluate - except on a case-by-case basis - the ambiguous admixtures of narcissism and detachment, sentiment and irony, which emerge from the practice of writing?

It's possible that a grid of such contraries could help a critic orient him/herself toward a more decisive ethical or critical judgement. But I'm afraid the more likely result is a practice of pigeonholing individual writers; snap judgements; labelling; the formation of spurious & unnecessary lumpings-together : unique poets into handy groups.

Why do we keep circling back, repeatedly over the decades, to these formulae about "the self"? This is a conundrum. Does it have something to do with the difficulty of apprehending and judging sincerity and emotional authenticity through the detached medium of a text? Isn't this the problem with reading in general? Isn't this why authentic poetry exhibits an awareness of emotional/ethical/epistemological complexity, through a comparable rhetorical complexity?

[p.s. even "complexity" has its complexities. A style which comes across as blunt, simple, direct, idiomatic - even vulgar - may be propelled by a very complex and ironic literary strategy. Yesterday's complexity may not be today's.]

People want me to be clearer, more comprehensible, include lengthier selections of my poem. It seems to me I've posted quite a bit of Forth of July lately, along with links to longer passages.

Besides, I'm not here to make it easy for you : it's not easy for me! Why simplify a complex game, one which I've put my heart & soul into for years? My poetry is not a fast food franchise.

This is my "free time", provided free to anyone interested. You don't like my product, so long, das vidanya.