The poem had seemed transparent, said Phillips, but in fact it is quite dense. But after dismissing the poem for some years, Phillips gradually recognized how the details and associations create a secondary density and profundity of implication, one that finally won him to recognitions he had not anticipated, including a deepened awareness of interiority. A fish is caught, then released-full stop. He then spoke of his experience with Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Fish,' a poem in which, at first reading, he found very little happening. The structure mimes the mental movement it characterizes the contortions of phrasing ('Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme ') are necessary to the final epigrammatic effect, its punch: 'All this the world well knows yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.' The first was Shakespeare's ' The expense of spirit' sonnet, which, as he pointed out, consists of one 12-line sentence, fairly convoluted in its syntax, leading to a second, the closing couplet, which in its straightforward clarity enacts a movement of arrival and recognition. He illustrated his points with two examples. But obscure, Phillips insisted, does not mean unavailable often it means merely hidden, with the reader's challenge being to unlock the hidden level. That which is instantly gotten, it would seem, does not have a chance to put its hooks into us. He offered this engagement, which I had conceived as the friction, as a way to physically take hold of the text. Intentional obscurity? A whole other issue, one that I hoped we would get to.Ĭarl Phillips spoke first, acknowledging the taxonomic issue and then immediately asserting the reader's need to commit to what Phillips called the terms of engagement of the work in question, taking the poem on its own terms. And then of course there is the question of vantages: difficulty as experienced and expressed by the poet in the making and that experienced by the reader in her reading.

Difficulty, I would say, maps itself obediently to the contours of our interpreted world, hugs it like plastic wrap. There is the difficulty of syntax, reference, image, idea, and metaphysical reach and of course the difficulty inherent in that which is to be expressed. Eliot, or Louis Zukofsky, or Paul Celan, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Anne Carson, or John Ashbery, not to mention the work of my three co-panelists. The taxonomy of difficulty is as vast as the available poetic instances, which are many and various, from the poetry of Paul Muldoon to that of Ezra Pound, or T.

Whatever that is: Clearly, our discussion would not be venturing more than provisional swipes at that immensity.

Indeed, I would say that difficulty is the friction that accompanies all the attempts we make on meaning. Difficulty bears directly on the question of meaning. I looked right past the signpost of the stated title, which struck me as a subhead to the issue I wanted to address-I mean 'getting it,' with obscurity just one of the obstacles to the desired comprehension, and clarity only one of its avenues of access. This was my first thought, anyway, as I started to think toward moderating a panel on the topic of 'Clarity and Obscurity in Poetry' with Carl Phillips, Kay Ryan, and James Tate. Not difficulty for itself, necessarily-though that may be part of it-but for what it suggests to the reader about his or her inadequacy in the face of meaning. Moore, many out there too dislike it, this may have less to do with gardens and toads and more with the simple fear of difficulty.

Definition obscurity