The Games Poets Play

Sometimes poems are riddles, hard to decipher, complex mazes with clues scattered all around to help us find our way to some understanding. The poet is taking a risk there. The more difficult the task of working out the clues, the greater should be the pay-off. There is nothing worse than that sensation of finally cracking some code and then saying, “That’s it?” For a long time, that poet becomes a little suspect. However, the real pleasure of this quest is often similar to the feeling we have when we have completed a particularly difficult crossword puzzle.
If there were some kind of ancestral prototype for such poems, I like to think we would find it in some ancient culture where the priests were given the codes of herbal remedies or the laws of family and faith in riddle packed proverbial conundrums called poems. Only the priests would be expected to unravel these mysteries, but occasionally, some gifted soul manages to do so, and that person becomes Queen of King. The mystery of language, though is the thing retained.

The access to exclusive knowledge that the priest might have enjoyed, is probably the same one that many poets seek to experience when they write poems we describe as thick with obscure allusions and references. They want to look brighter than their audience, want to remind the world that they have somehow been gifted with a rare intelligence. It is arrogance, yes, but it is only a few steps away from the desire of many poets to feel in some ay chosen, set aside, holy.
I would find writing such poems terribly tedious. But this does not mean that some of these poems are not illuminating and pleasurable.
Other obscurers, however, have quite different motives for the clues, the shadows, the complex metaphors and the “private allusions and symbols”. Theirs is not a quest for originality (though that is sometimes part of it), but a peculiar desire to say something quite revealing without revealing much. Much of the contemporary re-examination of the poetry of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century has been founded on the effort to discover such secrets in the poems of poets who were apparently gay or in some way acting in a manner which was then deemed a transgression of sorts. Clue cracking sleuths have managed to decode some many examples of secrets revealed through veiled references and a complex of symbols connoting some unspeakable truth.
Obscuring with poetry has, for a long time, been a central part of the sport of making poems. But the twentieth century has been especially prodigious in producing poets of obscurity and celebrating them for their obscurity. I think that obscurity breeds obscurity. If you are taught poetry in school in a manner that suggests that what you are reading at the surface is almost always a wrong view of the poem, and that you must have a full glossary of terms, a full library of literary antecedents, and an intelligence capable of matching the great intelligence of the poet to be able to make sense of the work, you cannot be blamed for imagining that all great poetry has to be hard in that way, has to be marked by obscurity. The truth is that obscurity is an art in itself. Learning to lay out the trail of discovery for the reading—to chart it as one would chart a map—have become for many poets, elemental to their work. More often than not, though, such poetry is crude and ironically, quite transparent. However the practice persists because of the way poetry is taught and because in any circles it is still quite cool to be described as “deep”.
I do wonder, though, why I sometimes intentionally obscure the “facts” of a poem. Mostly I am trying to protect someone. Often, even indirectly, that person is myself. But I persist because I believe that there is something beautiful and valuable in the poem even if the “facts” are obscured. Some of these game are quite private and more often than not, I have not cared if anyone would know what I have done or not. In fact, the pleasure has been in doing it and enjoying the process. I often think that knowing what I have done would not be especially enlightening, anyway, and would certainly not help the reader engage the poem. I remember once, some years ago, I drafted a poem that was quite clearly a confessional poem about some offending habit of mine. I liked the poem for hat it did, and I set it aside for use later if the occasion arose. Some months later, I was putting together poems for a new collection. During that period, I had encountered someone whose actions were extremely painful to me, and in whom I had lost a great deal of confidence. Wickedly, I altered the poem, changing the person, and shifting the attack away from myself and towards this person. The sifts were fairly subtle, I thought, but I left enough clue for the person to at least wonder about who the poem was targeting. No one has ever commented on this poem. I still read it to myself and chuckle. The pleasure was wickedly mine. It all seemed harmless enough. And I can’t say that the poem itself suffered for this. Indeed, it may have been strengthened by the shift from the maudlin and indulgent, to something more wholesome like revenge. Now, I think repentance is in order.
I am always interested in how these games, these exercises in obscuring and revealing affect the reader at the end of the day. It seems that we are making some kind of deal with the reader that something true is hidden in all the devices that we use in the poems. Yet, it has to be true that the reader does not have to know everything that has gone into the poem.
Unless a poem is some kind of guide to meaning (which sometimes it must not be)—a means to an end, a poor representation of something more essential, so to speak, rather than a thing of itself, a thing that stands there and is to be engaged and admired—then there is really no reason why the reader should even expect to know every hidden thing in a poem, every element of its making. The poet herself does not really know how the poem was made. The poet may pretend to understand all the elements, every source, every bit of flotsam in the world that is salvaged and put in the poem, but the poet knows that this is really not the case, that there is often a great deal more (or less) to a poem than she thinks.
Nonetheless, for me, there is one contract I want to make with a reader. I want to assure him or her that at some level—at at least one level—there will be something to hang onto in the poem, something to satisfy the hunger for value in the poem. I hold to this view perhaps because it was this quality that I always appreciated and admired in the poets I read while in school; the poets I had to be able to write about in critical appreciation essays. I came to rely on the single line of meaning, which would then help me to go deeper, to see beyond the surface. It was a kind of bait and I would swallow it all, and be yanked out writhing at the pure terror of finding meaning I a poem. (That metaphor ends now). I was grateful for the taste of understanding. It made me try harder to discover more. It is true that language alone—language and its use—can be the source of great confusion and obscurity in poetry. But language can be deciphered, unfolded, to reveal something close to meaning. At the end of the day will appreciate the language some more.
I will end, though, with a confession. I don’t like riddle poems. I may be lazy, but I don’t. I do like poems that may be puzzling, somewhat unclear, dense even at first glance—but mostly, I like those when they give me something to hold onto. Here is Cyrus Cassells doing exactly what I like. I will keep trying to go further with this poem. It is the language that keeps me going, but mostly, it is the “true” of the emotion—that is clear, even when other things are not:
One with the Shadrach girl
On the riverbank,
Whose sound arcs
Above spellbinding, obliterating flames:
A girl with the cataract of grief
Of a lion;
A lion with the treble wail
Of a trembling girl—
Even if your voice cracks,
Speaker, fallible singer;
In a century of immeasurable burning,
Tell me something true.
from “Shadrach Chorus”
in Soul Make a Path Through Shouting