Panel 3: Clarity & Obscurity: The Uses and Misuses

James Tate: Does a poet ever strive for obscurity? I can’t think of one.
Kay Ryan: Who needs more? [laughter]
Carl DennisPhillips: No one is deliberately writing so no one would understand what they’re trying to say. That would be perverse….
We had dawdled over lunch and now we were late. Having missed the opening statements, we arrived in time to see Sven Birkerts interrogate an increasingly uncomfortable Carl Phillips about one of his poems deemed “obscure.” Then he moved on to Kay Ryan, who completely disarmed Birkerts and the audience with her legendary wit. Then when he read a Tate poem that “throws you up against the gap of sense” Tate shot back gruffly: “It doesn’t feel like a whim to me. Feels like it means damn good sense!” (Nota bene: Poets like to talk about poetry, not their own poems.)

Carl Phillips was eloquent on the merits of a certain kind of obscurity acceptable in poems—what Stanley Kunitz called “moments of wilderness.” You can’t explain them, but if you take them out the poem falls apart.
Sven Birkerts: But how do you know when it’s wilderness and when it’s bad?
All agreed that poems should at least be complex enough to merit rereadings, and that this may be mistaken for “obscurity.” And yet, Birkerts admitted, the “high art of deccelerating” necessary to “meet a poem at its own pace” is a challenge even for him.
Carl Phillips: Do I feel satisfied at the end of writing a poem? That’s really all I can do. I feel most of us are writing from a private space wrestling with hard ideas.
Kay Ryan: I’m trying to be as clear as I can be to myself. I am weaving a fishnet. But I have to come back and see if there’s a fish in it. I don’t know right away if there’s a fish in it or not.
*
Is “obscurity” the modern vehicle for enchantment that meter used to be?
I think so. Birkerts said “difficulty” can be a pejorative or it can be a challenge. But he never broached it as a pleasure. Not the pleasure of puzzle-solving, but the pleasure of being lost. And not being lost in a wilderness, but being lost in a labyrinth, a garden maze, an Alhambra. It’s the pleasure of the baroque, of not having possibilities foreclose but multiply (at least for a while) while you read. At the end of the discussion Birkerts suggested that nowadays “obscurity” performs a mimetic function—that poems would not seem like life if they were perfectly transparent. But I disagree. We don’t want poems to be like life, which is itself a little too mundane. We want what the poets in Cocteau’s Orphee want—“Etonnez-moi! Astonish me!” We want pleasure. And sometimes the oneiric, the obscure, is the only way to feel transported.