Editor's Note: Matthew Zapruder responds to Johannes Göransson's July 13th letter to the editor, published on Harriet. Göransson's letter addresses Zapruder's July 10th column, "Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think," published in the New York Times.
Dear Editors,
I read this response by Johannes Göransson and thought, he seems to have confused me with someone who thinks strangeness and mystery in poetry are bad. Has he mixed me up with someone else, a person who does not agree that poetic meaning is distinct from other uses of language? And who is anti-immigration?
I must confess, it is tiresome to get dragged into the interminable argument about whether poetry "should be" (as if poets are ever going to listen to anyone anyway), understandable or difficult, clear or un-, "accessible" or obscure. Really what I was talking about was the initial encounter with a poem, how vital it is, when reading or writing, to be almost (but not quite!) sacred in relation to the words that appear on the page, and that this attitude of attention is the first step toward all the exciting, troubling, contradictory, gorgeous mysteries of poetry. I am also interested in the democracy of reading, how treating the poem like some veiled mystery with a single solution encourages people to feel that they need some kind of intermediary, like a professor or scholar or the poet herself, to encounter it. I wonder about the motivations of anyone invested in separating readers from poems, their own or anyone else's.
I still stand by my observations, based on 25 years (yikes) of being a poet, editor, and teacher, that people have a tendency to make certain assumptions about poetic language and the poem as a genre, ones that interfere with that very experience of mystery and strangeness. I think one of the main reasons readers (and yes, very often newer writers) of poetry feel this way is because they have been fed a bunch of nonsense in school. I'm certainly not the first person to notice this or point it out, but it seems to be necessary to keep mentioning it. I adore and respect my students, and love it when they experiment and try to launch themselves away from the banality of ordinary language use, with whatever results. Their bravery and passion and awe astound me. But I also think it's helpful for me to remind them that language is a meaning making system of immense complexity and power, and that really studying and considering this in a deep way leads to poetry that is both stranger and more devastating.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying, nor have I ever thought, that poets should only write poems that "make sense" in some kind of immediate way, or are "about" things in the way prose is. In Why Poetry, I write about many poets who require great concentration to read, including Dickinson, Moore, Eliot, Stevens, and Lorca, as well as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, W.S. Merwin, Brenda Hillman, Terrance Hayes, Victoria Chang, and many others. There are extensive discussions of my beloved surrealists and symbolists. There is even one entire chapter on the great John Ashbery. And another called "Make It Strange," about defamiliarization. The final chapter of the book, "Nothing is the Force That Renovates the World," is a discussion of poetry's intimate and necessary intertwinement with the limits of understanding.
What I am saying is that assuming poetry is a coded riddle has proven to be unhelpful in reading it, and that hiding what you mean behind a scrim of deliberately obfuscating language (except when one is in some kind of imminent danger from the authorities, and maybe even not then) has not generally been a productive approach to writing it. This is what I mean by being "direct"—direct in relation to language itself, like Tu fu, Dickinson, Desnos, Notley, Šalamun, Popa, Tranströmer, Faiz, Brooks, Ritsos, O'Hara, Spicer, Hikmet, Vallejo, Schuyler, Szymborska, Tate. Direct in relation to the poetic impulse. The poet is a medium for language, and should be almost egoless or even transparent. When we say we love poets, we love them for their transmissions.
It is always a good policy to let a great poet, in this case Mahmoud Darwish, have the last word: “extreme clarity is a mystery.”