How many times have you encountered a new poem in your reading and said that? And then quickly turned the page or tossed the book or mag you read it in to one side, and gone looking for stuff you can understand?
Access is not always granted free of charge in poetry. The price to be paid comes in the form of readerly, intellectual labor . . . and that just to get at the referential basis of the language . . . under which lies, usually, a poem's emotional message.
Often enough we--that is to say, I--throw our mental hands up, complain about trendy "difficulty," and move on, none the wiser for our encounter.
I hate when this happens to me!
I feel like I've ditched the long, slow, deliberate schooling in reading literary texts that I underwent through nearly ten years of higher education. In favor of the easy read.
And because I feel this way, I redouble my efforts to absorb a poem that refuses to accommodate my laziness. I read and re-read, then read again, ignoring, or trying to ignore, my pique at the opacity of the language.
I love when this happens to me!
I've done a Sonia Sanchez poem with my spoken word band, Program for Jazz, that I love to lyricize. It's titled "Small Comment," and you can find a recording of it on the Words & Rhythm page at the above link. That poem is more or less accessible - textually speaking, though perhaps not culturally for a white male reader - and it's rhythmically, imaginatively exciting. But this poem, written in a more current style, just leaves me scratching my head:
What?! I mean, what am I to make of lines like "not even myths that rode / young stallions to a circus tent / and carried torches on a convent wire / beyond the tides"? What are "chained sheets of sea"? One must really exercise one's mind's eye to see these images, and maybe that's exactly where this poem sets up house . . . in the mind's eye.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, the NYT Sunday Magazine's poetry editor & commenter, is as mystified as I about this poem. In introducing it to the average Magazine reader, he can find nothing to say about the poem itself:
"This poem . . . first appeared in 'Under a Soprano Sky,' a book I ordered while in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison. The first poetry collection I purchased, the book became all the clichés for me: my life raft, my rope, my talisman, my four-leaf clover. From the history of the MOVE bombing to reminding me of Auschwitz's horrors, I got it from that 'Soprano Sky.' All these years later, I can see myself flipping through these pages in my sleep, astonished and alarmed by what words might do--amazed to find so much of the world I'd thrown away in the lines that were saving me."
So, what "it" did Betts get from "Under a Soprano Sky" or this poem? Ordinarily, he will give us a clue to a poem he's selected for the Sunday Magazine, or a key, however subtle, to at least one way to read a poem. That is, he talks about the poem. But in this case, Betts can only tell about himself and his first encounter with the poem and the book in which it was published. He, too, must remain vague about the text, about its affect on him or his literary understanding of it.
Some poems - many more and more today than when I was coming up - simply don't offer themselves up to be paraphrased or "interpreted." You can only experience them. If what you're looking for in poetry is transparency, or in effect, the invisibility of words, then you're bound to be disappointed and even frustrated by poems like "There Is No News from Auschwitz."
That is, until you've read and re-read it many times, as many times as it takes for you to begin to internalize its suggestions, allusions, voicing, pitches and tones, until finally its emotional imprint. There is no news from Auschwitz . . . because "news" is new information, and nothing is old news quite like the horrors that human beings can visit upon one another, nothing is more with us or more standard human behavior. Doesn't matter whether you're a Jew, Black, Crow Indian, Irish, Tigray, Hutu, transgender, a trafficked woman or child, or White, Male, privileged and genocidal: evil and injustice are not news.
At least, this is what I "get" from my first ten re-reads of this poem. It's not much, admittedly. And it's surely laced with assumption, self-reference, clumsy intellect, prejudice . . . all those things that stand in the way of understanding. It's most likely a gross misreading.
But it's a place to start and, more importantly, a takeaway from 10 readings. I could read this poem a hundred times over and still be mystified by it. Or maybe I'd come into it. That's poetry for you. I'd better get started.
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