Illustration by Anthony Tremmaglia
My review of Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet now live at Guerilla 34. Here’s the start of it:
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
— Oscar Wilde
In her poem “I dwell in Possibility,” Emily Dickinson compares poetry to a house, open to those with imagination, closed to those who can’t understand.
When a poet fails to hold the house door open, it’s a challenge; when she slams it in your face, it’s an obstacle; if he yells “fuck you” while slamming it and people applaud without knowing why, it’s time to complain.
The review that follows looks at poet Ken Babstock, and his 2012 Griffin Award-winning collection Methodist Hatchet, at tone, and at incomprehensibility. About half way through the review recruits respected American poet Wallace Stevens to assist with the heavy lifting.
Poetry by its nature yields meaning tangentially, “on the slant,” as Dickinson had it; from the room next door. Words in poems are stimuli, symbols used to convey and produce feelings, movement, change…unreality and reality. Poetry contains the kind of opacity that courts attention; a chemical burn that produces pain or tears, pleasure or solace, or, over time, insight, maybe even understanding. It communicates in ways slightly mysterious, often more effective, or less cruel, than blunt, direct prose.
Inside “difficult” poetry anyone can read anything into the lines. It’s as much about reader experience and response as it is about what’s on the page. Rorschach blots, as the late great art critic Robert Hughes once said of Andy Warhol’s work, onto which others can project their interpretations.
As I will illustrate below, there’s too much of a disconnect between context—the exploration, say, of art and culture and the splintering of grand, all-explaining philosophies and unifying narratives—and the poetry that’s made from it in Methodist Hatchet. The slant is too steep. Readers aren’t invited into this erudite little game, and there’s scant incentive for them to join in; to make them care. The conversation is too much within the poet himself.
Must poetry, in order to be new, of necessity also be incomprehensible?
If the poet’s objective is to head in different directions, make an original contribution to the world’s corpus of existing work, break language barriers, discover terra nova in the 21st Century—must the result be entirely unrecognizable?
Speaking from the perspective of a common reader who seeks out, appreciates, and cares for verse he can connect with, the answer is no. While poetic risk-taking is laudable and has resulted in big rewards, it’s seldom successful when the “consumer” isn’t offered anything recognizable to “buy”; when he’s sold monologue instead of dialogue.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” at least had footnotes.
Paul Muldoon once told me that a poem may be called a success when it achieves the objectives set out by its author. Fine, if the poet is the only member of the audience, but it’s very difficult to evaluate, or want to write intelligently about something that both lacks beauty and makes no sense. Memorability; authentic, original use of lapidary language; rhetorical power scored to important human themes; synoptic understanding of our complex human lives; staying power … all of this seems rather quaint, slightly naïve, ridiculous even, in the face of such cool incomprehensibility.
But it isn’t.
These are important judging criteria; their use is, however, precluded when you’re dealing with words that only their maker can understand or appreciate.
Perhaps some poetic genius or super-computer will reveal the intricate connections Babstock’s poems make with profound concepts and other works, thereby discovering clever echoings of wise and revered voices, hidden beauty, underlying structural brilliance. I, however, in my ignorance—my inability to read—just find them irritating. So much so that, as you may have noticed, I’ve yet to engage with them here. I need help. So, from these failing hands, I throw the torch on to another, better qualified …
Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955), one of America’s most respected poets, was a great collector and coiner of sayings and proverbs. Many of his best found their way into his poetry. Below you’ll find a selection of them (in bold, taken from a collection called Adagio), poetically twisted to help continue this critique. Here’s the first:
“All poetry is experimental poetry”
That he is experimenting is, as I’ve said, laudable, and desirable. But just what Babstock is experimenting with in Methodist Hatchet is unclear. The poems may, in their slick, impenetrable fashion, be an attempt to mirror the superficial décor that seems to colour our current world, defining its discourse. They may, in their cache-borrowing, high-brow celebrity name-dropping way, aim to expose a culture whose knowledge is fragmented, only wiki-deep, sounds and looks smart on the surface, but lacks truth, authenticity. Perhaps they lament the loss of past oracles now dumb in the face of secular, capitalist individualism—a desperate attempt to find lost or new answers. It’s possible they share Eliot’s frustration with mermaids singing not at him, but only to each other—his knowing that these voices might well teach life lessons, if only they could be understood. But this is all conjecture, the food that poets who write incomprehensible verse tend to live off.
Incomprehensibility in itself is neither new, nor….here’s the rest.
