You can read Sherman Alexie's wonderful "Ode to My Sharona" here (hat tip to Ron Silliman). It's get that awesome opening into your head!
Showing posts with label Ron Silliman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ron Silliman. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, March 30, 2009
Seventh Street
Kit Robinson's "Seventh Street" (from The Messianic Trees) begins with description:
Over and above
old captains' houses
now fallen into
funk, the train
passes. Further, trucks
docked to load
manifest ramps, then
darkness of tunnel
and the passengers reflect
on each other.
Light nicks the
surface of the
globe, even under
water.
On a train, someone describes what he sees (houses, trucks, a tunnel, passengers), then takes a first interpretive step in the third sentence, though still in a very descriptive mode.
But the diction changes in the next sentence, from a description to the word "description":
.... This lazy
description of the
way things are
tells more than
it knows.
A "lazy" description might contrast with a "hard-working" or "serious" description, in which case the descriptive mode of the first 13 1/2 lines of the poem is being criticized. But "lazy" can also mean "relaxed," the opposite of "tense" or "stressed out," in which case the previous mode is not being criticized.
The phrase "tells more than / it knows" is also ambiguous: it might mean the description is more a matter of telling than of knowing (more mimesis than epistemology?). If this is combined with the critical reading of "lazy," then the poem would be arguing against that descriptive mode because description does not generate knowledge.
But "tells more than / it knows" might mean something like "says more than it realizes it is saying," in which case the "lazy description" is being given a positive value because of its suggestiveness.
Further, I also hear a play on "tells more than / it [shows]" here. In many discussions of poetry, "description of the / way things are" is privileged because it shows rather than tells, so this moment in "Seventh Street" could be understood as a counterargument: this "showing" mode "tells" as much as it shows; it "tells more than / it knows [it does]" not in the sense of being suggestive but in the sense of "telling" more than it is intended to, and more than it is aware of in its emphasis on "showing."
Now, the shift in the poem's diction (from "concrete" to "abstract") does suggest, at least at first, that the poem privileges its critique of "lazy / description" and of the mode of "show, don't tell." If that was all it did (without a possible counter-reading), it would be a matter of "lazy abstraction" arguing with "lazy description," and it would hardly be worth talking about at this length.
However, the next sentence begins to make clear that things are not that simple:
.... Say
something about conditions
and you have
that to look
at too.
The diction remains "abstract" while also becoming self-referential: "something about conditions" is what the previous sentence brought into the poem. Such abstraction, this sentence concludes, is also something "to look at," just as the scene described earlier was something to look at. The poem makes "you" "look at" these modes and see them not as a hierarchy but as an interwoven pair that poems have to work with. "Telling" is not being privileged over "showing," in a critique of those who would privilege "showing" over "telling"; rather, the inevitable interaction of the two modes is being acted out, through both modes at the same time.
This interaction becomes completely clear in the poem's final sentence:
.... Your
station stop is
this writing's end.
The "lazy / description" and the mode of saying "something about conditions" have been kept in separate sentences until now (hence my emphasis on sentences), but they meet here in the conclusion, as the train ride stops and the poem ends. The two modes are not opposed; they interact. And they are, the poem argues, both necessary to the making of a poem, and to its interpretation.
(I am enormously grateful to Ron Silliman for his review of The Messianic Trees a few weeks ago, which inspired me to buy Robinson's book.)
[Cross-posted at The Plumbline School.]
Over and above
old captains' houses
now fallen into
funk, the train
passes. Further, trucks
docked to load
manifest ramps, then
darkness of tunnel
and the passengers reflect
on each other.
Light nicks the
surface of the
globe, even under
water.
On a train, someone describes what he sees (houses, trucks, a tunnel, passengers), then takes a first interpretive step in the third sentence, though still in a very descriptive mode.
But the diction changes in the next sentence, from a description to the word "description":
.... This lazy
description of the
way things are
tells more than
it knows.
A "lazy" description might contrast with a "hard-working" or "serious" description, in which case the descriptive mode of the first 13 1/2 lines of the poem is being criticized. But "lazy" can also mean "relaxed," the opposite of "tense" or "stressed out," in which case the previous mode is not being criticized.
The phrase "tells more than / it knows" is also ambiguous: it might mean the description is more a matter of telling than of knowing (more mimesis than epistemology?). If this is combined with the critical reading of "lazy," then the poem would be arguing against that descriptive mode because description does not generate knowledge.
But "tells more than / it knows" might mean something like "says more than it realizes it is saying," in which case the "lazy description" is being given a positive value because of its suggestiveness.
Further, I also hear a play on "tells more than / it [shows]" here. In many discussions of poetry, "description of the / way things are" is privileged because it shows rather than tells, so this moment in "Seventh Street" could be understood as a counterargument: this "showing" mode "tells" as much as it shows; it "tells more than / it knows [it does]" not in the sense of being suggestive but in the sense of "telling" more than it is intended to, and more than it is aware of in its emphasis on "showing."
Now, the shift in the poem's diction (from "concrete" to "abstract") does suggest, at least at first, that the poem privileges its critique of "lazy / description" and of the mode of "show, don't tell." If that was all it did (without a possible counter-reading), it would be a matter of "lazy abstraction" arguing with "lazy description," and it would hardly be worth talking about at this length.
However, the next sentence begins to make clear that things are not that simple:
.... Say
something about conditions
and you have
that to look
at too.
The diction remains "abstract" while also becoming self-referential: "something about conditions" is what the previous sentence brought into the poem. Such abstraction, this sentence concludes, is also something "to look at," just as the scene described earlier was something to look at. The poem makes "you" "look at" these modes and see them not as a hierarchy but as an interwoven pair that poems have to work with. "Telling" is not being privileged over "showing," in a critique of those who would privilege "showing" over "telling"; rather, the inevitable interaction of the two modes is being acted out, through both modes at the same time.
This interaction becomes completely clear in the poem's final sentence:
.... Your
station stop is
this writing's end.
The "lazy / description" and the mode of saying "something about conditions" have been kept in separate sentences until now (hence my emphasis on sentences), but they meet here in the conclusion, as the train ride stops and the poem ends. The two modes are not opposed; they interact. And they are, the poem argues, both necessary to the making of a poem, and to its interpretation.
(I am enormously grateful to Ron Silliman for his review of The Messianic Trees a few weeks ago, which inspired me to buy Robinson's book.)
[Cross-posted at The Plumbline School.]
Friday, January 30, 2009
The Beauty of the Husband and poetry's "layered elusiveness"
To say Beauty is Truth and stop.
Rather than to eat it.
But even if beauty is truth, the beautiful person—here, in Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, "the husband"—may still be a liar, even a compulsive liar. "All poets are liars," Carson quotes the ancient Greeks:
And from the true lies of poetry
trickled out a question.
What really connects words and things?
But it is not the lies of poets that are the issue here, but the lies of the husband:
My husband lied about everything.
And the horror of the compulsive liar is that he cannot recognize his lies as lies (as reported to the narrator by her husband's friend Ray):
Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.
The lie is not in the speaker, then, but in the words, according to this theory. From this perspective, the poet's lies are in the words, too, not in the poet. But this way madness lies, or at least the abyss of irony:
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Or beneath the strata of figurative language:
Waiting coils inside her and licks and licks its paws.
Or this:
A cold ship
moves out of harbor
somewhere way inside the wife
and slides off toward the flat gray horizon,
not a bird not a breath in sight.
Or this:
But words
are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend
to the ground.
Carson's Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece of similes; here, the comparisons are rarer, and metaphor abounds—the poet's "lies" to counteract the husband's, each apparently compulsive, the latter's surely more damaging, as more truly lies. "No doubt you think this a harmless document," the narrator says of the (now ex-)husband's brief letter accompanying Ray's obituary: "Why does it melt my lungs with rage?"
*
One of the passages quoted above deserves some further consideration:
Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony
because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive.
Or to abbreviate the claim in a perhaps oversimplifying way: "Poets prefer to be layered and elusive." This might provide a tool for understanding differences between poets about what poetry's aims should be.
All poets with any kind of ambition (from Ted Kooser to Ron Silliman, say) want to produce work with several "layers," work that "eludes" the reader in some way ("resists the intelligence almost successfully," as Wallace Stevens put it, though I might be misquoting the phrase). One important difference between poets lies right on the surface: how "elusive" is the immediate sense of the words?
Many poets (and I number myself among them) want the top "layer" of the poems they write to be relatively transparent; their ideal is to create the "elusiveness" of poetry by allowing for further "layers" in the poem that can be explored further on the basis of that initial transparency.
Many other poets (and Dieter M. Gräf, whose work I translate, is surely among them) produce a top "layer" that is in itself elusive. Instead of producing a transparent surface that can be seen through in elusive ways, they produce an opaque surface whose meanings are immediately elusive.
For me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is transparent is whether or not the poem generates any elusive "depth" at all. If all there is to it is the immediate meaning of the words, without any "strata" (whether of irony or of something else), then the poem is a banal failure.
In contrast, for me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is itself elusive is whether or not that immediate "layer" provides any sort of compensation for the absence of such immediacy of meaning, be it musical (metrical energy, alliteration, rhyming), paradoxical (counterintuitive moments, for example), allusive (distorted but recognizable variations on cliches or quotations, say), or formal in the most general sense (Ernst Jandl's "ottos mops," say, whose only vowel is "o").
In either case, if the poem does not offer some kind of immediacy to me, then it cannot draw me into its layers; it cannot lead me to chase down what eludes me. It is not enough for the surface to promise depth; the surface itself needs to make me interested in pursuing whatever depth is there.
That's why—to choose a poet famous for his "obscurity," and one of my favorite poets—I love the poetry of Paul Celan: the surface meaning of a Celan poem may not be immediately apparent, but his poems always offer some sort of immediacy to the reader, as in the opening of "Corona" (with Michael Hamburger's translation):
Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.
Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:
die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.
Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
The immediate "meaning" of the lines may, in a narrow sense, be obscure, but the poem offers so much to the reader at an immediate level: the vivid, powerful image of "autumn" seen as an animal eating from the speaker's hand; the alliteration of "frißt" and "Freunde", of "Hand" und "Herbst"; the assonance of "lehren" and "kehrt"; the cyclical quality of the image doubling the cyclical implication of any reference to seasons. I may not immediately know what Celan is talking about, but I am immediately drawn into the poem, and I want to pursue what initially eludes me.
Or to put it another way, I feel something when I read the poem, and the feeling derives from its "immediacies," and the feeling is what makes me want to understand the poem with my intelligence. But as a reader, it's often enough to just be able to feel it, to sense that the poem promises more without necessarily actually pinning down what that more is. And since responses to poems are grounded in feelings (which includes the feelings one has when using one's reason), the "layered elusiveness" of any given poem rarely opens up for all its readers. "From the nuts, we shell time": before we shell a poem, it has to make us want to shell it, and all readers choose different poems to shell. And the best poems of all are like Celan's "time": after we have "taught them to walk," they "return to the shell."
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Silliman takes his terms too far
The other day, Ron Silliman suggested that what the "School of Quietude" (as he dubs it) needs is someone who will "take on the responsibility for describing with much greater accuracy its mand sub-tendencies and internal points of contention."
Fair enough. But he later goes on to say that this "conservative tradition ... extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so?"
This is nonsense. The poets Silliman derides as quietists did not grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier. Among American predecessors, they read Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, as well as the same Modernist poets that Silliman presumably read. In fact, the Modernists themselves were the last generation of poets to grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier; the success of the Modernist overthrow of such poets was so great that both "the School of Quietude" and "the Post-Avant" (or as Bill Knott puts it, "the School of Noisiness") derive from the Modernists.
It's not completely persuasive to argue that there are two fundamentally opposed strains of work in contemporary American poetry; it is utterly ahistorical to project that opposition back onto the history of American poetry.
Fair enough. But he later goes on to say that this "conservative tradition ... extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so?"
This is nonsense. The poets Silliman derides as quietists did not grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier. Among American predecessors, they read Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, as well as the same Modernist poets that Silliman presumably read. In fact, the Modernists themselves were the last generation of poets to grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier; the success of the Modernist overthrow of such poets was so great that both "the School of Quietude" and "the Post-Avant" (or as Bill Knott puts it, "the School of Noisiness") derive from the Modernists.
It's not completely persuasive to argue that there are two fundamentally opposed strains of work in contemporary American poetry; it is utterly ahistorical to project that opposition back onto the history of American poetry.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
A Grateful Dead Analysis
Deadheads will enjoy this statistical analysis of the relationship between the Grateful Dead's performance of songs and the fans' listening habits. (Thanks to Ron Silliman for the link.)
One thing I noted in my comment on Silliman's blog is that the most-played songs are all Weir tunes, but the most popular tunes are largely Garcia tunes. This might not be statistically significant, though, since Garcia simply had more tunes in the repertoire, so he did not have to repeat songs as often as Weir did.
One thing I noted in my comment on Silliman's blog is that the most-played songs are all Weir tunes, but the most popular tunes are largely Garcia tunes. This might not be statistically significant, though, since Garcia simply had more tunes in the repertoire, so he did not have to repeat songs as often as Weir did.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
100 Books
Ron Silliman writes: "... name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each."
Okay, Ron, I don't have time for "a little about each," but here are 100 that I could say something about without looking at my shelves:
Glyn Maxwell, The Breaking
Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level
Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast
Dieter M. Gräf, Tousled Beauty (okay, I translated that one)
Ilma Rakusa, A Farewell to Everything (and I co-translated that one)
C. Dale Young, The Second Person
Gabriel Spera, The Standing Wave
Brigitte Oleschinski, Your Passport Is Not Guilty
Anne Duden, Hingegend
Jacques Réda, L'incorrigible
Billy Collins, Questions about Angels
Simon Armitage, The Shout
A. E. Stallings, Hapax
Philip Levine, The Simple Truth
Michael Donhauser, Sarganserland
George Szirtes, Reel
Karin Gottshall, Crocus
Matthew Sweeney, Black Moon
Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas
Thomas Lux, Street of Clocks
Joachim Sartorius, Ice Memory (to which I contributed translations)
Sean O'Brien, Cousin Coat (which I reviewed)
Giles Goodland, A Spy in the House of Years (ditto)
Franzobel, Luna Park
Geoffrey Brock, Weighing Light
Mark Halliday, Little Star
James Longenbach, Threshold
John Fuller, A Space for Joy
Jane Hirshfield, After
W. S. Merwin, The Folding Cliffs
Brad Leithauser, Darlington's Fall
Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Leichter als Luft
Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
Adrienne Rich, Sources (but was that more than 25 years ago?)
That's 38 in 15 minutes of brainstorming, trying not to repeat authors and not looking up things whose titles I can't recall at the moment.
Padraig Rooney, The Escape Artist
Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel
Robert Creeley, Later (not sure about the pub date?)
Jürgen Theobaldy, Immer wieder alles
Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives
Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan
David St. John, The Face
Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover!
Sarah Maguire, The Pomegranates of Kandahar
Selima Hill, Violet
Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
Jill Alexander Essbaum, O Forbidden
I'll stop at 50 since I'm tired and it's time to go to bed. And I did those in 25 minutes under pretty strict conditions. If I repeated authors I'd get over 100 easily!
Okay, Ron, I don't have time for "a little about each," but here are 100 that I could say something about without looking at my shelves:
Glyn Maxwell, The Breaking
Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems
Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level
Durs Grünbein, Ashes for Breakfast
Dieter M. Gräf, Tousled Beauty (okay, I translated that one)
Ilma Rakusa, A Farewell to Everything (and I co-translated that one)
C. Dale Young, The Second Person
Gabriel Spera, The Standing Wave
Brigitte Oleschinski, Your Passport Is Not Guilty
Anne Duden, Hingegend
Jacques Réda, L'incorrigible
Billy Collins, Questions about Angels
Simon Armitage, The Shout
A. E. Stallings, Hapax
Philip Levine, The Simple Truth
Michael Donhauser, Sarganserland
George Szirtes, Reel
Karin Gottshall, Crocus
Matthew Sweeney, Black Moon
Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas
Thomas Lux, Street of Clocks
Joachim Sartorius, Ice Memory (to which I contributed translations)
Sean O'Brien, Cousin Coat (which I reviewed)
Giles Goodland, A Spy in the House of Years (ditto)
Franzobel, Luna Park
Geoffrey Brock, Weighing Light
Mark Halliday, Little Star
James Longenbach, Threshold
John Fuller, A Space for Joy
Jane Hirshfield, After
W. S. Merwin, The Folding Cliffs
Brad Leithauser, Darlington's Fall
Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Leichter als Luft
Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
Adrienne Rich, Sources (but was that more than 25 years ago?)
That's 38 in 15 minutes of brainstorming, trying not to repeat authors and not looking up things whose titles I can't recall at the moment.
Padraig Rooney, The Escape Artist
Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel
Robert Creeley, Later (not sure about the pub date?)
Jürgen Theobaldy, Immer wieder alles
Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives
Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan
David St. John, The Face
Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover!
Sarah Maguire, The Pomegranates of Kandahar
Selima Hill, Violet
Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife
Jill Alexander Essbaum, O Forbidden
I'll stop at 50 since I'm tired and it's time to go to bed. And I did those in 25 minutes under pretty strict conditions. If I repeated authors I'd get over 100 easily!
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Dock Ellis on LSD
Thanks to Ron Silliman's long post about the Mitchell report on doping in baseball, and the comments on it, I got to read this poem by Jilly Dybka.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Secret Life
Poetry has decided to put all of its poems on-line. So you, too, can enjoy this one by Li-Young Lee, "Secret Life," a nice companion to David Orr's "Daniel," which I posted a note about yesterday.
Lee's poem wonderfully captures how children will get completely absorbed in what they are doing—but as soon as they do not know where their parents are, then the absorption will disappear, making "the one who hears the dove more alone."
I read Lee's The Book of My Nights on a train from Kalamazoo to Chicago in October, 2002, and I was transported not only by the train but also by the book. "Secret Life" also creates the special effect of Lee's best work, which I am at a loss to characterize right now. Looking through that book, I found the phrase "a terrifying and abundant yes" (from the poem "The Well"). That will do nicely for now. (That phrase was cited by William Logan in his review of the book in The New Criterion as "moony silliness" and "beautiful mush." Oh well.)
*
There are some other superb childhood poems in the same issue of Poetry, in the selection of contemporary Italian poems guest edited by Geoffrey Brock: "Slide," by Umberto Fiori (trans. by Brock), "For My Daughter," by Antonella Anedda (trans. by Sarah Arvio), and "Night Visit," by Swiss poet Fabio Pusterla (trans. by Brock).
My other favorite from that selection—one definitely not about children—is the sly and startling "Hygiene," by Raffaello Baldini (trans. by Adria Bernardi).
*
Also worthy of note is "The Arrow Has Not Two Points," Clive James's dismantling of Ezra Pound and the Cantos. James writes from an interesting perspective: he once loved the Cantos (almost fifty years ago), then he later decided they were bunk. But now, he has reread them, to see if they really are bunk. His conclusion: they are bunk. His never fully stated implication: people who think they are brilliant are, like his younger self, too easily impressed by Pound's statements about his own work, as well as statements made by others, so they end up not looking closely at what Pound actually wrote, which is a bunch of tedious nonsense interspersed with "Imagist" passages that turn out to be as insipid, unspecific, or nonsensical as they are supposed to be original, grounded, and meaningful.
Now I'm waiting for Silliman's shredding of James ...
*
ADDENDUM (thanks Swiss Lounge): Check out the archival material on Pound at the Poetry website, especially the fantastic slideshow of Poetry's publication of various Cantos over the years (see the bottom of the archive page for the link). It's worth looking at just for the Tables of Contents of the issues with Cantos in them!
Lee's poem wonderfully captures how children will get completely absorbed in what they are doing—but as soon as they do not know where their parents are, then the absorption will disappear, making "the one who hears the dove more alone."
I read Lee's The Book of My Nights on a train from Kalamazoo to Chicago in October, 2002, and I was transported not only by the train but also by the book. "Secret Life" also creates the special effect of Lee's best work, which I am at a loss to characterize right now. Looking through that book, I found the phrase "a terrifying and abundant yes" (from the poem "The Well"). That will do nicely for now. (That phrase was cited by William Logan in his review of the book in The New Criterion as "moony silliness" and "beautiful mush." Oh well.)
*
There are some other superb childhood poems in the same issue of Poetry, in the selection of contemporary Italian poems guest edited by Geoffrey Brock: "Slide," by Umberto Fiori (trans. by Brock), "For My Daughter," by Antonella Anedda (trans. by Sarah Arvio), and "Night Visit," by Swiss poet Fabio Pusterla (trans. by Brock).
My other favorite from that selection—one definitely not about children—is the sly and startling "Hygiene," by Raffaello Baldini (trans. by Adria Bernardi).
*
Also worthy of note is "The Arrow Has Not Two Points," Clive James's dismantling of Ezra Pound and the Cantos. James writes from an interesting perspective: he once loved the Cantos (almost fifty years ago), then he later decided they were bunk. But now, he has reread them, to see if they really are bunk. His conclusion: they are bunk. His never fully stated implication: people who think they are brilliant are, like his younger self, too easily impressed by Pound's statements about his own work, as well as statements made by others, so they end up not looking closely at what Pound actually wrote, which is a bunch of tedious nonsense interspersed with "Imagist" passages that turn out to be as insipid, unspecific, or nonsensical as they are supposed to be original, grounded, and meaningful.
Now I'm waiting for Silliman's shredding of James ...
*
ADDENDUM (thanks Swiss Lounge): Check out the archival material on Pound at the Poetry website, especially the fantastic slideshow of Poetry's publication of various Cantos over the years (see the bottom of the archive page for the link). It's worth looking at just for the Tables of Contents of the issues with Cantos in them!
Monday, August 13, 2007
Denver and Coltrane
Here's a nice point from a post on Ron Silliman's blog:
"Do we want every musician to be John Denver? Can’t somebody be Pete Seeger or John Coltrane or Bela Fleck or Meredith Monk? And wouldn’t that, actually, be more interesting? What if you want Lou Reed & Tuvan throat-singing? The world becomes very monochromatic the instant you want the same level of accessibility everywhere."
RS is making this point in the context of accessibility and difficulty in poetry. I would find it more convincing if RS himself were a bit more flexible in the range of poetry he is willing to recognize as legitimate (which is much different than the issue of aesthetic judgment). But it is true that he is responding to an article that is unwilling to accept his poetry's right to exist, so the argument is understandable.
"Do we want every musician to be John Denver? Can’t somebody be Pete Seeger or John Coltrane or Bela Fleck or Meredith Monk? And wouldn’t that, actually, be more interesting? What if you want Lou Reed & Tuvan throat-singing? The world becomes very monochromatic the instant you want the same level of accessibility everywhere."
RS is making this point in the context of accessibility and difficulty in poetry. I would find it more convincing if RS himself were a bit more flexible in the range of poetry he is willing to recognize as legitimate (which is much different than the issue of aesthetic judgment). But it is true that he is responding to an article that is unwilling to accept his poetry's right to exist, so the argument is understandable.
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