and now for some more Mary Karr

From the essay Against Decoration

Highlights:

That the poetry of the first half of this century often was too difficult... is a truism that it would be absurd to deny. How our poetry got this way--how romanticism was purified and exaggerated and "corrected" into modernism... how poet and public stared at each other with righteous indignation, till the poet said, "Since you won't read me, I'll make sure you can't--is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.

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My opinion of ornament became cemented a few years back when I sat through a partial reading of Merill's epic Changing Light at Sandover. At the crowded reception after, I stood elbow to elbow with some friends--poets and critics whose opinions I respect and who were jubilant about the performance. I asked each in turn what he or she liked in the reading, which parts were moving, because I assumed that I had missed something. But their faces remained empty. No one seemed to remember much. Maybe my question seemed too bone-headed to warrant an answer, but no one seized upon an instant or quoted a line to support the consensus that the reading was a smash. These friends in the wee hours quote Hopkins by the yard, or rehash the details of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry. Yet ten minutes after an allegedly brilliant reading, the poems had merely washed after audience, leaving no traces except for some vague murmurings.

I drove home feeling awful, thinking that something terrible had happened to poetry, that a trick had been played on readers, and small wonder that the number of readers continued to decline. Somehow, the poetry that made our pulses race, that could flood us with conviction and alter our lives, had been replaced by fancy decoration, which can only leave us nodding smugly to one another, as if privy to some inside joke.

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In my view, emotion in a reader derives from reception of a clear rendering of primal human experiences: fear of death, desire, loss of love, celebration of being. To spark emotion, a poet must strive to attain what Aristotle called simple clarity. The world that the reader apprehends through his or her senses must be clearly painted, even if that world is wholly imaginary, as, say, in much of the work of Wallace Stevens.