If poetry is to reclaim a vital pulse in intellectual culture, it must become more difficult. Difficult poetry seeks to question and to complicate, challenging with its nuance the presumptions we bring to bear on experience. Although complex, such poetry is not opaque. It neither defies semantic intelligibility nor reduces to abstracted truisms.
Opacity persists as a dominant poetic among many academics and experimentalists. Unfortunately, its primary alternative remains a colloquialism that garners popular readership by suppressing interpretative potentiality. Whereas opaque poetry evinces a sense of mystery that is both artificial and illusory, colloquial poetry evinces no mystery at all.
Yet it is exactly this mystery that renders poetry vital. In order to recover its gravity, poetry must aspire toward an edifying difficulty. It must surrender to intellectual wonder and revel in the entwinements of the present and the past. Ever-certain of its capacity to remake the world, it must give vision to the blind complexities of our moment.
Literary Laundry has attempted to assemble a collection of poetry that manifests both daring and difficulty. Whereas “Luego” portrays the despairing persistence of authenticity exhausted by historical repetition, “In the Beginning” seeks to recover the primordial ecstasy of uncreated beauty. “To Hart Crane” recalls the “imaged echoes” enclosed in both remembrance and death while “Dora Maar” explores the fragmentation of memory induced by anticipation, inspiration, and insight.
The devouring nostalgia with which the poet of “Cum Mors Est Non Sumus” resigns his vitality stands in contrast to the creative vigor of evanescence, celebrated in “Your Stillness and Flight.” Whereas “Icarus falls and still the trees” presents the delicate (and perhaps tragic) naivety with which routine escapes even the most extraordinary of occurrences, “Sailing” imagines the perpetual “submerging” evoked when such naivety shatters.
“While Flying Over New York” juxtaposes the fixedness of reality with the agile joy of creativity. In turn, “Because the Pen Must Move” explores the compulsion to adventure manifest in artistic creation. Lastly, whereas “The Execution of Vasco Núñez de Balboa” reveals the piercing vision of an intrepid, ecstatic death, “On The Other Side of the World” ponders the ironic difference and tragic beauty of a place still sensitive enough to cherish the fall of raindrops.
These pieces question and complicate. They promise conversation without resolution like the “stitching and unstitching” by which Yeats reduced so many hours to a “moment’s thought.” Redolent with meaning but resolutely enigmatic, these poems reveal their mystery in a playful escape from interpretative certainty. Indeed, they prove difficult, but such is the urgency of their wonder.