In the last couple of instalments, I have been discussing poetry that, for one reason or another, can be considered difficult. Poetry, like all the arts, is concerned with the ‘interesting’ – by this I mean to say that the reader should feel interested in the subject of the poem. However a feature of difficult poetry is that its subject is often not readily apparent. This raises a question: why should we invest mental effort in trying to understand something in which we have no immediate interest?
I believe that to answer this question, we need, first, to be careful about the term ‘understand’. When one first reads a poem, one forms an impression of it that is emotional and intuitive rather than rational. Then, when we interpret the poem, we in effect analyse our own subconscious reaction, trying to make explicit an implicit content. Conscious analysis can then feed back into our subconscious understanding, affecting the pleasure we derive from the text. To paraphrase Kant, aesthetic pleasure is derived from the play of mental faculties. I would like to say that successful, difficult poetry indeed communicates its meaning immediately – but in such a way that it bypasses the conscious mind. (We might in this connection think of TS Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative”.) In this way a poem can be interesting even if we cannot immediately paraphrase it.
There is another reason why we might want to persevere with a difficult poet. We do so because she wins over our confidence. Our first impressions lead us to believe that the poet has something to say, something important or at least interesting (as well as the means to say it) even if on first reading one is unsure what that ‘something’ is. It is as though the reader and the writer enter into a contract in which the writer implicitly guarantees a return on the reader’s investment. The way in which a poet wins the reader’s confidence is by demonstrating that she understands and has assimilated the rules of poetic discourse, that she reads poetry as well as writing it.
The poet I intend to focus on in this posting is Kate Camp. My reasons for choosing her are not altogether arbitrary. Camp is a contemporary New Zealand poet and by talking about her I am supporting my local community. Moreover, Camp is also very good. When I picked up her book in the bookshop, I immediately felt that this was a poet I would like to know better. Camp understands how to write poetry. She might not employ rhyme and metre, but her poems are nevertheless highly structured, each one a series of striking images that follow each other like clauses in a well-ordered sentence. Her poems possess the unity of a single coherent statement.
The poem that made the strongest impression on me when I picked up her book is the “The Tired Atheist”. I shall quote and then interpret it.
The Tired Atheist
In my hand I hold a mouse
a golden labrador
and a cat, all the same size.
Yes I assume the mythical plenty of a god
where my eyes look become green hills
red houses, skies necessarily blue.
In Cordoba the smell of shit and orange blossom
TV’s await the pope, that puff of smoke
who knows what they burn to make it black or white.
Of course I don’t want to live apart from God’s grace.
What kind of idiot would force air from their lungs
or retch up water?
No, behold the mismade agonies
of those attempt to hear with the tongue
or eat with the eyes, forcing crusts of bread under the lids.
Behold the quiet substance of their rooms
the hollow air in the cavities of their bodies
the finity of their lives, tasting like morning
now you tell me, if one knows everything
and one knows nothing
what the fuck are they going to talk about?
The poem is difficult but not too difficult. Its central idea is that God, being infinite, is too large a being for a mere human to relate to in any kind of meaningful way– the scale is wrong. However this is not the only idea in the poem. Structurally, the poem can be described as dialectical: each stanza break represents an ellipsis in an argument Camp is having with someone else. In the first two stanzas Camp pretends (for the sake of her argument) to be God, but in the third, she abruptly alters her perspective, suggesting rather the remoteness (epistemological and otherwise) of God from ordinary people. In the fourth, Camp leaps again, replying to an unheard interlocutor that “of course” she doesn’t want to live apart from God’s grace. To do so, as she suggests in the fifth, would be unnatural. However, in the sixth stanza, she describes the existence of atheists (who are hollow because they do not believe in souls) in such a way as to suggest that it is non-believers who possess a form of grace, perhaps because the problem of God does not trouble them. Camp thus destabilizes the concept of grace. Grace, she implies, is possessed by those who are not bothered by the problem of God; and these people are to be envied. Camp, though, is indeed bothered by the problem of God (or perhaps by God-botherers) and in the last stanza she returns to her central argument and states it with some force.
The poem is thus a logical sequence of ideas, and the structure of the poem underscores its logic. Camp’s use of ellipsis reduces the argument to its bones, while her use of imagery brings each step vividly to life. This is a poem that can appeal directly to its reader’s unconscious mind. It helps, though, if we are familiar with the tradition of which the poem is a part. “The Tired Atheist” is highly reminiscent, particularly in its second stanza, of another major New Zealand poet, Alan Curnow, who in his later poetry often ‘assumed the mythical plenty of a god’, in “A Touch of the Hand” for instance, using solipsism as a way to explore questions of agnosticism and mortality. Camp’s poem can be considered a kind of gloss on late Curnow. (I like this because it suggests that there may be more subtle ways for a poet to advertise his or her New Zealand heritage than by talking about the toi-toi.)
Camp’s brilliance lies partly in her vivid use of imagery and partly in the way she presents a complex, nuanced perspective in a structured form. And her perspective is interesting – it reflects the kinds of conflicts that we face in everyday life. This is why I enjoy her poetry so much.