Snags and Gags: Cruising the Difficult

Abstract

Poetic difficulty often marks the furthest reach of poetic meaning. It serves as a trace of drift or pulsion into the unmeaning, unknowable, and unspeakable. Much of the most exciting modern and contemporary poetry hovers at this edge, its lexical and affective power arising from unmappable, but somehow accessible, journeys out of and back into the known. Poetic difficulty lives at the site of poetry’s central node: the conflict between what can and cannot be said. Because of this, poetic difficulty is as various as poetry itself. To make any generic claims about difficulty would be flawed in the same way that generic claims about the whole of poetry are flawed. The excitement of invention and discovery would drop out of material whose most characteristic urge is toward invention and discovery.