Simplicity versus Troubled Sense in Poems

Julian Gough talks on Clive James’ books, particularly the departures of the second book, from a year ago. It is an interesting entry point and introduction. (I seem to find essays and discussion around aims more interesting than anyone’s poems these days, such as this, and James’ reflections on listening for the flavour.)
Gough quotes James as saying,

“I threw away surrealism early on. I thought I’d try and be clear and intelligible, at least on one level. A retreat in order to advance.”
It worked. He needed a base in truth and clarity, because he didn’t yet have a base in self. He would have floated away—as so many young poets do—in a second-hand drunken boat, down an endless, meandering river of bullshit. But it takes a precocious wisdom to realise that. Instead, he mastered the art of writing brilliant poems that contain no ambiguity (much harder work than it looks). There is a clear line of ethical argument running through each of them, superbly expressed. They look playful, but the words are always doing a specific job.

A hard thing to do, especially in text, stripped of the context of tone, life. Love the analogy of BS river. Sometimes you want landfall. What’s the point in listening for long when what is said doesn’t mean anything to the speaker. Poetry is a form of connection and communication. Grice’s maxim’s of quality, amount, relevant and fittingly direct, are pretty hardwired to win. Why should poetry be exempt?
A certain amount of conversation is just place-holding, breeze-shooting, dadaist almost. But as pleasant as all that is, if you never have substance or personal or emotional divulgence, it’s as if a wall is keeping you from any “meaningful” connect. Or if you are 100% divulgence, that one-note orchestra fatigues as well.
A dither and blather and blare is for a domain other than poetry? That idea has eroded with me. If someone is going to take my time, I’d rather they need that if I don’t. At least some use was done.
If you ask someone why they are still talking and they don’t know and keep going, does that lack of meaningful intent not involve an unconscionable opportunity cost? Or does that assume a closed system of finite energies and direct cause and effect and a Protestantism need to squeeze purpose into each economical gesture? If one can talk and one’s point is unconsidered, petty, spiteful, irrational, maudlin, cosmic-width abstract, adding up to nothing, but cherished as archival trivia, and by being that, valuable as the bulk of existence…that’s another world view. The world is bigger, can afford mental room for unfocused things “without use”.
Clive James in the same article says,

[…] you get into what my friend Bruce Beresford calls the Departure Lounge, and two things happen: suddenly time really matters, you can hear the clock, and also you have all these freedoms, because you’ve got more of life to reflect on. There’s no young man’s version of the stuff I’m writing now.”

Each person is turning over whatever they need to. Some distill fast, some slow. What we value varies. Is anything good poetry? If it’s a tool for what we are trying to fix, refines or is better than the kludge we use, that’s a better kazoo up that wazoo for the toot of our own special tune, who’s to complain if there’s a fan?
When is it useful for the Inner Poetic Censor step forward? What’s worth chucking on the table and what’s just worth chucking?
I’ve got a line “at the qwerty’s gearbox, a pencil vein”. It amuses me. Life’s short. How much opportunity cost am I willing to give up to build friend lines for the line?
I have a problem in that my worldview is that the ultimate meaning of the universe is absent. It sums up to nothing but its own self-perpetuation so far as life on earth by some definition. Nothing ultimately matters and all ultimately natters.
There are stories that can be told and one can get good at the toys of making a good one but all is trifling. One can achieve feel-good stories of story arc of emotion culminating in a speculated order of how things are but…it’s hard to commit to trifles. Truffles, yes. Trifles, so far as they please the hedonist.
The game is to gamble and keep payoffs of well-being above the penalties of daily life’s crapshoot.
But if one is to be in the game, one needs to excel. So how does someone writing poetry for 60 years see the game?
Clive James says,

“I expect to be judged on each one. I’m a great believer in the stand-alone poem. And the stand-alone poem—you have to be able to stand by it. If you’re toying with any ethical conundrum then I think your position should be clear. For me, the essay and the poem are very close forms.” And his poems are beautifully, and formally, constructed to carry an idea. First there is the idea: then the poem.

Even if nothing matters, one has to approach a moment as if it does. It is only constructive to create forms and respect and respond to forms of life and creation. It creates a compassion for self and others to listen, to build.
All options end anywhere but it is a design to live, not in brittle cheer, not in self-enforced grief, not in unsustainable beligerance, nor suppressed neutrality, but floating towards each response while setting longer course, skyward, rather than after any given cloud. There’s a stability in the constructions of story. It doesn’t matter whether one is fiction or true or a mix. It is a matter of keeping level, productive.
Some can live while in angry anarchy without mellowing. Some can live a self-contained strand of social contract of appropriate that is much narrower. All are ballast and helium to rejig how each floats.
Gough said,

If, on many days, I prefer the wilder poems of more morally reckless poets (poets with far higher failure rates), I nonetheless always return—a little sulky and hungover—to Heaney and to James. Their murmur and boom are the voices of my conscience.[…] Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth.

What is he saying? He is nourished. It is as holy of thing as we find in life to be nourished by what we can hear.
There’s a place for those who take higher risks with words. And for steady-on ones.
Poetry is communication. What do we tolerate in the speech act? Why we tolerate or don’t speaks as much about resonance with reader as what is read.
If we only antagonize ourselves for no gain for ourselves or author, forget about it. Good energy thrown after bad. (Or are we widening our capacity to hear?)
Are we indulging time from a person or only so far as our need our own amusement gets filled? So long as our hoops get leaped thru? What standards do we hold over someone’s option to be heard?
So what if someone has nothing in the depth to say that we need?
If reading is a relationship with author, what range is healthy? Perpetual acquaintanceship or exclusively instrumental relaying of information is okay sometimes.
In talking, what if someone never veers course, is never petty, never emotional, never cheerful or funny or fearful and never changes a point of view, fond of frequent identically repeated story-bank?
Is this a matter of what masks we like our poets to wear for us? Our rules or be called “slight poems”, not rigorous enough, or too juvenile or undeveloped, or shall we ascribe motivations and intents and moral failings of not being sufficiently crafted, a bar too low, a bar too high.
Once there are enough bars, is there necessarily prison? Which side is who on?
Just tell me a story. Just refuse to tell me any story. Be coy. Or be blunt. Strip it back to sound. Strip it back to monotony and surprise. Make it seem sensible, except for the matter of being (in)appropriately absurd. Make it just patterns of light and dark on the page that are aesthetically pleasing, or deliberately unpleasant.
So long as it’s for me. Or so long as its not for me but I can be a voyeur in the unintended craft. If I can’t have that, who cares, there are millions more poets and accidental poetry and art saturating the world.
Do whatever you like. But keep doing something. For your own sake.
Don’t worry about boring me because only a boring person is bored. If you don’t like the channel of poetry, shift off to some other.
This seems sensible to me.
More on that reading about poetry, that meta-level…Poetic Closure (by Barbara Herrnstein Smith as pointed in in Barbara Myers article on ending a poem in the most recent Arc. The second Barbara speaks of it signaling a leave taking, a coherent closure. This makes sense. If poetry is to be an act of civilization, it should be civilized act, not some awkward dash from the room of the words. A poem is curating something. Something by way of door, even if not a click of lock makes sense.
From listserv direction (of people vying for my poetic soul), The Art of the Poetic Line (by James Longenbach) devotes a book to that aspect.
He speaks of the 3 kinds of use of lines: parsing lines (breaking where the syntax naturally pauses, emphasizing structure), annotating lines (enjambed, cutting aginst grammatical units, emphasizing words that wouldn’t be highlighted in prose-reading) and end-stopped lines (each line a sentence).
Longenbach states,

“Neither a parsing nor an annotating line is inevitably preferable; there is nothing wrong or right about any particular way of ending the line. But by placing lines so utterly in service of syntax, reducing the tension between syntax and line, a poem dominated by the parsing line can make its own lineation seem increasingly unnecessary. [On the other hand,] The excessive use of the
annotating line can come to seem mannered or fussy, a way of jazzing up uninteresting syntax, just as the excessive use of the parsing line can come to feel dull, a way of merely repeating what the syntax is already doing on its own.”

Is the question what is valuable or the better question, what is valued? If something needs saying, is it better it be said, or need that wait until someone with comsummate skill arrive? If someone with skill is here but has nothing fitting it, does that person practice anyway? Or consign self to silence?
If an actor can find no script or play and director at his skill level, does one starve or work beneath self and elevate the trivial with transcendence? If there is too much material, must only the things the best have time to do, be said? Can a Shakespearian actor be as good at improv? Are they inherantly not just different but unequal?
We each bring a different world to a poem. Desires and results can vary. It’s not what you do but knowing the outcomes. Consciously or unconsciously guiding the outcomes of the listener/reader.
When one’s audience is only onself as one writes, one still gains from knowing what one is doing to oneself, the implications of the cascades of choices forced by choices, the capacities embedded in the thought-act.
What kind of world is one building? And to what end?