John Goodman has written an essay for AngelHouse Press on Obscurity in Poetry but it takes a fast-forward run thru the last millennium of writing. The 11 pages make for informative reading…
Here are some teaser snippets:
After the Norman invasion of England under William the Conqueror in 1066 and the
subsequent reigns of the Plantagenet Kings, French culture and poetry dominated English culture. The French introduced classical meters and end-rhymes into England. Old English poetry did not use end rhymes, but relied on fore-rhymes, since Old English was rich in words beginning with similar sounding syllables, arranged alliterative in four-beat lines.
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Old English verse encouraged metaphorical or euphemistic language. For example, if the sea didnt alliterate with the other words in the line, a euphemism would be found, such as the whales road, a technique called kenning. Similarly, a ship might be referred to as an oar steed or a battle as a storm of spears. While adopting French forms, the English bards retained this colourful and figurative language […]
Rather than dismissing non-narrative poetry because it is difficult to understand, a productive approach is to try and discern the writers underlying poetic and ask why a poet would want to write something abstruse in the first place. Language is what we use to communicate, so why would anyone intentionally write something incomprehensible?
The answer has a lot to do with the way our minds work. Our minds are constantly attempting to knit the world together and the tool the mind uses to structure reality is association. Our minds are associative engines continually binding our fragmented experiences together into a unified whole. Where there is no association between discrete events, the mind will supply one. […]
Dada […] sought to disrupt conditioned responses through the introduction of the random and unexpected. Surrealism followed soon after with the incorporation of images from the only place where we are free from our conditioning: the natural symbolic language of dreams. If our lives and even our creativity are directed by uncontrollable subconscious forces, why not give up the illusion of conscious control entirely and go straight to the source, the subconscious mind?
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Each poetic is a self-contained schema. A poem created within that structure is meaningful within that frame – and it doesn’t have to be meaningful in other frames. The constraints of Romantic poetry don’t apply to Beat poetry. […]
There is no one poetic that characterizes all avant-garde poetry. Not all our innovative poets can be said to be attempting to write beyond their conditioning, or exploring the limits of language, or trying to reconstruct language to say things that cannot be said with conventional forms. Some experimental poets stay close to the surrealist tradition and relate bizarre tales in largely narrative, syntactical format. For others, the disruption and disorientation of the language is the message, expressing a sense of alienation by making us feel like strangers in our own culture – a dysfunctional world represented in dysfunctional language. Some intentionally blur the demarcations between the various elements of experience, overlapping inner and outer worlds. Some break their experiences down into basic components and reorder them in new ways. Others use random elements, text symbols rather than words, or invented languages to test the ability of language to convey meaning. Some use surprising juxtapositions of images in an attempt to bypass the critical mind and speak directly to the subconscious. And others provoke alternative perspectives on our shared reality through oblique, lateral, non-linear links rather than direct statement.