I'd have to dissent from this one, James. Or maybe just insist on this modification: "A reader of poetry must develop some tolerance for surreptitious coherencies." There's no reason to tolerate outright incoherence in poems or people....
I like the idea that a reader's experience of incoherence is just a failure to recognize or to understand what is 'surreptitiously coherent'. But I wonder if that's true. Could it be that for any poem, when it reaches a certain level of complexity (particularly of psychological/emotional kind, e.g. Trakl), or when the poem is governed by the poet's own idiosyncrasy (e.g. Blake), that it just can't be expected to be wholly coherent. Of course then in special case of many 'language poems' the only way one could 'read the poem' would be with some tolerance for, if not an absolute expectation of, incoherence. And, so called 'pure poetry', or poetry written from an ecstatic state, too, would compel one to read without an expectation of coherence.
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I'd have to dissent from this one, James. Or maybe just insist on this modification: "A reader of poetry must develop some tolerance for surreptitious coherencies." There's no reason to tolerate outright incoherence in poems or people....
I like the idea that a reader's experience of incoherence is just a failure to recognize or to understand what is 'surreptitiously coherent'. But I wonder if that's true. Could it be that for any poem, when it reaches a certain level of complexity (particularly of psychological/emotional kind, e.g. Trakl), or when the poem is governed by the poet's own idiosyncrasy (e.g. Blake), that it just can't be expected to be wholly coherent. Of course then in special case of many 'language poems' the only way one could 'read the poem' would be with some tolerance for, if not an absolute expectation of, incoherence. And, so called 'pure poetry', or poetry written from an ecstatic state, too, would compel one to read without an expectation of coherence.
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