hard on the head

It certainly wasn’t concrete poetry…but it was obdurate to human understanding.

architecture without lines

Claude Monet on his Rouen Cathedral series…

When the British painter Wynford Dewhurst asked for an account of the Rouen pictures, Monet replied, ‘I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.’
[…]
‘I have wanted to do architecture without doing its features, without the lines.’

Quoted in Jackie Wullschläger’s Monet: The Restless Vision (Knopf, 2024)

brakes on perception

The language of poetry is difficult, laborious language, which puts the brakes on perception. In some particular cases the language of poetry approaches the language of prose, but this does not violate the law of difficulty.
[…]
Moreover, there is a strong tendency to create new language, specifically intended for poetry; as we know, Vladimir Khlebnikov is leading this school. Thus, we arrive at a definition of poetry as decelerated, contorted speech. Poetic speech is constructed speech.

—Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017), edited and translated by Alexandra Berlina [94; 95]

experience of the encounter

A poem may frustrate understanding without diminishing the experience of the encounter.

responsible reader

It’s not all on the writer—the reader too has responsibilities to the text.

substitution of terms

Anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
—Niels Bohr

Anyone who thinks they can talk about poetry without feeling dizzy hasn’t yet understood the first thing about it.

not part way

Don’t start this poem unless you mean to finish it.

what is given and withheld

Within a few lines you know what you’re going to get from the poem, and what will not be disclosed. After that, all there is to do is relax.

entire and eternal

Reading the book in its entirety led you to feel you’d be reading it for an eternity.

difficult passage

Poet, make barricade lines.

alt audience

Her poems would only appeal to an uncommon reader.

degree of difficulty

The poem was difficult in all the right ways.

hard reading

A poet of a taxing syntax.

dead end or avenue

People think that many poems are hard to read because of the vocabulary, proper names, lacunae, allusions, etc., things they don’t readily recognize. That’s not a difficulty, that’s an opportunity to explore new avenues of understanding.

not random

It’s not so much that you need to understand the poem but more a matter of believing that the reading experience is not intended to be random.

time out to look up

Being driven to the dictionary by many words in a difficult poem proved to be a blessing, as it gave one time to mull over or to rest the mind, before beginning again.

dialect or pidgin

Poetry on some level is a dialect or a pidgin: It must be engaged almost daily and learned in order to be understood.

reflexive property

He said that poetry was difficult. Like life?, I said.

high bar

When asked: “Do people still read poetry?” “Some do,” I said, “but only the smart ones.”

poetry as a foreign language

Taking ‘Poetry 101’ in college should fulfill a student’s foreign language requirement.