The difficult poem

Charles Bernstein

pp. 148-150

in: Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr (eds), Poetry & pedagogy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

All of us from time to time encounter a difficult poem. Sometimes it is the poem of a friend or a family member, and sometimes it is a poem we have written ourselves. The difficult poem has created distress for both poets and readers for many years. Experts who study difficult poems often trace the modern prevalence of this problem to the early years of the last century, when a great deal of social dislocation precipitated the outbreak of 1912, one of the best-known epidemics of difficult poetry.