Stages of encounter with a difficult text

Lyn Hejinian

pp. 205-212

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

Abstract

From a variety of angles—as a writer, as a reader, and most explicitly as a teacher—I have had many encounters with what for the moment I"ll call "the problem of the difficult poem." None of these encounters have managed (since they have never attempted) to eliminate the problem; perhaps in the end difficulty will no longer be a problem in a troublingly pejorative sense, though I hope that it will continue to provoke puzzlement and compel fascination in the drama of consciousness that difficulty (in poetry, as in all else) produces. And none of these encounters have diminished the "difficulty," though they have, I believe, altered its character and placed difficulty in and of itself at the center of my thinking about poetry and about the reasons one might have for teaching it.