The Art of Incomprehensibility

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We visited the National Gallery in Ottawa in July, to take in the current exhibition, called “The 1930s: the Making of ‘The New Man.’”

[National Gallery of Canada site]

It was a fascinating historical documentary through the eyes of art, the contrast of regime-sanctioned “ideal man” art with the distortions of post-impressionism and surrealism – artists’ statements in paint and sculpture, for and against the totalitarianism of Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain. There were pieces from Picasso, Dali, Miro, and many more. Really exciting. The best exhibition I’ve seen yet at the gallery, topping last year’s Renoir.

These exhibitions make me hyper-aware that I have so much to learn about art, including literature. What instinctively moves me the most is the purely visual: the image, colour, form, composition. Art, though, goes beyond those, and maybe it must. The audio guide at the Gallery helped see symbolism and reference and political statement, but I’m still at the neophyte stage; those are not what move me, but rather are the added bonus, the superimposition of meaning on the joy of art magnificently rendered.

If I were to transfer this to poetry, the notion of colour, form, construction over substance, I suppose what I’d be drawn to would be the music of a poem – the sounds, the rhythms, the space. I’m not completely sure the analogy holds, though, since I like a poem I can find experience in, narrative experience. I have much to figure out.

I recently bought Jorie Graham’s book, “Swarm.” Ms. Graham is something of an It girl in contemporary American poetry, it seems, or so the reviews on the cover would infer. “Poetry” magazine, that journal-among-journals, recently published her in two consecutive issues, poems which required double-sized fold-out pages, and must have been quite an expense for the publisher. Another of her poems, “What the End is For,” was labelled “one of the greatest poems of the late twentieth century” by John Redmond in his book, “How to Write a Poem.”* I loved that poem, and Jorie Graham’s name kept popping up, which is what prompted me to buy her book.

Well. I can’t read it. I tried. I was confused, then bored, by the first poem. I read a few other poems, then set the book aside. I can be a clueless reader at times, but if I spend time with a poem or set of poems I can usually find a way in. Not these poems. The emotion these poems made me feel was like that of the excuded playmate; I thought, if this is the vanguard of poetry, this is a club I don’t want to join. To me the poems were an incomprehensible juxtaposition of carefully-placed disjunct lines, separated by asterisks. Nothing more. I understood not the lines, the spacing, nor the asterisks. I thought maybe I was supposed to “hear” the poems, but I could find no music in them, no poetic device (unless it was buried so deep it was obscured from me.) I can’t imagine these poems read aloud. If I were to see these poems out of context, I would likely dismiss them.

But what do I know?

I have much to figure out. I would like to find criticism of such works as Graham’s that can tell me what she’s doing – like the audio guide at the National Gallery – because I’m lost on my own. Most reviews of poetry, however, I find so vague as to be almost as incomprehensible as the poems they discuss. Maybe someone on the inside could explain this phenomenon, this apparent mutual back-scratching among poets. But I don’t imagine it’s easy to find anyone who has the nerve to question the clothes of the New Empress.




*Redmond, John. “How to Write a Poem.” Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. 2006. p. 146.





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