Chapter 13

Simplicity

In 1980, I had to pick up William Stafford at the airport to drive him to a reading that he was doing for me at the Poetry Center. Quickly, I realized that he was very upset because a critic had called his writing “simple.” During his reading he gave a brilliant talk on simplicity and the difficulty of achieving it in writing. I’ve always felt that the simpler something appears, the harder it is to do.

Recently a student sent me a poem she had written in response to a prompt. The poem had some good, clear lines in it, but it was wrapped in complicated imagery and fifty-dollar words. The poem also made very tentative dips toward real emotion, and then ran away from it through its use of an elaborate extended metaphor that seemed stiff and forced. When I pointed this fact out to her, she was reluctant to get rid of most of the esoteric language, and the screen she had built with deliberately obscure language. I finally went through the poem cutting it down to the bone, paring away all the obscure language and most of the complicated metaphor. This student, having been schooled in a Ph.D. literature program, felt that it wasn’t a poem if it didn’t have all this extra clothing on it.

I thought back to William Stafford standing on the stage in the Passaic County Community College Theater, and talking about the simplicity of his poems. I think of my own poems, the ones I wrote thirty years ago which suffered from the deliberately obscure Greek god reference syndrome, and the ones I write today that are as direct and honest and plain as I can make them. I think of William Stafford’s poem, “Our Kind.”

In such a concise poem, he is able to explore complex feelings without making the reader feel that he or she is too stupid to understand the poem.

I sometimes think that some people writing today – whole schools of people, in fact – are writing for five people at an Ivy League school. These are the ones who bemoan the fact that their books don’t sell. They are also the same ones who denigrate Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, that NPR program in which he reads one poem a day. They denigrate it because the poems Keillor reads are comprehensible and appeal to a large audience.

Personally, I am grateful to Garrison Keillor for that program, for making poetry available to a large number of people and for helping to overcome the stereotype of poetry as incomprehensible, that stereotype that has haunted poetry for years. I’m also grateful on a personal level, because he has read my poems many times on his program, which back in 2005, resulted in Italian Women in Black Dresses going into its third printing less than a year after it was published. It also led to emails and phone calls from people across the country. Is that what I want? You bet I do. Even Shakespeare wrote for people in the pit, the ones who bought tickets to stand through the performance, as well as for the people who could afford expensive seats.

What Stafford was trying to say about his work is important to remember. Anyone can drape an idea or a feeling in yards of gauze and fluff; it’s much harder to pare away the excess to reach the heart of the poem. Often a beginning poet marks himself or herself as a beginner by choosing the more esoteric word rather than the simpler word to express an idea. This method only makes the poem stiff and unnatural sounding. The following poem, “My Daughter at Fourteen: Christmas Dance,” from What We Pass On is an example of a poem that uses simple language to convey an experience.

My Daughter at Fourteen: Christmas Dance

Panic in your face, you write questions

to ask him. When he arrives,

you are serene, your fear

unbetrayed. How unlike me you are.

After the dance,

I see your happiness; he holds

your hand. Though you barely speak,

your body pulses messages I can read

all too well. He kisses you goodnight,

his body moving toward yours, and yours

responding. I am frightened, guard my

tongue for fear my mother will pop out

of my mouth. “He is not shy,” I say. You giggle,

a little girl again, but you tell me he

kissed you on the dance floor. “Once?”

I ask. “No, a lot.”

We ride through rain-shining 1 a.m.

streets. I bite back words which long

to be said, knowing I must not shatter your

moment, fragile as a spun-glass bird,

you, the moment, poised on the edge of

flight, and I, on the ground, afraid.

You need to ask yourself when you’re revising whether this word is one you would use when you are speaking or is it one you are using because you think it’s poetic. Read it out loud to yourself. Record yourself. How does it sound to you? Do you sound like the person you really are or like the person you think you should be?

Sometimes I read poems in anthologies and journals, and I feel depressed because the poems sound like bad imitations of 19th Century English poetry. Obviously, the person writing them is afraid to use his or her own ears to listen to the sounds of American English or to let go enough to allow his or her own voice to come through. Don’t lean on the crutch of archaic language. As an American writing in the 21st century, please don’t betray yourself by writing as though you lived in 19th Century England.