Some poems are hard to understand. That's absolutely true. The answer is that they usual lack clarity. The handbasket poem you reference (in my opinion) would have less clarity issues if it replaced the word it with "her heart". Its usually a very simple thing to edit for clarity. Cliches would not have made it better, just been another issue to look at. Every poem has issues to work on.
The reason we push so hard against cliches is because they're a form of shorthand that is so overused and so unoriginal that they rob the language of any freshness or power. Cliches are also usually fairly vague.
He was a pain in my neck
She broke my heart
Yeah you understand what they mean, but there's no power to it. It rests on the surface. You have no idea what level of pain the person caused the other person, or the extent of the heartbreak.
Poetry is about the condensed power of language with original images and phrases. Cliche is a greeting card. Poetry is meant to be more than that.
I didn't take your comments as a blast. Its worth discussing.
If most get left behind in understanding a poem that usually points to other problems.
I think if a poem is obscure for the sake of obscurity it fails. However, if its complex and interesting and you can unlock its meaning once you see it (whether that's through a reference, or a literary allusion, or whatever) then its like one of those magic photographs of dots when you look at the picture the correct way and the image forms. That's when it gets sort of cool. That said some of the poems I like are very easy to understand but again are not cliched. Here are two for reference (quite different):
Their Sex Life
One failure on
Top of another
by A. R. Ammons
What the Dog Perhaps Hears
If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.
by
Lisel Mueller
Cliches don't make it clear. They make it boring. That's mostly why we rail against them.
Best,
Todd
The reason we push so hard against cliches is because they're a form of shorthand that is so overused and so unoriginal that they rob the language of any freshness or power. Cliches are also usually fairly vague.
He was a pain in my neck
She broke my heart
Yeah you understand what they mean, but there's no power to it. It rests on the surface. You have no idea what level of pain the person caused the other person, or the extent of the heartbreak.
Poetry is about the condensed power of language with original images and phrases. Cliche is a greeting card. Poetry is meant to be more than that.
I didn't take your comments as a blast. Its worth discussing.
If most get left behind in understanding a poem that usually points to other problems.
I think if a poem is obscure for the sake of obscurity it fails. However, if its complex and interesting and you can unlock its meaning once you see it (whether that's through a reference, or a literary allusion, or whatever) then its like one of those magic photographs of dots when you look at the picture the correct way and the image forms. That's when it gets sort of cool. That said some of the poems I like are very easy to understand but again are not cliched. Here are two for reference (quite different):
Their Sex Life
One failure on
Top of another
by A. R. Ammons
What the Dog Perhaps Hears
If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.
by
Lisel Mueller
Cliches don't make it clear. They make it boring. That's mostly why we rail against them.
Best,
Todd
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson