Crediting the Felt Difference

28 Jun, 2026

She wasn’t the first, of course, to put the thought into words, but Laura (Riding) Jackson asserted pretty clearly that if you have to explain what a poem is about or is doing, you might as well be writing prose; you can’t say a poem is about x, y, or z and still call it a poem. Or as she insisted, “to tell what a poem is all about ‘in so many words’ is to reduce the poem to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation-mark, the poem itself.”¹

There’s the rub, and why I and probably so many others end up confused, intimidated, whatever, about poetry: maybe because in our minds, “liking” is equated in some way with “understanding in an intellectual or rational way,” and said form of understanding is especially linked to the use of words—as opposed to, say, music or painting. Words, after all, are ostensibly grounded in communication, in showing, demonstrating: in service of the hearer's or reader’s grasp of whatever it is that’s being presented. And I think we do recognize even so—we feel—that you can’t “explain” a poem. (Hence my dislike of critics like Helen Vendler or William Empson or many a poetry workshop instructor, with the sense they give of being able to clarify what a poem is and what it’s doing and why, and hence why it merits our attention or doesn’t.) So we know we can’t explicate it, but then we’re left with no real basis to spell out why we like the poem or find it good or bad. And maybe there again you have a problem: the felt need to justify logically why something affects you, as if you had to defend to an authority your gut reaction, knowing that there will always be guardians of good taste ready to spring up and accuse you of being a bumpkin.²

I’ve already spewed a ton of words into the world in the attempt to get my own grasp on poetry, and I know I’ll likely never reach a grand answer that will let me say yes, now I have the key to understanding what it’s all about, and why a piece affects me one way or the other or not at all—the ticket that will leave me less uncomfortable about my interaction with a poem, less suspicious that I’ve done something wrong in approaching it. And yet, the search continues, this time, via a comparison between a couple of collections I’ve been reading.

A while back, I came across an interview with Stanley Kunitz that I liked. I knew who he was, but had never read anything by him. And since I appreciated what he had to say, I thought I should check out the type of work for which he’s best known: his poetry. After reading his Collected Poems, though, I was left without much of a reaction, other than having enjoyed that interview more than I did his poetry.³ Sure, there were individual lines or phrases I enjoyed. But for the most part, nothing stuck with me, and it all seemed to blend into a world of vaguely twentieth-century mainstream US or European verse. What about his work struck his fans? Was he just prolific, and his individual poems good enough to hold your attention every now and then? I don’t know.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, and much like her Four-Legged Girl, these poems as a whole are sticking with me.⁴ She’s got her own stand-out phrases here, but they’re not lines that really suggest they were crafted with the intention of drawing attention to themselves, nothing that I could oppose to the work in its entirety. I’m hooked on the progression of one poem to the next, wondering how or whether each might be related to the overall universe of this project, or whether the only linking thread is “episode from poet’s life/from the life of someone the poet knew.” Frank O’Hara is mentioned in the collection’s first poem, but had I not read an interview Seuss gave about the book, I would never have known how his presence played a role in its creation, if not its surface-level content. And what’s really the key here, I think, is the fact that I’m never aware I’m reading a sonnet—and that I don’t feel irresponsible for my lack of interest in seeing how what’s in front of me is a sonnet. Maybe what I’m getting at is the fact that I’m enjoying frank because it doesn’t seem as if it was meant to draw your attention to how well it adheres to, exemplifies, masters, a form. It’s just presenting you with particular vignettes—OK, that’s one of the things a sonnet does—and doing it in a way that gives you the sense you are or were there, or could imagine yourself being there. In communicating with you, it’s also inexplicitly including you.

With Kunitz, maybe it’s the diction, the “shalls” and “thees” that, together with the rhyming, puts that distance between me and the poet’s work, work that says I’ve shaped these pieces in a way that you can appreciate, but probably not create yourself. But I think it’s more than that craft-as-formality that keeps me from holding any strong opinions about it, and more than that lack of overt formality that gets me excited about Seuss’s stuff, even if many of the situations or reactions she describes make me very uncomfortable, where the prospect of being part of those scenes is concerned. I’m guessing the difference has to do with when I’m from, in the way that Gertrude Stein described her view of composition back in 1926.

Here’s how she opened “Composition as Explanation”:

There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking…. anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.⁵

What I take from Stein’s essay is the assertion that the writing or production—the composition—of whatever it is you’re doing is the very thing that makes the sort of statement everyone always makes (about love and death and everything in between) into something uniquely said, and therefore uniquely able to advertise its creator as different or doing something different. A different, you might say, way of stating that the time and place in which we find ourselves influences how we’ll understand and live in and react to said time and place. Or as Stein specifies, “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing something.”⁶

What I think I’m trying to get at, then, is the fact that Kunitz may not speak to me because his way of treating the things we all go through—relationships, disappointments, etc.—is a way of seeing the world that for some reason, maybe just by virtue of circumstance, I don’t share. A previous generation’s way of seeing. It’s curious that that disconnection isn't present where Stein is concerned, but definitely is with, say, Robert Frost, whose New England surroundings and the attitude bred within and reacting to it seem far remote from anything I’ve known, even if I can recognize, maybe even appreciate, how Frost approaches those surroundings and the questions and situations they share with other milieux. (Neighbors are hard to deal with; you can’t take every option in life.)⁷

I’d made that connection between Seuss’s style/approach and one of O’Hara’s essays before reading the interview in which Seuss talks about that past. But boy, did I jump with glee when both Seuss and the interviewer, asking Seuss about the book, cited exactly the same few O’Hara sentences that I’d been thinking about, namely “Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures…. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’”⁹

Seuss liked the going on nerve, she says, but in the O’Hara era, not everyone (a woman, for example), was able to do that. It seems, though, that the way she does go on nerve now fits with contemporary sensibilities and tastes. It’s present in the poet’s revelation about writing that first poem: “I didn’t know it was a sonnet until it was on paper.”¹⁰ For me, in other words, there’s the impression of naturalness and lack of pretension—whether or not those things were present in the poet or her creation of the poems—that I don’t get reading Kunitz. Is that sensation enough to get me emotionally undamaged through a conversation with a bunch of grad students? That’s yet to be seen, but the presence of the imposing Poetry Judge, ready to crush my humble thoughts to dust, has grown a bit fainter for now.

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