With all the enthusiasm (you suspect) of a child swallowing boiled broccoli, Sunday’s New York Times Book Review presented a high-minded Poetry Symposium* in which various poets handled the unenviable task of picking a “book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, [that] has meant the most to you personally–the book you have found yourself returning to again and again.” Most of the discussions failed to get me itching to add the nominees’ work to an Amazon shopping basket, but one of two pieces that did pique my interest was the dissection of John Ashberry’s book “As We Know” by Harold Bloom (the same Harold Bloom who has scarred Naomi Woolf for life by allegedly groping her knee during a boozy after-hours dinner (“his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh”, according to Woolf)). Bloom may lack a normal endoskeleton but he remains an engaging writer, dropping names and quotations with Olympian verve. For instance, the quality he identifies in a number of Ashberry’s poems is that they are “inexhaustible to meditation.” Thanks to the wonders of Google, I tracked this ringing phrase to the writer and philosopher I.A. Richards. I suppose the quote struck me because it chimed with an unfocused hunch I have about why poetry has faded so significantly from Western Culture relatively recently. (Of course, it was always a marginal pursuit but not so long ago–two generations in the past at most–an “educated” person might be expected to be able to rattle off half-a-dozen poems learned off by heart in school. Going further back, recall that Byron is considered the first media celebrity and that Tennyson immortalized a botched cavalry charge in Crimea**). Perhaps today we actually like to “exhaust” our works of art, because we then feel we have somehow “mastered” them or at least gotten our money’s worth. I think this impulse lies behind two habits common to those who read a lot of novels: 1) When starting a novel you check the number of pages it has. This, in a way, represents the “finish line” to aim for. 2) After finishing reading a novel, you add it to your list of books read that year. This, I acknowledge, is an embarrassingly bit of anal retentive behaviour, but most people who are serious readers appear to succumb to it.Yet a book of poetry seems to elude these two ticks of completion. This is particularly true of non-narrative poems. You can put a line through, say, Byron’s Don Juan or lie to yourself and add Paradise Lost to the year’s tally because you’ve reached the end of the story (or narrative as university graduates always prefer to call it). Knowing the end of a story is one way of mastering a piece of art. But it seems there can never be that same level of assured accomplishment with a collection of poems. On a most basic level, it seems to block the traditional start-to-finish trajectory of novel reading. After reading one poem after another you start to think that this is somehow inappropriate, being pointlessly sequential. The finishing line already starts to evaporate. Then there’s ambiguity–Richards’ prot�g�, William Empson, in his famous book “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, apparently prefigured the Deconstructionists by claiming that a line’s meaning is always shifting according to the angle from which it’s viewed. Basically, with the great poems you’re never quite sure if you’ve got “it” or even if there’s a a final “it” to get***. Hence we return to Richards’ phrase, and a poem’s refusal to be wrapped up in a single reading. I suspect none of this is new; doubtless some mid-20th-century Mitteleuropean philosopher has expressed, and teased out, similar thoughts aphoristically in an essay I have yet to hear of. But toying with the idea that poetry might somehow exist outside modern consumption patterns brings me back to the old issue of whether poetry is ‘superior’ to prose. As someone who thinks the best prose has a power equal to the best poetry (think, for example, of the descriptions of New York from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (James Wood quotes a luminous paragraph here)), I’m reluctant to admit to a hierarchy. However, as anyone who was tried her or his hand at fiction (and how many English graduates haven’t?) can testify, there is something envy-inducing about poets’ freedom from the creaking mechanics of plot. This is because for novels to work, the prose has to be, in places, prosaic–there are few things more wearing than to read, for example, colourful descriptions that bracket conversations. (“Please, give me a chance” she wheedled, her hot anxiety tingeing her words, etc.). And that perhaps is where a gap appears between the two practices. A poet can be unique in the way she or he describes a cloud scudding across a sky, but there are only so many ways a fiction writer can get his character out of the damned house. And that means that sometimes the very best of prose writers have to use the same words, in the same order, as the very worst.*Symposium is a word that conjures up bitter coffee and hot photocopiers. However, the original Greek meaning signified a drinking party punctuated with songs and raucous games. For example, this site shows a detail of guests playing kottabos, in which “the dregs or drops of wine were flicked from the drinking cup at a target set in the middle of the room.” Winners were often rewarded with kisses from serving boys or courtesans. It’s doubtful whether any wine was hurled during the NYT Symposium.**Incidentally, a new book claims that the Charge of the Light Brigade (see review) was in fact, by the sanguinary standards of the age, “an astounding success.”***Elsewhere in the Symposium discussion, John Ashberry mentions the ending of Wallace Stevens’ The Man on The Dump: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? /The the.” That’s correct: “The the”. Faced with this sheer rockface, how many readers could confidently put a tick beside Stevens’ name to indicate he’s been “done”?