Representation and resistance

The September issue of Poetry is now out. There's an interesting article by Tony Hoagland comparing two types of poetry - designated by him as perspective and entanglement. Two kinds of poetic meaning, value systems, "tribes". Hoagland makes the important consideration that both of these functions are important, and then goes on to talk about the second, "entanglement", also called resistance, derangement, disorientation, as the most recent, and less well-known. An intimate struggle between the poem and the reader that resists the mind, and a way to talk about "collective dizziness" as a "fundamental symptom of modern life".

To me this construct of meaning is interesting in the opposite way I personally react to it. With communication overload, a hyperawareness of the subjectivities and imperfections of language and culture, the time-pressured and ephemeral conditions of our existence, is poetry to work with this by using fractured sentences, phrases, words, constructions? Undercut assumptions of narrative, meaning, hierachy, place? So many poems I've read have this uncertain play going on, either in the text itself as in many LANGUAGE-influenced poems, or in the concepts put together. I find it bewildering, exhausting, and not, in the end, useful to me - which puts me firmly in the first, more conservative tribe, of perspective, I assume. Especially with the concept of a poem as a made thing, an artifice, a work.

What I'm not sure of, and which haunts me as I read and reread this article, is the idea of a poem as an experience. When I write, I am trying to induce an experience of a certain kind in the reader (the reader being usually me but hopefully others too). The vertigo Hoagland talks about fits as an experience, but so does the blossoming of emotional recognition, surprise, elation, transcendance which many historical poems evoke in me (I'm thinking of a poem such as the lone and level sands of Ozymandias, for example, or more recently, Anthony Hecht's Peripeteia.)

So a poem must create an effect (or why read it), whether emotional, and/or intellectual. But must it represent the times? I.e. induce a state in the reader that is intended to replicate, maybe at an accelerated or focused way, conditions we already live in? Or could it, instead, create a slow place, a safe place, where those emotions, truths, and facts, that we often forget or miss in our hectic lives, can surface, and be considered? Where we can love at a depth not expressed in any other way, where we can remember death, or those quiet voices telling us we have forgotten to take a breath, change course, speak up, listen?

Hoagland's excerpts of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist as an example of incorporating both "tribes" are interesting, however, and as I've never read the book, warrant some investigation.

I re-read my post, and wonder if these comments attempt to make a complex thing too simple. Probably. This is the sort of issue that should never be resolved, but considered, argued about, and struggled with, by anyone interested in reading or writing poetry.