I check some other blogs on the 49thShelf. Tess Fragoulis leads me (indirectly) to Tom Payne on Georges Perec, which leads me (more indirectly) to a recent review by Payne of a new book from Chatto, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry by Fiona Sampson, a former editor of Poetry Review. Early on, giving examples of some of the schools Sampson identifies as she looks for deeper links between poets, Payne tells us she considers poets like Elaine Feinstein and Dannie Abse to be among “The Plain Dealers,” influenced as they are by post-war austerity. The online thesaurus offers "blunt" and "austere" as synonyms for plain, but also "unadorned", "simple" and "natural". I think these are probably more what Fiona Sampson means, but then I think again: “Maybe, maybe not”, as the Eastern storyteller would say.

Eventually I settle down to write. My web-walk has been useful. It’s brought me to what’s on my mind, which is the matter of plain poems and stories.

I go back to Tom Payne: he takes (gentle) issue with Fiona Sampson for liking everything. “It’s great that she does. But this can make the book a less satisfying, provocative read than it might be.” He’d also prefer her to be more concerned with the "interested bystander" and if she "did jokes" that would be good. I am concerned with the interested bystander as well. I appreciate Tom Payne’s stealthy implication that there’s something going on with serious writers and readers of poems that arouses curiosity. Rites of the Word, let’s say. I long to initiate this interested by-standing person into these rituals. As writer and lover of song and story, I want to convert him, sway her into becoming that suspect creature, an Avid, Thoughtful Reader.

The question is, which poet, which writer among us will successfully seduce this by-stander? And if the writing is to be juicy bait, does its plainness or obscurity matter? Is it that only Plain Dealers like Feinstein and Apse will tempt him in?

I Google Dannie Abse and I find, seven down in the ranking of urls, “What does this Danny Abse poem mean? (For my English Literature class)?” His poem, “Prescription,” isn’t easy but it’s not terribly difficult either. I am wary of concluding that this question has been asked because the student is stumped by the poem, of going on from there to argue, “my ‘plain’ is your ‘confusion’,” etc. (As a student of literature, she’s a key demographic.) She may simply be opting for efficiency by accessing the friendly World Wise Web, and so arriving with dispatch at right answers “for her English Literature class”. Certainly she’s not asking for help as she peruses “Prescription”.

A writer may be as obscure as what he needs to say requires. I claim that right as much as anybody. But unless it’s the Bible that she’s writing (bestseller for a long time, despite being abstruse), the obscurity may come at a cost. Indeed, I wonder if the obscurities we have chosen have already come at the cost of readers, who are fewer and fewer.

Is it possible to say the same thing in a poem in simple and less simple ways? If a poem shouldn’t mean but be, as Archibald MacLeish insists in his “Ars Poetica”, then maybe not. What about stories? Can we tell the same story simply and less simply? Or is a story married to its every word in the way that poems are, or that we claim they are? Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, addresses exactly these problems in the first verse of his “Ars Poetica?” with the question mark in the poem’s title marking his ruminative vs MacLeish’s declarative stance.  Indeed, Milosz is not so much addressing the problems as wishing for a way around them.

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

(Serendipitously, I find Chrisopher Bakken describing the poetry of Milosz, as ‘plain-spoken’ in a fine essay.)

My motive here is low and high. It’s low because writers cannot survive without readers. I wish everyone to be an Avid Reader so writers will be able to earn ‘a bread’. It’s high because Thoughtful Readers are all that will save us from that Greedy Thing Mauling the Planet, Forever at War, Masquerading as Contemporary Civilization.

I’ll come clean. I’m an old language arts teacher and trainer of teachers, originally from Jamaica. I have loved poetry all my life, so much so that I dallied over a PhD thesis about two Caribbean poets for 16 years. I love rhyme, rhythm, wordplay; I love the prestidigitation that makes a poem. I have never taught in Canada but I have visited enough classrooms and talked to teachers just starting out as well as teachers who’ve been at it for a long time. I know we’re in trouble when my wonderful teacher and teacher-mentor friend tells me that she can’t understand Derek Walcott’s poetry; when a young relative, about to graduate from York University with a communications major, tells me he reads only biographies, stories that are ‘true’ and not made up; when I read assignments from Writers’ Craft students whose ‘stories’ show that they have only the dimmest acquaintance with the telling of the tale.

I’m happy to be as obscure as anyone. But I also want people to read, and read what I write—not only the initiated but also all those “interested bystanders” of whom Payne speaks. So, for the time being anyway, I’ve chosen to write plain stories and plain poems.

Here are some lines from “Reading at 4:00 am” in Subversive Sonnets, my new collection from TSAR:

Ah, Pope, I've stole your pen and plainly spoke,
which they like not, in rhythm and in rhyme
so they'll not hearken – till there's no more time.

The plain speech in the case of this poem concerns global warming, not what we sacrifice when we write at three, five or seven degrees of obscurity. What I fear is that the verdict of the last line may be correct, both in the case of dwindling earth and dwindling readers.

Pamela Mordecai writes poetry, fiction and plays. Her four previous collections of poetry are Journey Poem; de man: a performance poem; Certifiable and The True Blue of Islands. Her first collection of short fiction, Pink Icing and other stories, appeared in 2006. Her writing for children is widely collected and well known internationally. El Numero Uno, a play for young people, had its world premiere at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto in 2010. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.