people expect too much of poetry. it’s best when the expectations are low and pretty simple. it’s some text that you can lay your experience over at times. it’s unobtrusive. it does certain very specific good things for the brain, for experience. it feels good, at best. not like iced cream exactly, but perhaps better than iced cream albeit totally different. it allows me to partake of some projection of another experience, even if it doesn’t allow me to partake of the specific experience of another person. you can’t partake of a specific experience that accompanied or caused the writing… that’s not even possible when I read something I wrote in the distant or even very recent past. it’s not like reading something I wrote a week ago allows me to partake of or even clearly remember the experience I was having at that time. it might allow me to remember something of the experience, or something that informed it, or some circumstances. if my own work doesn’t provide that for me, then certainly someone else’s doesn’t. the important thing is not so much adopting some other specific experience as it is getting out of whatever is my own present experience. at best, I can be having a particular experience myself, and start reading a poem, and be able to make out some projection of possible experience that is noticeably different than my present experience, and that makes it more possible to opt out of my present experience. it makes me believe in the availability of other ways, modes, so on.

as for what such a projection is like, there is something in the poem’s record of difficulty, how a good poem seems to retain some shape or quality of the difficulty with which it was produced. I like the word difficulty right now, putting aside the obvious fact that many poems often don’t seem difficult to write, and may get written quickly. the difficulty is very easy sometimes, but difficulty is still the word.

language seems very biological to me right now. we’ve gotten so used to having language. language has been a big success as measured by how much it can be taken for granted, how it blends into or seems the same as experience rather than being some discrete part of experience… rather than being a “tool.” tho it’s equally remarkable that some people still feel as tho they are not “good at” language. at least when it comes to writing. even when it comes to speaking. it’s odd to me how many people think they are better at many things than they are at language. true that certain things don’t require language, like the long jump. language might help someone explain technique, might even be a part of some mnemonic device an athlete uses to remember certain aspects of technique, but it’s not really necessary for jumping. so it is that a person can feel like they live a full life even if they aren’t “good at” writing and/or speaking, reading and/or listening.

it’s a little bit astonishing to me that, still to this day, I sometimes decide I don’t like poetry based on present experiences with one or two books or because I’ve witnessed a discussion about poetry that I didn’t like. I feel like I should have gotten to the point, by now, where I can more readily recognize the obvious fact that you can like poetry by liking just a smallish percentage of it. and you can dislike things about how some people talk about poetry without disliking all poetry. and I should know by now that there will always be many times when I don’t like poetry at all. days/weeks when the combination of me and poetry does not produce any good effect. I get very discouraged and disoriented at such times but I just have to accept that it’s like being in a relationship with someone who has to travel for work, so sometimes they are not around. they might be gone for a week. while they’re gone, you do something else. then they come back.

yes, it suits me to not expect much, or anyway to not expect the same things some other people might expect. I want to more quickly recognize when I see other people expecting something I don’t expect and am not ever going to want to expect.

it’s not really about “not expecting much.” that just happens to be some language that seems able to hold the idea for now.