I feel a bit dizzy trying to follow up on all of these well-spun threads, so will concentrate on your statement that ‘didacticism is nearly as worrying’ as documentation and see where I end up.
The other day I was discussing Jorie Graham’s Sea Change and someone said that they were put off by its didacticism. The judgement surprised me because, as a collection of poems handling climate change, I had thought of it as trying to keep open some space which is usually closed (on both sides of the ‘debate’), as conversation falls into well-dug furrows (denial/apocalypse). Another person had no trouble with the collection being didactic, but was offended, to the point of feeling unable to read it, despite being a big Graham fan, by the apparent arbitrariness of her line breaks (alternating very long/very short lines). I wondered whether the two things were connected. Is it a self-consciousness about entering into a contentious discourse which led Graham to impose such an obvious constraint on herself? Are the frankly obtuse – but regularly so – line bre-/-aks a protective mask when saying something, as a poet, somebody else might disagree with?
I wonder whether we (I’ll speak for the air) have got rather too worried about didacticism. Or, more precisely, that it is only lazy didacticism that is a problem. That is, if a poem is written as if it knows everything, it is likely to feel predetermined and boring. If a poem asserts the poet’s view as inherently better than everyone else’s it’s likely to be boring and troubling. But a being-didactic which assumes that any poem is in conversation with the world, which asks for a response, but which asserts a moral position which it is not afraid of being disagreed with over, that seems productive. Peter Reading, who you mention, tells his readers off in -273.15: they should have listened to him more carefully; Milton was certainly trying to instruct…
The possibility of disagreement asks for some other useful attributes too – someone must be able to be let into a poem to disagree with it (even if it’s difficult). This doesn’t mean that all poetry must be reducible to argument – yuk – but it does mean that we are in the business of communicating. Of taking seriously the collaborative part of ’reality, our great collaboration’, as you put it so well.
It may be that this is not at all what you meant by didacticism, so apologies if that’s so. What were you thinking?
Also – what part can provocation play in this collaboration? What does a risky poem look like now? What about a shocking poem? Perhaps this is to miss the point. I’m often shocked simply by a brilliant line-break, or a moment of glorious concision. Difficult to think, though, when I’ve been morally challenged by a poem recently…you?
CK