On Aug 18, 2010, at 10:21 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> And the difficulty of Pound's Cantos is _entirely_ of this sort. All the
> lines and phrasesd are wholly clear in themselves; the difficulty is in
> consruing what emerges from the whole.
On the page, John Ashbery's poems are often barely comprehensible. But when I saw him read them a few times back in the 1980s, they seemed remarkably transparent. I never understood why, but Carrol's point could be relevant. Maybe the aural experience focuses attention on the parts, emphasizing their lucidity - but on the page, the complexity of the whole is revealed.
Doug