The Difficult Poetry Defense Nobody Wants to Make
Everyone praises clarity now, and mostly they are right. But some poems must be difficult to be true. A judge defends the hard poem, with a test that separates earned difficulty from bluff.
The hardest poem I ever scored took me four readings before I understood a single stanza, and I gave it the highest marks of my judging month. My co-readers thought I had lost my mind. The poem ran its sentences backward through themselves, broke words across lines like bones reset wrong, and refused every courtesy a reader expects. It was about a stroke. The poet's mother had lost her syntax, and the poem made me lose mine, for four readings, until I stood inside her kitchen unable to find the word for kettle. So this is my difficult poetry defense, and I make it as someone who spends most of the year arguing for clarity. Some poems must be hard, because what they carry is hard, and smoothing them would be a lie of the sweetest kind.
What This Difficult Poetry Defense Does Not Defend
Let me clear the ground, because the difficult poetry defense usually fails by defending too much. I am not defending fog. I am not defending the poem that withholds its subject as a power move, or the private code that needs the poet's biography as a manual, or the graduate seminar voice that mistakes reference density for depth. I score dozens of those every month and they are not difficult, they are merely closed. A locked filing cabinet is not a labyrinth.
Real difficulty is something else. It is resistance with a purpose, the poem asking more of you because it intends to give you more back. The distinction matters because the current fashion, and I have contributed to it, praises accessibility so loudly that young poets are starting to sand every strangeness out of their work before a single stranger has read it. I want to talk them out of that.
The Case: Some Truths Do Not Come in Plain Sentences
Here is the heart of it. Language did not evolve for the extreme states: the seizure, the vision, the grief that rearranges time, the love that arrives like weather. Plain syntax handles the middle of human experience beautifully. At the edges it starts to falsify, because plain syntax asserts an orderly speaker, and the whole point of the edge is that the speaker is no longer orderly. A perfectly lucid poem about losing your mind has a credibility problem built into its grammar.
Gerard Manley Hopkins understood this in 1877, writing lines nobody would publish for four decades: "I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon." That word broken across the line break is not showing off. Hopkins is trying to get the falcon's swerve into your mouth, and ordinary word order was too slow for the bird. Say those lines aloud and you feel your own breath bank and turn. The difficulty is the meaning. Translate it into clarity, this morning I saw a falcon and it was impressive, and you have not simplified the poem. You have deleted it. His work rewards a long visit, and Hopkins is where I send every poet who thinks difficulty and sincerity are opposites.
Difficulty is a promise: whatever the poem withholds, it must repay with interest.
A Worked Example: When the Hard Version Is the Honest One
Abstract arguments convince nobody, so here are two drafts of the same four lines. First, the clear version, the one a cautious workshop would approve:
After the stroke, my mother lost her words.
She pointed at the kettle, then at me.
I named the objects of her kitchen slowly.
We both pretended this was conversation.
Competent. Sad. Forgettable. Now the difficult version, the one that actually happened to the language:
My mother points: the, the, the.
Kettle goes out of her like steam.
I name her kitchen back one noun an hour.
We conversation. We pretend a both.
The last line breaks grammar exactly where her mind broke it, and the reader does not observe the aphasia, the reader has it, for one line, safely. That is what earned difficulty buys: transfer instead of report. Notice also what the hard version still provides, a mother, a kitchen, a kettle, a clear dramatic situation. The floor is solid. Only the air is strange. The craft tools here are old and learnable ones, fractured syntax and the violent line break, and the glossary entry on enjambment will show you how much force a broken line can legally carry.
The Earned Difficulty Test
So how do you tell, in your own draft at midnight, whether your difficulty is Hopkins or fog? I use five questions, in this order, and I suggest you write your answers down rather than nodding at them.
- Point to the source. Name, in one plain sentence, the thing in the poem's world that the difficulty enacts. Her syntax broke, so mine does. Time looped in the hospital, so the stanza loops. If you cannot point to a source, the difficulty is decor, and decor made of confusion is the worst decor there is.
- Check the floor. Earned difficulty keeps something solid under the reader: a situation, a speaker, a room, a repeated image. If everything in the poem is strange at once, the reader has nowhere to stand and no way to measure the strangeness. Strangeness needs a ruler.
- Locate the payoff. Find the exact moment a persistent reader gets paid: the click, the image that reorganizes everything before it. If the poem is hard on page one and the payoff never arrives, you have written an IOU and signed someone else's name.
- Run the paraphrase test in reverse. Write the clear version of your difficult passage. If the clear version loses nothing, keep it and thank yourself. Difficulty must beat clarity in a fair fight or it does not deserve the seat.
- Ask a stranger for a working theory, not a solution. After two readings, an intelligent stranger should be able to say what kind of thing is happening, even if not what everything means. Bafflement about details is fine. Bafflement about the situation is a structural leak.
What Difficulty Looks Like on a Scoresheet
People assume contest judging is hostile territory for hard poems. My experience says otherwise, with a condition. At Writory, every entry is scored on five criteria, creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, and difficult poems that pass the test above tend to spike the creativity and structure scores precisely because their strangeness is doing structural work. The stroke poem I fought for won its month. What difficult poems cannot survive is failing the floor check, because a judge reading a hundred poems will give any single poem two attentive readings, maybe three, and the poem must earn the fourth. Here is what earns it:
- A first line that establishes trust before the poem starts breaking things.
- One element held stable all the way through: a kettle, a name, a refrain.
- Difficulty that increases where the emotion increases, instead of sitting evenly over the poem like weather.
- A final line that pays the reader in full, even if some middle stanzas stay wild.
If your hard poem does those four things, send it out with confidence. Entries at Writory open on the 1st and close on the 25th of every month, and the score breakdown you get back is the rare chance to see exactly which criterion your difficulty helped and which one it taxed. Submit the strange one, not the safe one, and read the numbers.
The Sonnet Was Difficult Once Too
One more piece of the defense, because it reframes the whole debate. Every form we now call traditional was once a difficulty engine. The sonnet is a machine for making a thought fight through fourteen lines of resistance, and its first English readers found it knotted and foreign. Rhyme itself is an artificial obstacle. Meter is a constraint with no equivalent in speech. The entire history of the art is poets adding friction on purpose because friction generates heat, and heat is what readers come for. Today's difficult poem is not a betrayal of that tradition. It is the tradition, mid-invention, before the textbooks catch up.
Keep One Wild Poem Alive
I think about the stroke poem more than any clear poem I scored that year, and that fact is the whole argument. The poems that stay with us are not always the ones that opened easily. Some of them are the ones we had to live inside for four readings until our own syntax gave way and something true got in through the crack. So yes, write clearly, most of the time, about most things. But when the material itself is broken, let the poem break honestly, run it through the five questions, and keep one wild poem alive in every batch you send out. The smooth ones will make friends quickly. The difficult one, if it is earned, is the one a judge will still be quoting to an empty room in December.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.