Jeff Oaks on BAP: "the simplicity of patience"

Here he talks about Ginbserg and Carl Phillips and the " "the simplicity of patience." He ends the post with Phillip's poem "King of Meadow."

I didn't like Allen Ginsberg when I first read him. I didn't get why those long lines and weird language was necessary. It wasn't until I read the "wrong" book of his–the book that nobody else seemed to talk about–that I "got" him. Kaddish had me weeping by the end, and I realized there might be other ways to approach poets than the one that people urge you toward

….

I remember Carl Phillips' work was once so impossible for me to read that I perceived it almost as garble. I turned away from it toward the other thousand poets whose lines were clearer. But his name refused to go away, and it became clear that I had to deal with his work somehow, so I did what I often do: I assigned a book of his for discussion to a class. That would force me, I thought, to come up with a way to read it. I took out the line breaks so I could "simply" read the narrative or argument. Then I tried to put them back in without looking at the original poem. That little useful exercise taught me an enormous amount about the relationship between the sentence and the line. What had seemed like a simple relationship was suddenly changed into a much more sensual one, in which music and sense constantly dance around each other.