Creative Chats With Daniel E. Pritchard (Should Art Be Difficult?)
Should art be difficult?
That was the question Dan Pritchard brought to our Creative Chats conversation in May 2026. The Creative Chats series features (almost) monthly live podcast events put on by Little Local Conversations and hosted at the Mosesian Center for the Arts.
Daniel E. Pritchard is a poet, translator, and essayist, as well as the founding editor of The Critical Flame (criticalflame.org), whose work has been published in the Lily Poetry Review, The Arts Fuse, Pangyrus, Salamander, and elsewhere. Find him at danielpritchard.net.
Released June 26th, 2026
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
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Transcript
Matt 0:02
Hi there. Welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode, I sit down for a conversation to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This episode is a recording from one of the live Creative Chats events that I do monthly over at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. I'm actually taking a summer break, but we'll start back up in the fall, and I'll still have a recording from the last event of the season, the Creative Chats Conference, hopefully up next month as well. But today's episode is a conversation with Dan Pritchard, a poet, translator, and essayist, also a Watertown resident. And we had a conversation around his question of, should art be difficult? And before we get into the conversation, just want to give a quick thank you to the Creative Chats series sponsor, Arsenal Financial. Thank you to Doug and his team for sponsoring this series. And as always, thanks to the Mosesian Center for the Arts for hosting these events. Now let's get into the conversation.
Matt 0:58
All right, so welcome. This is Creative Chats. We are here at the Mosesian Center as always. Today, gonna have a chat with Daniel Pritchard, who is a poet, translator, and essayist. Why don't you introduce yourself a little bit before we get into the question? So, what is your art practice? What do you do?
Dan 1:14
Sure. Thank you for having me, Matt, and for running this excellent podcast in our community. It's been so great to hear from all the different creative people we have in Watertown. Yeah, I have been a writer since college, maybe a little before, you know, dabbled in high school. Mostly poetry, but also pretty early on, I was interested in critical writing, and I was a philosophy major in college. And a lot of what I did was philosophy of art. And so that's been a kind of lifelong interest of mine. So writing poetry, writing book reviews sometimes, came of age in the heyday of blogging, started a blog in my spare time that eventually kind of became a journal, which I ran for about 15 years. We published, gosh, I think something like 80 issues of the journal, which was all nonfiction. It was mostly book reviews, but sometimes broader essays, sometimes interviews. And I also translate poetry. And I'm a very amateur musician, which is an art practice. And so it's important to mention. Yeah. So you know, most of my arts practice is in writing around poetry.
Matt 2:20
Gotcha. So the question that you brought in today for our topic is, should art be difficult? And we've been joking beforehand that there's so many layers to what difficulty is. But where is your initial angle for this question?
Dan 2:33
Yeah. I mean, it's a very selfish question, obviously. When you were like pick a topic, I was like, great, I'm gonna pick a topic that I got a bone to pick with you people, and you're gonna hear about it. No, it really grinds my gears, so to speak. Anytime I tell people that I'm a poet, first of all, it's like a great way to end a conversation. It's like telling people you're an accountant, there's nowhere to go for them. But the first thing people say is like, I don't understand poetry. I don't, I don't get poetry. It's all Greek to me. And they just immediately and offhandedly dismiss an entire genre of writing, the ur literature for human beings. The first thing we did was tell stories and songs. Poetry is essential to who we are. And people are like, nah, it seems hard. I don't like it. And that bugs me.
Dan 3:16
And with my art philosophy interest, this is a thing that comes up over and over again. In the poetry world, it comes up as this discourse around the death of poetry. Poetry's dead, and why is it dead? And it's dead because it's too difficult. It's dead because of John Ashbury, or it's dead because of whoever. Now, that script has flipped a little, weirdly, where nowadays poetry is dead because it's too easy. And it's on Instagram, and people don't like that either. So it's really like a, it's a lose-lose. Poetry's dying no matter what. But for a long time, the discourse was about difficulty, accessibility, audience. It was why don't people read poetry anymore? And that discourse among very intelligent people in publications like The Atlantic also bothers me. It bothers me as much as the people who dismiss poetry as difficult because it's fundamentally, I think, wrongheaded. Poetry's not dying.
Dan 4:07
And difficulty is an essential element of all art. It's a dimension of art. It's not a characteristic you either like or don't like. You know, it's not cilantro. It's not like some people hate it and it tastes like soap and everyone else likes it. It's just a way of thinking about the work. And there are many, as we were talking about before, many different kinds of difficulty. So to paint with this broad brush all the time, both, I think what has frustrated me is that it runs between serious readers of the art form that I engage in and people who literally don't read it, but they are willing to say it's all very difficult and I don't like it. And so that's kind of why I picked it.
Dan 4:47
But I think it's a rich question. Should art be difficult? I think is a rich question because obviously in the 20th century, art became very abstract, many kinds of art. You had atonal music in orchestral music, you had jazz doing forms and approaches that were really challenging to their audiences. You had T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and modernist writers writing work that was extremely, extremely dense and elusive and sometimes very difficult for people to understand, so to speak. And then, of course, you had visual arts where you had a lot more abstraction coming out of cubism. And then there's always this weird layer of the CIA funded a lot of it because they didn't like socialist realism. And so, you know, Jackson Pollock famously was boosted enormously by CIA funders and the Paris Review was funded by the CIA. So there was all kinds of weird stuff going on there, too, that is another layer. But just to say in the 20th century, art forms across the board embraced formal difficulty. And then it sort of triggered almost immediately this discourse around difficulty, around like, should art be difficult? Is this too difficult? Is this wrong? Is this anti-democratic or pro-democratic? And again, that that's where like the question about funding and the politics behind difficulty come in. And so there's many different dimensions around it. I think it's a rich conversation to have.
Matt 6:06
Yeah. So back to your initial thought there. So when you tell someone you're a poet and like I don't get poetry, what's your response to that? What do you say to them about the difficulty of them getting into poetry?
Dan 6:15
Like, oh, and I go and order a drink, and then I come back and I splash it in their face. No, if I'm having a real conversation with someone and I have an opportunity to kind of badger them about it, you know, the thing I would say is that there is a kind of poetry for every kind of reader. There is a kind of poetry that no matter what you are interested in, you can immediately connect with. And we should embrace difficulty as not a limitation in the art, but a limitation in ourselves. Difficulty is where we run up against the edges of our experience and other people's experience as it's been transmuted into a work of art. So when we run into art and we're like, ah, this doesn't make any sense to me, there are many reasons for that. One reason could be literally formally, I don't know how to decode this. And that's a question of the way you use language, the way this poet uses language, the norms of the form and how this person might be breaking them or, you know, or embracing them or subverting them.
Dan 7:14
There's another layer of difficulty that's like, this is not really for you. This is a poet, I don't know, of another gender identity. This is a poet of another racial identity. And they're writing for their community. And so, like you, person who's not in their community, yeah, you find this challenging. It's not for you. There's two ways to think about that. It's not for me, so I'll forget it. I only want things that are for me. And that's the very straight white man kind of way of approaching everything. Everything should be for me, and when it's not, I don't want it around. The other way of thinking about it is to say, like, this is challenging. It's not for me. But I'm gonna continue to engage in this because I actually think if you're willing to embrace difficulty and if you're willing to really engage in a work of art that's not for you, that really challenges you in some way, it makes you better as a human being. It certainly makes you better as an appreciator and engager of art forms of all kinds, engaging in difficulty is a practice.
Dan 8:10
And so, you know, when these people are like, ah, difficult. Poetry is difficult. I don't like it. First of all, you're just not seeing the poetry that lands for you, because everybody needs a place to, a foothold. I wouldn't recommend starting with, you know, the abstract language poets of the 80s if you've never read poetry before, but I might recommend starting with, I don't know,
Matt 8:30
Billy Collins.
Dan 8:31
Yeah. Best selling poets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt 8:34
Yeah. So then if it's a practice and they need a foothold in and like, I don't want to take the work to find my thing, because that's difficult, to find your thing. What do you say to that step then?
Dan 8:44
They're just telling you who they are then. You know, I don't feel like it's my job to convince people necessarily. I'm not, I know I'm on your podcast. I'm not an expert in anything really. I'm a poet. I care about this a lot. I care about the arts a lot. But I don't think it's the job of people who love an art form to convince people who are dismissive that they also should love the art form. You might take that up, but I don't think it's required. And so I mean, if someone is really resistant and they just they don't want to engage, there has to be an endpoint in that discourse.
Matt 9:14
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how about let's talk to the people then who are open to this, right? So they found their foothold in, they found maybe more of the best-selling stuff that is maybe not as complicated. Why should they take that next step to discover more difficult stuff? I mean, you've already explained how like it exposes you to different points of view, but why does it have to be difficult to explain a different point of view? What is the difficulty? Is it in the actual writing? Is it in the point of view? Like you can have simple writing that's just from a different point of view from you. What are the different flavors of difficulty?
Dan 9:45
Yeah. I mean, formal difficulty is one I think most people point at. They're thinking about in, let's say, visual arts, it could be something that subverts their expectations of what a painting or a photograph ought to be. In music, it could be something that pushes back against the popular format of a song. And in poetry, it's obviously like how people are using the language. So using language in a not obviously clear and communicative way is something people point out all the time. And then there's the difficulty of just any other person is a black box. We don't actually have access to each other. That's incredibly lonely. It's incredibly like sad. And it's not human to live in that isolation. We want connection with each other, and we need pathways to transcend that isolation. And art, I think, is the fundamental way.
Dan 10:38
And so I think the reason you might move from very clear work to more difficult work in whatever way it is, difficult because it's not for you, because it's coming out of a different community, or because it's using language in a way that's challenging. The reason you might do that is because it extends the breadth of your connection with people. The more you can engage in other people's interiority, and art practices are fundamentally kind of interior things, the more you can engage with people's interior lives and interior experiences, the richer your own experience gets and the richer your sense of connection with people gets.
Dan 11:17
And I think that that's really, for me. I'm gonna go on a tangent here, but for me, that's the danger of algorithmic selection. Algorithms give you what they know you're gonna like. And I want what I'm not gonna like. I want to encounter things that I'm not already primed to understand, access, and enjoy. I mean, I want those things too. Everybody wants those things sometimes. I watch a lot of action movies. Everybody likes popcorn fare. I also want this other thing. And so these days, we've leaned into these algorithmic systems like Spotify that are trying to give you exactly what they think you're gonna like the most. And I think that that's, I don't know. I think it's diminishing us as people.
Matt 12:00
I wish there, I wish Spotify had like a random podcast button, just like you know, you can go to Wikipedia and hit a random Wikipedia page. But so take me through an example of you personally encountering some art that you found difficult, but you were glad that you did.
Dan 12:14
Oh my God, so many. So many. I mean, I'm the most guilty of this. I think probably why the reason I feel strongly about it is because I feel like I benefited so much from functionally trusting other people's opinions and tastes and challenging my own through that process. So a very funny example, I think, is I really hated Jane Austen as a young man. I was working class, lived in Quincy, had a single mom. Jane Austen did not resonate with me. It's not, it was not for me. It did not connect with me personally. The concerns of my life were not like, oh my God, we need to find the wealth to keep our estate. It was like, I don't know, I would have to scrounge together bus fare. So like it really just didn't, it didn't make sense to me. I was invited to read it, I don't know, in high school or something. And I was like, this is not for me. And I just thought it was like classist junk.
Dan 13:05
And I was wrong. And thank God there was enough people around me who were like, no, you're wrong. Like, you should go ahead, go back to that. And I eventually did. I continued to re-engage it. And eventually something clicked. Something about continuing to try to engage with the art form, continuing to think about my own limitations. I grew as a person, so the art changed over time as it always does. So eventually it clicked. And of course, it's genius. It's like incredibly smart. Have you guys heard of Jane Austen? I hear good things. I think, keep your eye on her. So it's great work. And it just took me a long time to get there. And that was because it wasn't for me. She was writing in her context, and I was very much outside it. And, you know, that was true for her for the sort of literary intellectual establishment for a long time. She had to be recovered very intentionally at some point in the, I'm gonna say like early mid-20th century, because she had been, by other straight white guys in academia, she'd been pushed aside as sort of lesser for all those reasons, all the reasons that I didn't connect with it. So I mean I'm a much better person because I continued to challenge myself and continued to say, like, you know what, I think it's me. Like I think I'm the problem.
Matt 14:17
Yeah. And do you have, putting you on the spot, but do you have any specific example of with Jane Austen of something that you came out of specifically from engaging with it, other than a general, oh, now I like this?
Dan 14:27
Oh, I just, I mean, the subtlety of humor, and there's pieces of reading a novel from that long ago that's like you have to have some understanding of the historical context and things like that, that really help me appreciate it. But it's very funny. It's very funny work. She's an extremely pointed social critic. And once I realized that she was also making fun of these people, I was like, oh yeah, you're my girl. But you know, it took a while. It took a while to come around. People really had to continue to encourage me. I had to like basically trust the people in my life who said, no, this is, you should really like this. They said, like, there's something getting in the way. Continue to engage. It was difficult. It was difficult to get over my own limitations. And I'm glad that I did.
Matt 15:03
Yeah. So let's flip it now. The art creation side. Should the art that you make be difficult? Should the writing that you do be difficult, both in terms of actual production of it and then also as it presents to others.
Dan 15:21
Hmm. I've always held that if you put a maxim out there about what art should be or how art should be created, there is some genius out there and you create this person who's going to prove you wrong by saying it out loud. So no, I don't think anyone has, I think artists often, but not always, I think the art's difficult for them, even if the art is simple. I think very frequently artists are engaging in the difficulty of life in various ways. And it's coming out in art. They're wrestling with something, they're challenged by something in their life, an experience that they've had, relationships, social conditions. I think that's often, if not at the center in the process of creation, deeply embedded in the process of creation. But you know, poets who write for their community, if they're a small community, they're not saying, like, I'm gonna write difficult, I'm gonna write stuff that's gonna really mess up readers in Nebraska. You know, like they're writing for their community within their context. It's not difficult for them and the people around them, and that's totally legitimate.
Matt 16:27
I will say I went to art school and there were some people who wrote specifically to not be understood.
Dan 16:31
Oh, no, I've taken many a workshop in my life. And honestly, if you go to like MFA programs, there's like. You know, in the 80s, there was political movements based around the idea that you needed, I mentioned the language poets, the language poets of the 1980s. They had this radical materialist critique of writing, where trying to remember this now because these are the kind of people who write letters. They basically said if you use language in a way that's communicative, communicable, easy, identifiable by the audience, you're just perpetuating kind of the capitalist system that we all live in. And actually, language is a material and we should use it like material, we should use it like paint, and we should create abstract work. So, like language quotes in the 1980s, they were not the first ones to do this, I'm just thinking about, they really did actively believe this was how it should be done, and they had principled ideological reasons for that in a lot of ways. This is painting with a broad brush. There's a lot of nonconformity within that group, but there are people who believe you ought to do it this way or you ought to do it this way.
Dan 17:31
There's a poet who I love, who was a longtime BU professor, Geoffrey Hill, British poet, extremely British poet. He wrote a lot about like British Civil War heroes, leaders, martyrs. He was deeply engaged with history. He wrote extremely dense, elusive, postmodern in the sense of continuing the modernist project. He wrote that kind of work. And he wrote an essay where he basically said, like, difficulty is principle because it's democratic. You're treating your audience like they are as smart as you are. If the work you're writing is complex and rich for you, then you don't need to clear it up. You don't need to clarify, it shouldn't be simplified because that's very condescending to your audience. Your audience is smart. People are smart, people can figure it out. And so he had a principal view on that.
Dan 18:24
Now, he's sort of just explaining the way he thinks about it, but I think that there are people who have ideological arguments in favor of or against difficulty. And I'm not one of them. I think every kind of art everyone makes is valid. There's no kind of art that's wrong, and there's no style of art that's wrong or right. If you've been to the MFA, you've seen all art is contemporary. Art continues to exist in a living way before us, all the time. And we socially and culturally might move through these periods of some kinds of art being more favored than others, but none of those kinds of art are wrong. We're wrong, no.
Matt 19:02
Yeah. And just a little sidenote, that reminded me, I assume you know about like the Oulipo writers and the French writers.
Dan 19:07
Yeah, yeah. They were a precursor I was thinking about.
Matt 19:09
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that was like the group that like some guy tried to write a book that didn't use the letter E because that's most.
Dan 19:15
Oh, he did it. He did it. It’s incredible. Georges Perec’s book, unbelievable. You have to and it's in translation without the letter E, and it's available from Godin, where I used to work.
Matt 19:24
Right. So there's even the difficulty of not necessarily the concepts, but of the challenge that you set yourself.
Dan 19:29
And for them it was like a game. They thought of it as playfulness. They wanted to bring playfulness into literary writing. There was extremely high-level artistic accomplishment and also a game. It's a limitation like writing a sonnet for them.
Matt 19:42
Right. It's your framework, you know, John Cage and with music. People might know him as the guy who sat at the piano for four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. People love to hate on him. But he was like this really joyful, playful guy. And people think, like, oh, he's so full of himself. And like, but that's been thrown on him. So yeah, a lot of times this difficulty can be seen from a playful, joyful way rather than stern seriousness.
Dan 20:06
People's reaction was anger. I mean, people were mad at that, at that recording, famously. And that's interesting. I mean, I think that's an interesting question. Why? Why do we respond to difficulty in the ways that we do? Why is so often, especially in collective public arts like theater, why is the response always so often anger? Why are people so mad? Because a piece of art is difficult in some way. I think that's like a really interesting question. What is it about the collective consciousness that encounters difficulty and anger is the thing it brings?
Matt 20:36
So getting back with your own. Would you consider your writing, your poetry, for the average reader, would you consider it difficult?
Dan 20:42
The average reader? What a good question. I don't know the average reader. The median person? If you're here, raise your hand. I've been looking for you my whole life. I think, yeah, I think some of my work is more challenging. I think some of my work is more about my interior life. And it makes leaps of image or logic that someone wouldn't be able to follow because they're not me, because every one of us is a universe of very specific experiences. And then I think there's some of my work that's difficult because I'm, in the kind of Oulipo way, like I'm doing something playful. I'm trying something out.
Dan 21:20
One of the connected ideas to difficulty is failure in art. Like is difficult art, failed art because it fails to reach people in the way. It just kind of depends on how you think about art. And I think that varies by discipline in a lot of ways. I think in poetry, people accept a lot more sort of hermeneutic difficulty, like closed-off black box, God, that poem is so weird and dense, and I don't understand what's happening. That's what poetry is like. And that's part of the reason people say to me at parties, poetry is very difficult, because they accept that as a facet of poetry. Whereas, you know, popular music, for instance, you're a musician, I know, and it's very different. People might think about a difficult work or a difficult song as failed piece of art in music because of the nature of the reciprocal audience relationship and the listenership and expectations about what music ought to be doing. So I think there's difficulty in everyone's work. And it depends on who you are and what you're bringing to it.
Matt 22:16
Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned the failed music because the avant-garde music from, you know, the 20th century now is what's in the background of every major film that you go see. So it's like now we're used to it because the setting is different.
Dan 22:28
Right. David Nolan is basically.
Matt 22:30
So it's interesting poetry doesn't get mixed with other medias to get in a different setting. So maybe that's part of, the framework doesn't get changed enough.
Dan 22:39
Although in, I don't know if you saw The Bone Temple.
Matt 22:42
I did not.
Dan 22:43
The Bone Temple everyone speaking of movies that I watch because I like genre fair mostly. There's a sequence in that movie where Kipling's poem, I'm forgetting it now. A recording of Kipling's poem runs over a very disturbing sequence of violence and it's a wonderfully fascinating moment where you almost never have poetry used that way in other media like you say. So I was like oh it's a poem. It's so interesting to hear it used as a kind of soundtrack over the scene and it's inviting all kinds of new difficult questions about, I don't know, empire and the nature of domination, the nature of people's violence toward each other collectively and individually, because that's what the poem is kind of about. And so by layering it on top of this film media, it's inviting in much more interesting questions, difficult questions. It might be difficult to see what the connection is between this early 20th century poem about British Empire and zombies, you know, but that was a kind of recent example where I was really struck by how well it worked and and how interesting it was.
Matt 23:43
Yeah, so maybe a way of getting through difficulty is just changing frameworks a bunch of times until you find the framework that fits for you.
Dan 23:50
Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. That's why it's a practice. That's why engaging in difficulty is, it needs to be a practice. And I think people who shy away from it, you know, it's fine. Some, I go back to my favorite poets a lot. I go back to lots of poets that I think are on the somewhat less difficult end of the spectrum a lot. But I also continue to try and read particularly new writers, for me, new writers who are doing something really different from what I'm used to. And I think new writers is important because like I could just live in the 20th century’s avant-garde for a long time. There's plenty of work I haven't read yet there. But I think if you want to continue to challenge yourself in that way, you need to be seeking up art that's being created in your contemporary context because I think it'll challenge you in a different way than art that has a historical context.
Matt 24:37
Yeah. Well I think we've talked through a lot of different phases of the difficulty here. Was there any other angle and difficulty we didn't hit on that you want to mention before open up to any questions?
Dan 24:49
No.
Matt 24:50
Question. All right.
Speaker 24:49
Thanks. Hi Dan. Partly because you're a person of such goodwill it seems that you're really favoring the writers over the readers, that if they write something that you don't get, it's because it's difficult and the problem is on you, not the writer. And I'm struck that this leaves out the whole issue of value like there's difficult versus easy. There's also bad versus good. And I wonder how you think about that.
Dan 25:20
Yeah I don't I don't think there's bad versus good. I mean I think there's work that I value highly. There's work that I think is very accomplished. You can see the formal mastery in it. I think there's also work that's very improvised, that's extremely moving to me and I would value very highly. So I'm extremely skeptical of value. I think value is a terrible way to think about art. It's an art collector's way of thinking about art. It's a capitalist way of thinking about art. Art has a dollar value or a social dollar value. But art is about your relationship to it. So if you love something, love it. And if other people don't, they're not you and they don't need to love it. And I think that's for me, that's how I approach this. I'm not interested, I'm not worried about the canon of the future. You know, I'm not worried about what they're going to teach in English classes in the future or the best of books of the year.
Dan 26:14
Because like frankly, I don't know, if you go back and look at like I mean the Pulitzer Prize is a great example of this. Most of, hello Pulitzers. If I ever publish a book I'm not going to get a Pulitzer now. But you look at, you look back at lots of the Pulitzer Prize winners of the 20th century, you know, far enough ago that they're kind of fallen out, are totally lost to time. They were considered the best book of the year by this Pulitzer, very prestigious prize committee. And now no one, no one reads a lot of them. I mean some of them are, some of them are, you know, the Sound and the Fury or something like that, but plenty of them are not. And so I think this idea about value is I think it's too tied up with too many very limited social structures. It's too tied up in identity. It's too tied up in who's got the money and who's paying for prizes and who's picking the judges and who's able to go to university and become a professor and who's not. And all those things. I mean we see right now, right? The dismantling of all the infrastructure that made the 20th century literary world possible. I think you need to, you as a single person audience member, you need to engage with the art as openly as you can on its own terms. And if it moves you and if you love it, if it affects you, that's your experience of the art and that's totally valid.
Matt 27:32
How do you square that with your Jane Austen experience where being told this is so good you need to go back to it?
Dan 27:38
There were people I trusted. I trusted people and I trusted that, I trusted that I am a very limited person and that I had lots of space to grow. My experience is, part of that comes from not having come from like an artistic family per se. I went to plenty of Red Sox games as a kid but I didn't go to an art museum until I was in college. And I was like oh my God, what have I been missing? I loved it. But I felt like I know nothing. I know nothing and I went and read all these art tomes of art history because I felt like I didn't understand what I was even looking at, but it was moving to me and I wanted to understand it better. And so for me, my engagement with art has always been I think from a position of I have room to grow. I have to trust museums. Smart people picked these paintings and I love some of them and I don't understand some of them and I want to, you know, I trusted that there was something else going on.
Dan 28:27
And so I think trusting other people's taste is great. Trusting Isabella Stewart Gardner is smart. Trusting, I don't know, an oil tycoon, eh, I don't know. You have to pick and choose. Trusting people who have a strong sense of taste and you're like your sense of taste is interesting to me. And these people who continue to encourage me to engage with Jane Austen had also introduced me to lots of books that I loved. And it's a matter of again community and social relationship. I think it's, I think it's a big part of art that people leave out too. That like so much of our understanding of art is shaped by our communities.
Matt 29:03
Well we could make that whole topic a whole other talk.
Dan 29:06
On tomorrow’s podcast.
Speaker 3 29:09
Hi Dan. I had a question kind of how you built your identity as a poet. So more as a younger person, what were your introductions to poetry or like what do you identify as ways that allowed you to connect and feel comfortable in a way?
Dan 29:22
Oh I don't feel comfortable.
Speaker 3 29:23
Well you know what I mean but like you know to kind of see yourself in that world from a young person to now.
Dan 29:30
What a good question. I mean, speaking of difficulty, I think you're never totally settled I think, let me just speak for myself. I'm never totally settled in an identity as an artist in any way. I always feel like a fraud. So I don't know that I'm there. But I was exposed to, well I mean this is interesting actually I loved Halloween. And I was exposed to like Edgar Allan Poe and spooky poems and things like that that I think were probably my early, that and Shel Silverstein, which I think is a lot of people's. I think those were probably my earliest exposure. And Shel Silverstein, my dad wasn't really in my life, but he gave me A Light in the Attic and so it's like a treasured possession because it's I don't have very many things that I connect with him. So I think I would pick that book up frequently for that reason just because it was like kind of nice. But the poems are great. I mean I don't know like speaking of great value, are they great poems for adults? I don't know. But like I love them as kids and I. Policeman, policeman help me please someone’s gone and stole my knees. I would chase them but I suspect my feet and knees just won't connect.
Matt 30:42
I was more Jack Prelutsky myself.
Dan 30:45
That's it. We got to fight now. No, but I think that was my really early introduction. And then I was, I got really into music as a teenager and it was the era of the Doors revival. I was like perfectly situated as a young man. And Morrison wrote poetry, which I don't recommend to anyone, but is meaningful to me because I was a young person and I was thinking about you know how do I fit into art. And then I’m Jesuit educated and the Jesuits are pretty good selectors of literature to expose you to so high school was just like a litany of poems. It was just poems, poems all day long. It was like a whole year of the Odyssey. I think we did Milton actually and now that I think about it, that's surprising, Milton, our great enemy, the Jesuits. But you know, we did Elliot, we did Four Quartets, I think it’s senior year of high school.
Dan 31:35
So it was just like a slow accumulation of, oh, this is like these works are, continue to be meaningful to me as I go along even as I pass them. Like Shel Silverstein, I'm well past the point of Shel Silverstein being for me, right. But it's still meaningful to me and I still, you know, even in like high school I would pick it up every once in a while. And like Edgar Allan Poe has this poem Alone, which is oh, it's very melodramatic. But I as a slightly goth child, I'm the normiest looking goth kid you've ever seen. But I had goth tendencies. Let's say I was goth curious. I really connected with these poems about like being alone and the only thing before you is death and, oh, my beloved dead ones and you know and things like that. So yeah and I had, you know, some difficult experiences as a kid and poetry, again, I think like the difficulty in poetry matched the difficulty of the experiences that I had in a way that made me feel less alone. And I think that that as a young person was really important to me. Thanks.
Matt 32:32
Any other thoughts?
Speaker 32:34
Okay so back to the this versus that. I hear more about poetry or art being not accessible rather than difficult. So that's sort of how I think difficulty versus accessible. So then should we offer a ramp, you know, an accessibility ramp to people who are finding it hard? Who does that? I mean I, if somebody says I don't get abstract art to me, I'm like, well, well how does it make you feel? And if they can't answer that, then I move on sort of like what you were saying. So I don't know, I think the accessibility, people, get back to your anger point, it's frustration. Anger is the response to frustration. I'm like I'm trying but I just don't get it. So I don't know do you have any comments on accessibility.
Dan 33:14
Yeah that's interesting. So for accessibility I think we sometimes think about this question of difficulty in only the extremes. So it's like only Rupi Kaur or Celan slate poems, right? It's only the most extreme. But actually, you know, within that gradation I think there's a place that's the right level of challenge and for you, audience, that kind of resonance, the community resonance, the identity resonance, whatever it is. I think there's a right fit. I don't think necessarily though that like the on-ramp is from the most simple. I actually think a lot of people, they need something to be interesting to engage with it. So it needs to be difficult enough to be interesting. And I think every person has a different place along that spectrum of accessibility or difficulty, whatever, you know, however we want to talk about it. I think everyone has a place in that that's the right place for them to on ramp. But I don't think it's necessarily like, well, you have to start with, I don't know.
Dan 34:11
Because it's also true that clearly written poetry can be very difficult in their other ways, conceptually difficult or emotionally difficult, or again out of your community. And so just like a totally different way of looking at the world and that can be a great place to on ramp. So there's plenty of difficulty in it and it's got enough to make you interested in it. But I don't know, I think boredom is a much greater threat to art than difficulty. I mean Netflix you're killing us, you're killing us guys. These movies are bad. Don't make them. Just hold out, make one good thing. Don't make eight bad ones, you know. I think it's the threat of AI, right? It's a mediocrity. By its definition it's an accumulation and summary of everything that better people have done and it's boring. It's boring and that's the problem with that. I think boredom's a much bigger issue than difficulty.
Dan 34:56
But I do think there's a point at which is the right point for accessibility. It's not like an accessibility ramp at a building that needs to go all the way down to the street. I think people have a different point, so to speak, along the journey. Yeah, yeah. Well and sometimes it's like you could have two poems that are roughly formally challenging in the same ways, but one of them has cultural resonances that a person connects with and therefore they're more willing to engage in the formal difficulty. Like the difference between Walcott and Heaney formally is not that great. They are very similar kinds of writers. They were besties. But I think they resonate for very different communities. And I think people who don't read poetry probably in different communities know different poems by those poets because there's some cultural resonance or values or perspective that connects with them.
Matt 35:45
Yeah somewhere between Twinkle Twinkle and John Cage is the right spot.
Dan 35:49
I think so. I think we've nailed it.
Matt 35:51
Yeah. All right. Well we can continue talking off the podcast but I think we got a good amount here for the podcast. So thank you Dan for being here today and thank you everyone for being here.
Dan 35:58
Thank you again, Matt. I appreciate it. Thank you all for coming.
Matt 36:03
So that's it for my conversation with Dan. I'll put links in the show notes so you can find out more about him and his work and also put a link in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to any of the other Creative Chats conversations. And if you just want to hear more podcast conversations in general you can head on over to LittleLocalConversations.com. There I have all the episodes, you can sign up for my weekly newsletter, if that's your type of thing. And if you like the podcast and you'd like to help support it, you can click on Support Local Conversation in the menu on the website. There you can become a Little Local Friend and help keep these conversations going. Again, that's all over at LittleLocalConversations.com.
Matt 36:39
All right and I want to give a thank you to the Creative Chat series sponsor Arsenal Financial. Arsenal Financial is a financial planning business here in town that's owned by Doug Orifice, who's a very committed and involved community member, co-president of the Watertown Business Coalition, he's the vice chair of the Watertown Cultural Council, involved with youth sports, and just generally involved with the city. Great guy, cares deeply about the arts and other things in the city, so love having him as a sponsor. But if you need help with financial planning, you can reach out to Doug and his team at arsenalfinancial.com. Thank you again Doug and the rest of Arsenal Financial.
Matt 37:09
All right and I want to give a few more shout outs. I want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is, this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Can find out more about them at WatertownCulturalCouncil.org and MassCulturalCouncil.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners first the Watertown Business Coalition. Their motto is Community is Our Business. Find out more about them at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep up to date with everything going on in the city, check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
