Michael couldn't even agree to that. "I don't think either of those alternate terms have much to do with aesthetic value either, though they're clearly relvant to indivudual tastes, just as difficulty and quirkiness are," said he. "Complexity is certainly one source of difficulty, but more often difficulty is the result of just not having done the work necessary to make oneself clear. You can't tell the depth of a muddy pool."

David Graham entered by citing a belief of Robert Francis's that it's not difficult to be difficult. I replied what was easy was obscurity, not difficulty. Afterward, I realized that I tend almost automatically to think of "difficulty" in poetry as complexity of technique, not as profoundity of subject matter--as David seems to (he later quoted Robert Frost's, "the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows" as an example of "difficulty" in poetry). There's difficult poetry and poetry about difficult subject matter. I think all good poetry is difficult fully to appreciate but that much good poetry--in fact, almost all good poetry--is simple so far as its subject matter is concerned. Good poetry can also be simple in technique. I do feel, though, that--other things being equal--the more complex a poem is in technique, the better it will be--simply because the more there will be to it. It is also true that the more complex in technique a poem is, the more likely it will break down somewhere.

mIEKAL aND, by the way, quickly pointed out how you can tell the depth of a muddy pond: you dive into it.