On Difficulty (and Poetry)

A book that uses poetry to talk about difficulty, and vice versaAs Lavinia Greenlaw readily admits, ‘The idea of poetry tends to make people feel stupid, anxious or bored.’ Poetry can appear to be inherently ‘difficult’; our immediate impulse, to baulk or turn away. But in this wonderfully lucid investigation, Greenlaw invites us to do the opposite: to dwell with her in the uneasiness of difficulty. She looks at why we might both crave and fear difficulty, how we use and perform it, how our relationship to it might expose habits of thought and approach that can be productively dismantled. By entertaining the possibility of difficulty, she argues, we might allow ourselves to get more truthfully at what it is we really need to say. With characteristic poise and clarity, and using plentiful examples, Greenlaw turns over moments of opacity and resistance to show us how difficulty might in fact contain its own solution.