am i missing something?

Internet's working well this morning. Trying to play catch-up, but need to eat soon.

Just read the entry on difficulty on Never mind the beasts. This isn't really a response to that entry, but rather to the notion of difficulty in (post-)avant poetry/art.

Is any (post-)avant art really that difficult? I mean, sure, it doesn't "make sense" when you first look at it. But that's a large part of the point, isn't it, to make art that's not restricted by received notions of "what makes sense"? (After all, if art must subordinate itself to sense, then it becomes just another moment of the rational -- it ceases to be able to stand on its own as art). Once you realize this, doesn't it become significantly less difficult?

Maybe you still have to wrestle with how to approach it, spend a little time figuring out how it's questioning your relationship to it, but a lot of this is done on an "intuitive" and not a strictly "intellectual" level. Unless the work is deeply coded (for lack of a better word -- I'm thinking of coded in the sense of Pound -- everything is a reference to something that you need a kind of dictionary to decipher), then you still approach the work of art as a work of art -- that is, as something that (potentially) affects you on a kind of "gut" level. If you find the work of art interesting or moving, you might spend time analyzing it, figuring out how it accomplishes its effects, uncovering additional layers of resonance and play. But the point is that the analysis doesn't need to come first -- and I think that a great deal of (post-)avant work is talked about in such way that presupposes the analysis must come first -- indeed, it seems this presupposition is precisely what is meant when a work is described as "difficult".