Something fascinating is happening in our literary landscape. While libraries close and books disappear from shelves, while algorithms promise to simplify everything we read, literature itself is pushing back with a quiet but powerful form of resistance: difficulty.
Recent developments reveal a striking pattern. As The American Scholar makes "In Defense of Difficult Reading," we see poets like Anthony Joseph crafting work that "haunts the black air" with complexity, while Palestinian poets gather under Jorie Graham's editorial eye to create verse that refuses easy consumption. Even biographical subjects like W.H. Auden are being presented in their full, contradictory complexity—straddling nations, traditions, and identities in ways that resist simple categorization.
The current wave of book challenges creates an unexpected irony. While censors target books for being too challenging to certain worldviews, the literary community is simultaneously defending literature's right to be intellectually and emotionally demanding. When Alex Haley's Roots returns to Tennessee libraries or when Canadian libraries close entirely, we're witnessing two sides of the same cultural tension: the struggle over who gets to determine what's too difficult, too complex, or too challenging for public consumption.