A Note on Form and the Transgression of It (3.29.23)

Here Is the Thing

mundi carmen

Here is the thing about the rhymed couplet:

You make a line of verse and then you double it,

And suddenly your world of Costco, cable and assault gun, 

The ball of shit you inhabit, Babel relation 

That rolls one ugly day into another

Relaxes, if only for a minute, into a zephyr

Of inconsequence: your broken world, if only

For a minute or two, isn’t broken and lonely.

Introduce as well syllabification,

Meter, stress, and end-of-the-line ligation

That favors rhyme and you can hardly claim

Disaffection from too much chaos or pain.

The case of couples, two by two, is why.

Equation, Orderliness, Law is why.

As for your constantly subconscious churn of mind—

Muddle, mess, morass, the daily grind—

Here is the thing that the double-hemmed hand-cuff

Of the couplet saves you from: you, yourself.

And today I wrote something again . . . (3.18.23)

Here's a tip for new writers, or any writer struggling with a poem: recast.

Let's say you are trying to write a poem, have developed a complete draft of it that has shape and movement, form and development, but it doesn't satisfy. The poem sounds forced, insincere, derivative (even of your own way of thinking and feeling!), unbelievable. And you don't believe it.

This is where I left off with the draft of a poem described in the previous post (3.17.23) in this blog. That draft was written as a villanelle and adhered pretty much to the form's requirements (in English) of 5-foot lines of largely iambic pentameter and an a-b-a rhyme scheme with repeating first and third lines.

I realized that I was committing the same error that I used to lecture my W@1 cohorts about, regarding rhyme: I was writing to complete the rhyme, not the sense; I was sacrificing the art to the figure. This affected content development in turn, effectively blocking me from any fresh thinking about where to take the next line: I worked to get to the line-end rhyme, no matter what the line actually said in relation to the lines before or after.

This predicament occurs often when I am trying to develop content through some device or other: a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic progression, a metrical footprint. I force myself into a framework that works against thought and feeling.

When you're caught in this kind of bind, all the drafting and redrafting in the world won't do a thing to break you and your poem free. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that if you continue writing the same formula that produces a weak poem, you will only arrive at that weakness. The same track leads to the same destination again and again.

How to break free of this? Get off the old track. Take a new track. Get off track altogether and go off-road for a while. It always works!

So over the past 24 hours, I dispensed with the idea of writing a villanelle. I jammed all the lines of the draft together into a block of undifferentiated "prose" without end-stopped lines with rhymes and without the affectation of meter or syllable count. I dispensed with "form," for a draft or two, anyway.

The result? I now have a new draft that has "form," but a more organic form than before: two stanzas of equal length whose lines are roughly the same syllabically and rhythmically for the most part, though with occasional short lines and two somewhat longer lines. I italicize to emphasize that this draft avoids strictness in the sense of a traditional form. It assembles more organically, according to the rhythms, pitches, images, and ideas unfolding as the draft builds. It's possible, maybe even preferable, that a further draft will de-emphasize even the two equal stanzas or the roughly equal line lengths. Or this may not be necessary.

I found that by dropping the formal requirements, I was able to generate new information in the poem, and especially to develop a closing line that doesn't feel forced or "arrived at," even though it is. It's just that the content and voice now dictate where the poem begins (same as before), flows, turns and ends, not the strictures of the villanelle form.

So, for you writers who are stuck drafting a poem, are you doggedly trying to stick to some format (a rhyme scheme, a stanzaic structure, a line length, a metrical footprint, a repetitive pattern), hoping that that will deliver you to the art you want to create? Are you finding that the same ideas, thoughts and feelings that haven't been cohering for you keep coming up as you re-draft? STOP following the form! Drop the technical braces (or step off the technical path) and walk free. You may stumble or teeter or even fall flat. You may become lost for a spell. But you might also find the voice and the idea(s) and the art that your insight, eye or ear (or all these) has been looking for.

Instead of redrafting, revise - revision meaning exactly what it says: seeing things differently.

I wrote something yesterday (3.17.23)

Recently, I stepped away from Wednesdays@One, leaving it in good hands and with a full complement of writers who still attend weekly to work on projects and to share poems and readings.  It took me a long time, two years, to decide to move on, and now that I have, I am feeling either an obligation to read and write more poetry and poetry criticism/history/theory, or renewed energy for doing these things, because I've written almost every day over the past month, either here, in my journal, or in my word processor.  

Several new poems have been born as a result, a couple of which I think are good to very good, and several continue to form in my mind and on my laptop, where I tinker and toy, try and tease out new lines, phrases, breaths, images, figures. Two I am having particular trouble advancing, for two related but probably different reasons. I'll discuss only one of them here, and very superficially at that.

It's a villanelle and it's tormenting me.  I began it yesterday and, in a single sitting, drafted a complete version: five stanzas of a-b-a rhyme with a closing quatrain of a-b-a-a.  As I often do with this form, I struggled for an hour to compose the first and third lines, that is, the alternating refrains, these being the engine that powers the poem. The opening line I had created early in the day during a long walk, which I had finished more or less by the time I returned home. The third, a-rhyme, line was partly conceived by then as well and needed only a half hour's work to fit together. The middle line of the tercet, the b-rhyme line, took a little more time and, as it often does, created an obstacle because of its quirky rhyme requirement: fertile.

I say obstacle, but only because in choosing it I declined any easier close or masculine rhyme. At the same time, the word "fertile" opened up possibilities for near, slant, off and rhythmic rhymes, which turned out so far to be:

fertile

riddle

fiddle

apple

fickle

paddle

Which is all to say, the whole thing has turned into an exercise in formalities. Yes, the poem has a theme (God's contribution to Original Sin), and yes, the argument is developed logically beginning to end. But that's just the problem with the poem, it's very Audenesque, so to speak. It strives for cogency overlaid with irony and a bit of tongue-in-cheek. It wants to be read seriously but it doesn't want to appear Poetic and Sober. It's a poor hash of modernist trope upon modernist trope.

So now I may be back to the real effort of writing, to cast a cold, critical eye on what I write . . . and to push on with the drafting, hoping that eventually I'll find a way to drop the posturing and write a real poem.

I say this poem is tormenting me. That's an exaggeration. I am not tormented by poems; annoyed sometimes, dissatisfied, but not tormented. And in this case, the best word for it is probably unbelieving. I haven't yet brought the poem to a state where I can believe in what I am doing, that what I am doing is of much value as craft or art or feeling. I don't know that I'll be able to get it there.

New Scholarship on the Life of Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry (3.7.23)

This book review appeared in today's New York Times. I think we are witnessing a renaissance in Phillis Wheatley's poetry, including this biography by David Waldstreicher, a 2011 biography by Vincent Carretta, The Age of Phillis, by Honorée Fanone Jeffers and published in 2020, plus this essay linking Fanone Jeffers' work to a concept called "critical fabulation."  Not to forget the critical essay and close analysis of her poem, "To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works," in Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry. *

Which is all to say, it's past time that those of us who were introduced to Phillis Wheatley's poems ("On Being Brought from Africa to America") in our sophomore American Lit survey courses (Norton, vol. 1) as somebody to pass over on our way from Anne Bradstreet to Ralph Waldo Emerson to get reading and (re)assessing. 

* Accorded a place of high estimation: the second of 40 poets/songwriters presented in the book whom Hirsch considers formative in the history of American poetry.

I read something today . . . (3.6.23)

I'm reading Edward Hirsch's new book, The Heart of American Poetry, which is his take on formative American poets from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo.  He describes language as a "structured system of communication, the poet's toolbox." And immediately I am thinking, poet's toolbox? That doesn't sound quite right.

Is language a tool, our tool, we writers of poems?

I've mused with my W@1 cohort that language is more like the stuff of poetry.  It is the material which we work into art, just as stone is the sculptor's material and sound is the composer's.

You can argue, I suppose, that experience is the poet's material. After all, we do say of a writer's work, "Her material is the family she grew up in"; or "He shapes his material (i.e., his experience at Normandy in 1944) into an epic story of struggle and heroism."

But language is the poet's material because poetry is language that calls attention to itself as material; poetry foregrounds the materiality of language, its organic characteristics, its physicality. 

Poets don't write grammar. Grammar - systems of linguistic structure - is the tool that poets use when working with their material.

If you made a sliding scale of these things, from the most abstract to the least, it might look like this:

Grammar ---- Experience ---- Language ---- Words ---- Sound

The farther along the scale you go, the more you enter the world most conducive to poetry, where words and sounds leave meaning behind to foreground their physical being . . . and the more deeply they penetrate the ear, and the more intimate your relationship with them becomes.