Comments on: Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:48:32 +0000

Some poets are open to all possibilities of form and content, and others aren’t. Is that the answer? I wouldn’t want to limit myself to one school – maybe I’ll go back to free verse? No, that can’t be possible after learning all this craft. Why does any poet say – no, you can’t be a poet that way. (oops, sorry rhyme there) Be a poet my way. But I’m not influenced by what any poet says I should do – I’m only influenced by poems or poetic insights. It’s fascinating to me that a poet would be against the concept of breath in a sonnet. Why reject breath? Or by extension, the body? I want my poems to be whole living bathing beauties that can twirl batons and win beauty contests. That takes breath.

By: Annie FInch

Annie FInch — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:43:17 +0000

Thanks for the correction, Jane–I see that I read your comment on the imeliness of forms too simplistically… and again, of course, it’s the poems that make the real arguments.
I don’t think it is the old raw vs. cooked duaity that’s underlying this conflict, exactly. Given the existence of Karen Volkman’s perfectly–even, one might say, conservatively–formed sonnets–not to mention the perfect sestinas of the Oulipians (Harry Mathews’ is one of the best sestinas ever, in my book), and the quasi-pantoums of Jackson MacLow, and Eliot Weinberger’s passionate attack, in the late great innovative journal Sulfur, on new formalists for not setting themselves still more difficult and exacting formal challenges–it does seem as if it’s not reallly ABBA, or a poet’s voluntary submission to random constraints, whether imperfectly or perfectly followed, that is still pushing so many avant-garde and even mainstream buttons.
“New formalism” stands for something in the popular poetic mind, as Emily and others suggest, and I’m guessing it may have to do with perceived faith in a fixed poetic ego or self. Nobody really cares if Karen V. writes an exactly-formed Petrarchan sonnet with disjunctive syntax and floating referentiality, but if Timothy Steele writes a sonnet beginning with the word “I” and the poem never questions or undermines the “I,” it drives the avant-garde nuts.
Why it does so more vexingly than an equally self-based free verse poem is the crux of the question for me. Is it simply the avant garde’s repressed passion for form being projected onto the hapless new formalists? (The avant garde have always been the most unrelenting formalists, after all.) Or is it the thought that the archetypal new formalist is somehow having his (because the archetypal new formalist is surely a (white) male in most minds) cake and eating it too–that he gets the fun of writing with constraint, just like a procedural poet, but doesn’t even have to sacrifice his sense of self in the process? Where does he come off being so privileged, so arrogant?! Yes, I’m convinced. It’s jealousy; I think I feel it too.
Annie

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:19:26 +0000

“…but mystery, I don’t think so.” Whaa?!?! You’ve got to have mystery in art. Actually, that’s kinda what makes art art. (Mystery isn’t the same thing as deliberate obfuscation, by the way.)

By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:42:11 +0000

Yes! I agree with Alicia: The artist should talk about craft. Art is craft. Art is that sum of craft with the capacity to engage the participant in the psychic event, that which is of the psyche, the nutritive through the intellective to the intuitive (see Aristotle on Psychology). Or better yet, it is the walk up the chakras, from the anus through the sagittal suture (the thousand petalled lotus on top of the skull). I think it arrogant of artists to keep what they do hidden behind some shroud of metaphysical inspiration and mystery. Yes, art can and should be subtle. It should have depth and breadth and complexity and elegance and transcendence and insight into the gorespring of our nature, but mystery, I don’t think so.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:33:28 +0000

I think Matt hit a certain nail on the head, there.
The real divide in contemporary poetry is not between “formal” and “free” verse. That’s just a smokescreen.
The real battle is between the polished (the strenuously artful) and the rough-hewn (the strenuously plain). Vast flotillas of poets congregate toward one end of this spectrum or the other.
However, there’s an even more peculiar paradox which must be taken into consideration :
BOTH of these attitudes toward poetry are superficial. They only scrape the surfaces of that very subtle art.
Good poems somehow, inexplicably, scout out a region which UNITES or BLENDS the artful & the plain, the rough & the smooth…..

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:59:05 +0000

Just a note to chime in in favor of “art” over “craft”.
As for form in contemporary poems, I prefer the kind that sounds clunky, slipshod, or slapdash, rather than “well-crafted” or “refined.” Call it “forminess”. For one thing, it’s funnier. And when you’re dealing with form these days, the poem probably won’t work if it takes itself too seriously.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:45:54 +0000

10 Reasons Not to Talk About Craft,
Composed by a Bona-Fide Form-Flinghest, & Composer of Odes, Pantoums, Gloses, Sonnets, Dream-Poems, Epics, Nocturnes, Chants Royal, Ballades, Riddles, Epigrams, and Generally Endless ABBA rhymed Quatrains, etc. etc. :
1. One is Too Busy Crafting to Talk About It.
2. It is in Bad Taste to Discuss Engineering Problems at the Dinner-Table.
3. Poetry is not a Craft; Poetry is Flesh and Blood.
4. One should Generally not Talk About One’s Own Art Works, since they are Meant for Others to Enjoy.
5. One is Usually Wrong in Any Discussion of the Craft of Writing (since it is not a Craft).
6. I Would Rather Not Discourse Upon the Mechanical Structure of the Bridge While I am Walking Across It.
7. Poetry is a Daydream.
8. My Craft is Not for Public Display (ie. Ars Est Celare Artem).
9. There Is No Joy in the Obvious.
10. Art (Like God, Sometimes) Hides Itself.
addendum :
11. One Is Not Being Paid to Talk about Craft (unless One Is).

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 08:34:27 +0000

Why shouldn’t people talk about craft? Of course there is craft. Don’t free verse poets have craft? Don’t they think about things like anaphora and line breaks, cadences, sound texture, levels of diction? It would be helpful I think if we separated discussion of Poetry with a capital P from Verse. Not all poetry is verse (there is prose that has more Poetry in it than 90% of the stuff being published as poetry), not all verse is poetry (you can put your shopping list in limericks if you like). But there is nothing wrong with talking about verse, as there is nothing wrong with talking about prose. I think it is a more useful distinction.
Since I write a fair number of sonnets, many–not all–of them starting either ABAB or ABBA (why is it always the rhyming that annoys people…), I find it bizarre to think this is something that cannot or should not be attempted. The idea that forms are only interesting where they are subverted or broken in some way–derived I think from T.S. Eliot’s remarks on meter–is by now a tired one. There can only be subversion where there is expectation, you have to have those ABBA sonnets to make breaking away from them mean anything. Free verse has so dominated recent decades that writing a sonnet is in itself subversive, as surely some of this discussion demonstrates. It upsets some people; it shouldn’t be done! Writing a straight Petrarchan sonnet in itself defies an expectation, whereas “subverting” the sonnet form–even writing something in free verse that is 18 lines and calling it “Sonnet”–is actually the expected, the norm.
The sonnet is hardly dead–and it isn’t just New Formalists using it either. I see quite a lot of experimental sonnets, many of which I cannot parse at all, but they are undoubtedly sonnets. Karen Volkman seems an Elliptical poet but she is also a consumate fashioner of sonnnets–and they do go ABBA. Forms, like the poetry of earth, are never dead–subject matter, diction, style, fashion, yes. These are not to be confused though with the forms that might contain them. It is possible to write a completely archaic sonnet without a new idea in its head. You can’t blame that on the sonnet, though. It is also possible to write a radically fresh sonnet, even, yes, a Petrarchan one. The freshness won’t be in the container but in the contents, and in the contrast between the two.
I have been resisiting a sonnet post, but I think I must come out with it now…

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:24:10 +0000

Given the overwhelming number of poets writing, and literary journals publishing, avant-garde and free verse as compared to those writing and publishing formal verse, such as the one Simon Dedeo mentions, and given this vigorous, sustained, fur-flying debate, I can only wonder whether “neo-formalism” or formalism exists as an almost mythic idea in the minds of the avant-garde, a constraint against which they work that is as every bit as generative as form is to the formalists. From Alicia’s original post:
“Glibness aside, though, do I feel belligerent against free verse? No, I admire good free verse, I wish I wrote it better. Tennis without a net has its own beauties and choreography. But I write best (as more than one editor has pointed out to me when I tried to sneak in some free verse in a submission) when I write against the constraint and pressures of form–any constraint, really, be it syllabic, repetend, stanzaic, metrical, rhyme-schemed. I write… freer that way. “
Emily

By: chesimard

chesimard — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:08:57 +0000

Hmm. Heidegger is an interesting card to play. He certainly did seem to believe that certain capacities did indeed inhere to certain language (as in, philosophy can only be done in Greek and German). But such beliefs are sadly of a piece with his soil-and-nation musings.
At the same time, Heidegger surely believed in change over time, especially in matters of representation. When he says “There was a time,” in Don’s citation above, he means it. He also means that time is over.
In his book on Nietzsche, he announced that Descartes’ cogito inaugurates a new historical period with a new subject, which he calls modernity. Compellingly, he insists that cogitare = to think is a too narrow translation, and ends up claiming that full understanding would find that cogitare = Vorstellen, or “to represent.” So he holds that modernity is representation, crudely put. And perhaps most relevant to this erudite thread, Heidegger thinks that neither the subject nor the object of representation, of modernity, precedes the other: they are mutually constituting. The object (a sonnet, for example) would have no a priori qualities, nor would the subject (a reader or a poet). The meaning of representation, in modernity, is entirely bound up in a shifting relation. The transcendental categories of the beautiful and the true are no longer functional.