Comments on: Nude Formalism (Redux)

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:20:44 +0000

Besides his arrogance and defensiveness, I’m impressed by Christian Bok’s assumption that the past can’t be of any relevance to the present because we’ve moved beyond it, due to “the manifold, literary advances since the time of Johnson and Coleridge.” I’m reminded of a wonderful comment by Frank Kermode on those “whose passion for the present requires the destruction of the past.” (Don Share quotes it in his blog.) Even if one agrees that there is such a thing as “progress” in art, new works or modes of art (unlike new scientific paradigms) don’t render previous works and modes obsolete.
I’m reminded of a quote from an article I recently read about Schoenberg and his circle: “for a group of composers compelled, like so many of their creative contemporaries, to withdraw from the commitment to a consensual form of expression, linguistic reinvention of the medium was never allowed to become the abstract end in itself that subsequent theoretical codification might suppose.”
I was also struck by Bok’s reflexive pseudo-political posturing about the “revolutionary investigation into our normative, linguistic useages [sic].” None of the various people who have made such an assertion has ever made clear in what way normative syntax, for example, is oppressive. If it is indeed so oppressive, why is Bok using it to writ this blog entry? And how and to whom is a sonnet “oppressive” (let alone “wholly oppressive”)? This kind of playing at politics is all too common among the self-anointed contemporary avant-garde. There is a real world of politics and economics and social relations, and if one wants to deal with that, deal with that. But don’t pretend that subverting the hegemonic institution of bourgeois literature or whatever straw figure you’ve constructed constitutes confronting and struggling with the world in which people actually are oppressed in ways that have nothing to do with sonnets.

By: James Hoch

James Hoch — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:07:21 +0000

Yes, Annie Finch writes quite well on this issue of form and style.
One thing to consider which Ellen Voigt has in such a thorough way
is the relation between form and prosody and syntax. We ought not
to leave out the role of the sentence in the questions of form. Too often,
when we speak of form it is limited to the notion of stanza and line,
that innovation in metrical or stanzaic structure is the only kind
of innovation to be had when it comes to form. This leaves out a host
of other aspects of artifice that contribute to pattern and variation,
not the least of which is syntax.
JH

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:54:00 +0000

I think Annie is quite right here to differentiate between form and style. It is style that becomes dated (or seems modern and fresh)–and content, diction, etc, not, in my opinion, forms. If a form seems dated, or updated, it is surely in the handling of the form. It’s true that a style can seem wedded to a form through association (as a certain flat plain-spoken style with free verse, for instance), but on closer look, it isn’t the case.
But I would certainly extend that to iambic pentameter. I guess I don’t believe meters become dull in and of themselves–it is rather to what uses they are put (subject matter, style, strictness, etc.). Virgil wrote exclusively in dactyllic hexameter. Shakespeare wrote overwhelmingly in iambic pentameter (much more freely in the plays, of course). Emily Dickinson largely limits herself to short hymn meters. Swinburne, on the other hand, experimented extensively with different meters, yet his poems do not strike me as innately more interesting because of that.
Anyway, I think poets are experimenting in meters other than ip. (OK–I grant you, there is a conservative contingent–conservative also in terms of style–that is heavily into ip, and doesn’t even admit of substitions that were common enough in the 19th century.) Look at all the Sapphics out there, for one thing. But why “docilely” returning to iambic pentameter? Hmmm. Maybe that is another discussion!

By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:05:20 +0000

A quick and grumpy word on behalf of the concept I’ve written about under the heading Metrical Diversity. . . It is not strictly accurate to say, Christian, that Volkman’s poem “radicalizes the form of the sonnet.” In fact, it radicalizes the style of the sonnet, Maybe one could say that in doing so, it radicalizes the form by association, but the truth is that it is utterly conservative in form.
Wtih so many neglected, underused, gorgeous meters out there, it is disheartening to see even supposedly adventurous young poets returning docilely to the iambic pentameter Pound tried so hard to break. If poets were receiving a better education in meter, they’d have more options to choose from.
With a rhythmic diet confined to free verse and iambic pentameter, no wonder so many people think form is dull.
Annie

By: Sina Queyras

Sina Queyras — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:03:29 +0000

Interesting post and comments. As always, I find it curious that people want to distinguish between forms such as the sonnet, and constraint based poetics…it seems to miss the point. A sonnet can be very innovative in the right hands. To my mind formal concerns are formal concerns wherever they come from. As for Eunoia, I’ve argued elsewhere that Christian Bok’s project is invigorating for many reasons, including a/ the labour involved, which reminds us that if poetry is worth doing it is certainly worth pushing to its limits and b/ the rigorous formal constraints that remind us of how all forms affect language and content and c/ the passion with which the project was realized. The latter being difficult to quantify. Who can describe or guess how another person might realize his or her emotions? That seems an impossible and illogical task based on a search for a recognizable other.
Sincerity, as another Canadian poet, Lisa Robertson points out, is extremely problematic. It’s difficult to measure, to authenticate, and certainly impossible to teach. And yet it seems to me that it is often tone, or this notion of sincerity that formal poets are suspicious of…and perhaps this is what is oppressive, not simply the form itself.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:41:51 +0000

Christian’s phrase “the anachronism of such appeals to antiquary authority” leads one to ask just when it is that that “anachronism” began: was it fifty years ago? one hundred, two hundred years? Five? How long before the “exhaustion” he cites begins to take hold? Aren’t there other sylistic moves beyond the use of form that exhaust themselves so? At what given moment do poems of any kind become “outdated?” And if old “formal” poems become “outdated,” have they not then accomplished the goal of producing “an indisputable, but unrepeatable, achievement—a perfect anomaly so sublime that no copycat can upstage it?”

By: JH

JH — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:01:43 +0000

It seems that the form of my last post lost its integrity somehow.
Imagine some dropped lines where they are suddenly shorter.
CB, if you can praise one sonnet (as you seem to do) then your argument
doesn’t hold. If there is one example of a valuable sonnet in Cont. Poetry,
then your claims are irrelevant or merely cautionary no matter how eloquent or passionate.
Art is best argued in the doing, by talking about specific work.
When one starts making generalizations, when one confuses
a preference for an essence or a value for a definition, a poem
that crushes such thinking is sure to follow. Knott. Volkman. Stallings.
Also, one ought to be concerned that descriptions of reading
do not get construed for prescriptions on writing (a mistake that so-called
formalists and so-called avantists both make as well as many, many
theorists). Further confusions exist when we conflate political idenitity
with aesthetic orientation without considering cultural and historical context.
One problem seems to be against artlessness (whatever that is)
and more against art that has nothing interesting to offer. A good thing
to be wary of, for sure. But you misargued, misfired your thinking here. Lastly,
forms of poetry tend not to oppress people. They can be used
as tools of oppression (all language can), but they don’t actually do the oppression.
That’s no small distinction, considering the amount of real oppression out there.
Concerning form: Well, that’s a longer talk dealing with finite and infinite games,
category expansion and inclusion, and definitional adjustments over the last few centuries
or so. I mean, what is form? What is a line?Or, maybe I should say: What can form be? What can a line be? I guess, if we don’t try to answer these questions or at least how to properly
frame and argue these questions, we will continue to talk by one another. I mean,
if we don’t agree on certain facts or definitions, how could the conversation ever move
beyond she said/he said, beyond voicing our differences, toward community.
JH

By: Jordan

Jordan — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:32:27 +0000

Steve, Praed's "Farewell to the Season" was reprinted a few issues ago in Shiny. Maybe your call to see it online will get Michael Friedman to start posting magazine content to the site...

By: Ben Friedlander

Ben Friedlander — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:08:37 +0000

“What I miss in quite a lot of avant-garde work– and what I absolutely find in Eunoia– is some connection between the reinvented or newly-invented form and a person to whose wants, needs, regrets and so on to which the form fits (or interestingly fails to fit).”
This, of course, becomes an easy defense of form as mere ornament, since there are many poems where the form gives pleasure although irrelevant or even ill-suited to the content. Longfellow’s “The Bells of San Blas” would be a good example of this: the bells’ “strange, wild melody” and the overall anti-Catholic message have little to do with the soothing rhythms and rhymes, although the latter obviously serve the needs, wants, etc. of the poet and his audience.
I do like Longfellow, btw, but this is his major weakness. It’s a humanist version of the weakness Ange is so fond of citing in political poetry–a turning away from the poem’s own purposes toward some other laudable goal.
And as long as I’m butting in here, can I say that form in the strict sense (rhyme, meter, line, stanza) is vastly overrated as a determinant of poetic character? What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is not his verse form, but the quality of his mind, and not only because his “iambic pentameter”–in the plays I mean–is so irregular as to have more in common with Ashbery’s line than Pope’s. Does anyone doubt that Laura Riding’s quality of thinking, though rendered in free verse, has more in common with Shakespeare’s than that of Elinor Wylie, though Wylie like Shakespeare wrote sonnets?
Not to knock sonnets, or Elinor Wylie: without them you wouldn’t have James Merrill. (And yes, I adore Merrill.)

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:01:03 +0000

Thanks, Christian, for engaging with this.
I can completely agree with the following:
“even the most laborious exercises can nevertheless generate both artful liberty and poetic license”
but then, why should the sonnet be “wholly oppressive”? This simply seems to me untrue–if so many poets continue to find the sonnet a useful vessel. What about the sonnet is oppressive? While alphabetic orderings are certainly ancient (the Psalms, the Greek Anthology), in some ways Oulipoian experiments seem more “dated”–i.e., of a particular place and time, than the sonnet. (Having said that, “datedness” can always be “updated”–forms in my opinion can always be made new, as in Eunoia.) But then, why pit one form against another–surely they are both actually pitted against formlessness or malformedness. (I am reminded that in modern Greek to be ugly is to be “without shape”), to be beautiful is to be “shapely”.)
Does the sonnet represent tradition? Very well then, what tradition? Italian? Elizabethan? Romantic? Twentieth century? Is to be in more or less continuous use over the centuries being imprisoned in a particular tradition?
Some of the language here again suggests to me that there is an underlying assumption of an evolutionary model to art, one of perpetual progress, which I would restate that I just don’t buy. The sonnet doesn’t need anyone’s help in preserving it from “extinction.” It doesn’t need special breeding programs, or protected habitat or radio collars. It will outlive us all. It’s one of the forms of the future.