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Evidence, But of What?, a Mini-Essay on Form
Does form need to support content? Or is it better when form does the opposite?
News item from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th Street
An Amtrak police officer was shot in the foot yesterday morning by a woman at 30th Street Station. The shooting happened in the vicinity of the McDonald’s at the station about 11 a.m., according to Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham. Philadelphia police took the female suspect into custody.
The circumstances of the shooting and the source of the weapon were under investigation, Graham said. Amtrak did not release the names of the officer and suspect. The officer’s injuries were not life-threatening, Graham said. The officer was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital and was in stable condition.
The news short is a form as surely as the sonnet. The news short generates mystery through compression, omission and conventions of tone, which take outlandish human events with an absolutely straight face. The best examples require the collaboration of a professional reporter and a very professional editor, neither of whom has observed the event. There is a tragedy in being shot in the foot, and probably an ugly story here. But tragedy and ugliness have been erased by newsification. The bizarre hilarity is not unlike Ashbery forcing surrealist comedy into the complicated traditional sestina form as in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” where Popeye is the subject. Both are inspired deadpan mismatches of form and content—though in the case of “Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th St,” one suspects that reporter and editor are not actually keeping a straight face, because neither ever has anything but a straight face.
Posted in Group Blog, Poems on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 by Daisy Fried.
Comments (6)
>Ashbery forcing surrealist comedy into the complicated traditional sestina form as in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” where Popeye is the subject. Both are inspired deadpan mismatches of form and content.
I do think this sort of gets things backwards. For truly, what is there in form more hilarious than the sestina? Ashbery’s poem is deadpan, yes, but hardly a mismatch. It is a deadeyed *merging* of content and form!
And as for the “news short” above, offered as exemplary of compression in the genre, well, there is no time to waste: One just has to see the master of the fait divers at work– Felix Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines. http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=7039
Kent
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“Does form need to support content? Or is it better when form does the opposite?”
Daisy, I think James Longenbach’s “The Art of the Poetic Line” gives a partial answer to your question. Among many interesting things he says, there is this:
“Deciding where the line should end in a free-verse poem might initially seem more mysterious than in a metered or syllabic poem, but in fact it is not: whether or not the line ending is determined by an arbitrary constraint, the line ending won’t have a powerful function unless we hear it playing off the syntax in relationship to other line endings.”
John Blackard
http://www.johnablackard.com
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If newswriters are anything like the TV news anchors in Seattle, they smirked like hell through that “shot in the foot” line, the Schadenfreude-seeking punks.
I could imagine seeing the mirthful possibilities in Dante’s “Stone” sestina in a giddy mood, but my world would be poorer if hilarity were that poem’s only effect.
Inverting the generic expectations inherent in the traditional examples of any given poetic form is “better” if late 20th century period irony is your favorite style. I love Tom Lehrer too. Ironic deadpan has been totally mainstream for a long time.
Being a songwriter, I think about form all the time. The differing forms carry different emotional freights. The 32-bar “standard” (pre-rock) form lies with different emotional possibilities than the rock-style verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus form. Etc.
Tone is the ubiquitous mystery. People who deny its importance are in denial. “I hate speech” is a clever speech. Deadpan irony becomes the default tone of most of the anti-signifying types. Deadpan irony becomes tiresome. Tell it to David Letterman.
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Hey John,
Hilarious in the sense of the apparatus, the extavagant medieval machine, just standing there, out of time, in a field of rutabagas. That doesn’t mean that Dante, or whoever, couldn’t have strapped it on with solemn intent.
But have you ever heard the recording of Pound intoning Sestina: Avantforte? Now *that’s* hilarious…
Kent
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I love any excuse to mention that folks who want to hear the recording of Pound intoning “Sestina: Altaforte” (and lots more) can just click right here.
I also love having an excuse to trot out again this quote from Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan), ca. 1993:
“I’m into my post-ironic phase…which of course would include irony as well. And I’m not talking about the New Sincerity, of course, but rather Post-Irony. Or maybe it’s the Pseudo-New-Sincerity, or New Pseudo-Sincerity, or maybe it’s Pseudo-Post-Irony. I don’t even know anymore. It’s hard to say. You know what? As soon as David Letterman hit the airwaves, it was really all over for irony.”
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SESTINA: ALTAFORTE!
Thank you, Don.
I unconsciously typed in the title of my “Sestina: Avantforte,” in which Ashbery appears, and which is obviously titled after Pound’s Altatforte…
http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/main/issue03_frameset.htm
:~)
Kent
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