Notes on Poetic Form (I) by David Lehman

I.

A distrust of received forms seems endemic to American poets. It is predicated on the conviction that depth or complexity of vision, force of passion, profundity of insight, or whatever it is that distinguishes art from mere craft will invariably precede rather than follow from a formal maneuver. This view found its first great exemplar in Whitman's "Song of Myself" -- and its first great sponsor in Emerson:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes
a poem, -- a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the
spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its
own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the
form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of
genesis the thought is prior to the form.

That Emerson's edict continues to have its adherents is clear. Allice Fulton has restated the case: "During the act of writing, technique and meaning are inextricably linked, and it is only for the convenience of critical discussion that one could wish to separate them. The realization that craft depends on content leads to the concept of organic forms and the idea that whatever elements help us experience a poem as a whole can be called its form."

Perhaps it betokens the rise of a new formalism that a rival notion -- that "in the order of genesis" form may precede thought -- seems on the ascendant. (By "a new formalism" I mean to designate the tendency as such rather than the specific group or movement of poets who have banded together under one or another label, issuing proclamations.) Certainly there has been a resurgence of interest in forms traditional or exotic -- forms that can themselves create the occasion for poetry. Some regard this development as yet another manifestation of the back-to-basics spirit evident in other areas of cultural activity. Or is it that the emerging generation of poets is acting in filial rebellion against predecessors who valued nothing so much as what Whitman called the "barbaric yawp"? In any event, it is possible that the preoccupation with poetic form is precisely what distinguishes this generation from the last. A number of celebrated younger poets are clothing their poems in the traditional raiments of rhyme and meter. Others have embraced a principle of poetic form that follows from two key premises: that imaginative freedom can flourish amid self-imposed restrictions and that originality starts from a mastery of tradition, not an ignorance thereof. There are also those who remain solidly committed to free verse -- they might write prose poems, but never a villanelle (never one that rhymes anyway) -- but who are nevertheless engaged to the point of obsession with the form and appearance and design of their work. In this category one thinks of Jorie Graham, whose meanings are inextricable from the effects she obtains through her experimentation with form: for example, her substitution of blanks for words in several poems, or her unusual lining and punctuation -- she may end a poem in the middle of a sentence with a dash instead of a period. These are formal choices, as crucial to the outcome in Graham's case as another poet's decision to write a double sestina using the same end-words that Swinburne used in his double sestina a hundred years ago.


[from The Line Forms Here (Poets on Poetry series, University of Michigan Press, 1992); adapted from the afterword of Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, ed. David Lehman (Macmillan, 1987)]