on 7/17/01 5:23 PM, Printmaker at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> So far I'm finding writing to a set format the equivalent of
> painting by numbers. I drew me up a table of ten columns
> (one per syllable) and fourteen lines - and then tried
> filling in the squares. Not good. Trying to squash the sense
> into a set line length and rhyme ending is excrutiating. I'm
> not even thinking about the beat.
>
> And verse, as Candice so aptly described, tends to send me
> off to sleep.
Er, don't want to be taken as corrupting the Youth of Poetry here--not
"verse" per se, at least not all of it across the centuries, but there's a
kind of sing-song monotony to some New Formalist poems (what I think of as
dumpa-dumpa meter) that you don't find so overwhelmingly in the older works,
maybe because the poets of earlier times had more training in the forms. It
does seem to me, looking again at that Gioia poem, that he's consciously
imitating Auden and failing for lack of subtlety (technically) as well as
for lack of anything meaningful to say (meaningful to Gioia, that is). No
heart/beat here, so far as I can tell.
Re your sonnet ordeal, maybe imitating (or answering) one by someone else
would get you over the first hump. Or if you're hung up on the form, try
feeding some totally unrelated content--the more inappropriate the
better--into the structural skeleton: i.e., let yourself _play_ with it!
Besta,
Candice
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