It is agreed,I think that, 'poetic' is a term of abuse
when applied to poetry, if not also for prose, this
has led I think to searches for forms that express
'one's own voice', which it is hoped won't be 'poetic'
but individual poetry.

I wonder is there much mileage to the proposition that
form is adopted because it imposes limits on
expression. So the reason that a person may write a
haiku is not because there is anything so very
expressive about 13 syllables. It is because there is
nothing so creative as impediment. On a simple level
if I have to have some very strict rhyme scheme I have
to find some words that rhyme before starting which
gives me something to be getting on with instead of
all of the things that stop me from writing:
the white page
the why bother questions
writing to this group
work
waiting for 'inspiration'
etc.
It is a cliche that the oppressed writer that must
communicate in parables is some how fortunate, for
example the widely held belief that after the fall of
the Berlin wall that writing would dry up in Russia
because there was no persecution on writers.

My belief is that only by adopting strict nearly
impossible rules will the writer be able to get at
saying anything other than reiterations. for just as
the census/secret police etc needed writing around so
as it were does the writers 'better instincts'.

However the particular form of stricture the writer
adopts is not neutral it may have rhythmic effect, but
this is not all there is to limits in writing can. In
reading for example George Perec's novel translated in
English as 'A void', a work which does not use the
letter E, there is a palpable sense of something not
right or something missing, the doesn't quite come off
in English, but in French E is pronounced the same as
eux them so there are none of 'them' in the novel. The
novel is a parable of the dissapearance of the jews in
the holocaust. This doesn't come wholly from the text
directly but from the doubleness of the writing of the
words and the feeling of the restriction under which
it is written. This shouldn't be suprsing. We imagine
that we can sense the writers life in certain works
but this might not be because of the ostensible
character of the writer rather in what we know of
their biography i.e. America in Frost, or the
restricted life of Jane Austen, landscape in
Wordsworth.

My interest is in finding forms of restrictions that
have this sort of expressive potential, is any one
else?



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