Creeley's original full sentence was:

'form is never more than an extension of content, and content never
more than an extension of form opposition'

But there's a bunch of decvent correspondence on the subject in the
archives from April this year (do a search on (Creeley (form)) for
example and find:

_________

Hey folks:


In looking at Creeley's commentary about the interrelationship between
form and content, I think it's pretty important to point out that he
was distinctly not speaking in favor of the conventional European
understanding of form as a pre-determined structure into which language
could be fit.


For Creeley and Olson, the interrelationship between form and content
has to do with the discovery of the problem of form and content again
on every line of a poem; projective verse is about finding where the
next line needs to go relative to the previous line, in terms of both
form and content--it's not about dictating that formal situation in
advance. A certain content takes structure a certain way; a certain
structure takes content a certain way. Both are choices that the writer
needs to make, again, on every line of a poem. The point here is
hardly, I think, to tease out the distinction between what is form and
what is content; the point is that both operate together in ways that
the writer must be open to exploring rather than controlling.


So the idea was crucially to not let form take precedence over content,
as Creeley and Olson felt the traditional formalists of the 30s and 40s
had done. For those formalists, content was something to be poured
into, and also shaped by, a pre-existing form, and that's exactly one
of the things that Creeley and Olson disliked about them.


Adding the second part of the quotation, that content is never more
than an extension of form, doesn't change the implication of the first
part of the quotation at all. Rather, it suggests that the second part
of the criticism was directed against the idea that one could
transparently portray content without understanding how structure
shapes content. It was a criticism of the idea that just because
content needs to play a role in shaping form, it hardly follows from
that fact that form is a secondary add on. Thus in their context they
are also criticizing a certain reductive sense of imagism that suggests
the clear image is all that counts, a criticism, I take it, that could
continue to be applied to much of the conventional narrative verse of
our own moment.


The point then is that form and content are in a constant
interrelationship in which neither should be understood as taking
precedence or being dictated in advance.


Unless one takes Creeley's comment out of context, I don't think that
there's any way that his quote should be interpreted as saying that all
formal structures are equally interesting just because they are forms.
The comment was without doubt a criticism of the way traditional
European forms attempt to coerce the shape of poetic language in a way
that denies that form can be exploratory, just as it was a criticism of
a certain kind of conventional understanding of so-called free verse,
then and now.


Whether one agrees with Creeley about such a point is certainly an open
question; but please, to suggest that his comment is somehow offering
support to the value of traditional European forms just doesn't seem
historically accurate.


Mark Wallace

______

etcetera, have a browse

love and love
cris


On Nov 7, 2004, at 1:24 PM, Christopher Walker wrote:

> <snip>
> 'Poetry is an occult science but I think the language of our science,
> verse
> composition, has been lost - or at least disfigured to the point of
> uselessness' [Don Paterson]
>
> (Shouldn't that be the 'occult science of our poetic language'? Dunno.
> Whatever 'verse composition' - a term which has me running for cover
> - is
> not some divine right or set of truths but a human-made set of
> formulas. As
> fellow humans we can and do reject those formulas to reflect or evoke
> our
> personal or cultural epoch. All science is empirical. It moves on the
> back
> of experience and experiment. Composition moves also.) [GM]
> <snip>
>
> Paterson draws a distinction between *content* ('occult science': the
> poet
> as alchemist) and form (the representation or expression of the
> business of
> that science in 'language', which for him is coextensive with 'verse
> composition', not defined). But it's odd in a couple of ways.
>
> Although his purpose, clearly, is to deplore a lack of technique,
> there's no
> sense of Creeley's observation (whether or not he agrees with it) that
> content extends into form (my rephrasing). As a result, the potential
> for
> what *content* can ever be is reduced, contained, postponed, and
> *form* too
> is cleaned of what Ron Silliman (in *Wild Form*) terms 'possibility',
> losing
> its edge. Or, to make that less opaque, Paterson's *experience*
> becomes a
> matter of reference within the frame of the poem, not something
> intuited
> through or as _a result of_ the poem. My slant upon what Geraldine says
> above.
>
> The other odd effect is that although Paterson tries to re-energise the
> nominal into process (metaphor > metaphorising; rhyme > rhyming) his
> distinction works against this, as though alchemy were a picture of an
> alembic and not a transformation after all.
>
> 'Disfigured' in some ways says it all, when what he means is
> 'damaged': the
> 'usefulness' and elegance of, say, a Philippe Starck washbasin are not
> at
> all the same thing.
>
> But perhaps I should find and read the whole piece before I comment
> further...
>
> CW
> _____________________________________________________
>
> 'Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence'
> (Magdalena Abakanowicz )
>