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Dominic,
I appreciate the honesty & clarity of what you say quoted below &
totally share this feeling myself, in fact. Your wording sounds,
though, as if you conflate traditional meter entirely with "the
pentameter." I assume that's not what you meant. There are so many
traditional metrical configurations besides iambic p. (and, by the
way, what do you mean by "traditional"--does it mean anything anyone
has ever done and done again metrically, in whatever language? If you
use English versions of Sumerian four-stress meter, or the Celtic awdl
gwyddyd form, or cretics or bacchics or the infamous amphibrachs we
have discussed, or even the
long-abandoned-for-serious-poetry-in-English trochaics or dactyls--are
you really using "traditional" meter? Just because a metrical pattern
is based on old traditions, does not mean it is traditional for poets
in English. ) Personally I have pretty much been boycotting iambic p.
since finishing my work on the metrical code. But there so many other
unused and compelling meters (which does NOT mean, of course, that
there are not many other kinds of nonmetrical meaningful rhythmic
choices also) that anyone who wants to mess with meter and avoid i.p.
could do so for a few hundred lifetimes. So maybe rather than
"traditional," what you mean to classify as rigidly formalist is
"predictable"--something with a repeating pattern, as opposed to
spontaneous or "organic"form created anew for each poem?
Then, to further complicate matters, if the feeling of being
constrained by predictablity is what feels rigidly "formalist," then
where does that put poets like Oulipian or procedural poets, who might
create their own repeating pattern with artificial constraints and
follow it? Is originality the criterion here? If a poet creates their
own form (like Dan Zimmerman's "Isotopes," say) and repeats it over and
over, does that exemplify formal imagination--but if another poet
copied Dan's form, then would that poet suddenly become a "formalist"
and not someone with a "formal imagination" ? What if that second poet
used the form in a more transformative way in which the inventor of the
form used it? Are imaginative points only given for those who have
invented brand new forms? OK, so, maybe it's ok for a poet to be
considered a poet of formal imagination if they adopt for their own
purposes postmodern forms, but not old fuddy-duddy forms like the
sonnet? Then where do you draw the line? Do the ghazal or the blues
qualify as postmodern, having been only recently adopted for
English-language literary poetry--or does the form have to have been
around for a while? How many decades would Dan's isotopes have to be
around before they became too stale for use by a poet of "formal
imagination"? Or, maybe it's ok for a poet to adopt a fuddy-duddy form
like the sonnet as long as they "subvert" it a la Berrigan or Mayer,
and make it clear they are not following it slavishly. But that
subversion itself can become a stale gesture (I have probably met a
good half-dozen young poets in the last year telling me that their next
book will be a book of "fractured sonnets" or some such phrase). Isn't
it possible a brand new form or formal gesture could be used in a fixed
way, and an old form in a transformative way?
Of course this is pushing it to extremes, and of course we all know the
stereotypical formalists to whom you are referrring. But when
stereotypes seem justifiable and are easily operative, it becomes all
the more important to watch one's assumptions. I go back to thinking
the real difference between the formalist and the poet of formal
imagination must, finally, be not in the forms themselves but in how
they are used, and to appreciate your very apt phrasing: "The
difference is perhaps the difference between taking a given
systematisation as a fixed point of reference, a centre to which all
excursions must either return or get irrecoverably lost, and taking it
as material for transformation."
--Annie
>
> I'm still trying to get clear of "the pentameter" myself, and there
> are two things that I want to believe about that attempt: i) that it
> can be done, and ii) that when you have done it, you are not then in
> some kind of metrical free-fall, but dealing with a wider and more
> demanding set of rhythmic choices, which might be made "by ear" but
> require that the ear in question be carefully trained and somewhat
> supernaturally attentive. Consequently I will tend to bridle at
> anything that sounds like a suggestion i) that it can't be done,
> because traditional will always remain the reference point
> against which any "deviations" will be assessed, or ii) that if one
> did succeed in doing it, one would then be writing "without metre",
> playing tennis with the net down, and would thus have arrived at the
> happy (or foolishly irresponsible) state of never having any
> "particularly meaningful" decisions to make about the rhythmic
> weighting or pacing of one's words.
>
> My anxiety, in other words, is that formalism denies me a destination:
> either I stay on the straight-and-narrow, or turn away from it into
> the wilds, but there is little sense there that there might be other
> roads.
>
> Dominic
>
>
___________________________________
Annie Finch, Director
Stonecoast Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
University of Southern Maine
222 Deering St.
Portland, Maine 04104
Phone: 207-780-5973
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.anniefinch.com
http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/
—THE BODY OF POETRY: ESSAYS ON WOMEN, FORM, AND THE POETIC SELF —just
out in the Poets on Poetry series from University of Michigan Press—
___________________________________
Annie Finch, Director
Stonecoast Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing
University of Southern Maine
222 Deering St.
Portland, Maine 04104
Phone: 207-780-5973
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.anniefinch.com
http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/
—THE BODY OF POETRY: ESSAYS ON WOMEN, FORM, AND THE POETIC SELF —just
out in the Poets on Poetry series from University of Michigan Press—
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