Let's also throw into the hopper Creeley's "form is nothing but the
extension of content," which I've always taken to mean that one discovers
form in the act of writing. This has nothing to do with fixed meter or
shape or precomposed rules of procedure.
Mark
At 05:18 PM 8/31/2005, you wrote:
>There's something vaguely Oulipian about the formal constraints I've
>adopted for the Half Cocks series, of course; I don't have a problem
>with that kind of deliberately chosen constraint, which can be
>enabling in a variety of ways.
>
>While there might be good reasons for the formal imagination to want
>to break free of established forms ("established" not by repetition
>only, but by being taken up in a variety of institutional contexts),
>it isn't primarily a horror of doing the same old thing that makes me
>want to resist formalist assumptions. The problem is with what those
>assumptions assume, and the critical judgements (and aesthetic
>choices) they authorize. It isn't, therefore, even a question of "how
>forms are used", a formulation that leans towards instrumentalism (and
>so tends to overlook some of the more interesting commitments one
>might make to a form, such as a willingness to be "used" *by* it). It
>is, as I said, the normative presumptions of formalism that seem to me
>to be reductive.
>
>To give a concrete example, it's potentially reductive to categorize
>as "unskilled" a use of fixed metre that is guided more by "ear" than
>by an educated awareness of the traditional uses of that metre, and to
>regard the resulting departures from the norm as slips or lapses in
>competence (or conversely to see any felicities as accidental, or
>owing to a miraculously "innate" grasp of the proprieties). That would
>be a judgement based on a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive,
>understanding of metre, and it's one that risks failing to take the
>measure of the poet's actual "skill" in weighting and pacing her own
>words. (Of course, some putative poets simply lack skill of any kind,
>but even they if they persisted in their folly might become wise after
>their own wise).
>
>It's also reductive to take the verses of someone working out of the
>lineage of American free-versifiers and try to read them back into an
>iambic metrical pattern!
>
>Dominic
|