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
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