I have been reading the 'Autumnal Sonnet' posts with great interest. My Creative Writing degree at Portsmouth Uni is about to start, and I have just completed an OU intro to Poetry Writing. Assessment 1 was to write a formal sonnet - a deeply frustrating, but fantastic training exercise. The delight came in choosing an 'orignal' exposition, and in finding the rhymes, which tended to dictate the evolution of the subject. My final assessment, a response poem, was in free verse, but I consciously and unconsciously employed every skill that I had learned in writing the sonnet, particularly with regard to rhthym, metre, line ends etc. Learning form enabled me to produce a poem which explored, expanded and flowed in ways in which I had previously been incapable. The piece was thrillling to write and received a mark (on my birthday!) which truly astonished me, but which makes me feel less of a charlatan in respect of my impending degree.
I am beginning to understand, and have great respect for, the importance of form in terms of craft, in terms of supporting the 'message' of the poem. I have a colleague who, on the contrary, avows (to paraphrase) 'if poetry is primarily a written art, then form probably does matter in some academic (i.e. formalist) sense which requires rules in order to establish often limiting and culturally exclusive aesthetic criteria for 'taste' or whatever (and that road to hell was paved by FR Leavis)[I don't know what he means here]That then becomes another way of reifying and pinning down an ongoing act of creation. And that is the nub of the problem I have with form. As Volosinov once [who?] said 'aesthetic communication..is wholly absorbed in the creation of a work of art, and in its continuous re-creations in the co-creation of co-contemplators, and does not require any other kind of objectification.' Form falls under the 'any other kind of objectification' umbrella. Either you get something from a poem or you don't. If you don't, for whatever reasons, formalist or otherwise, it doesn't matter that much. It's only a poem after all."
For me, creating poems is the most thrilling thing I do, doing that skillfully, by utilizing form, increases my pleasure.
I would be very grateful for any comments from the coalface!
Regards,
Cindy Lee
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