Well, I'm not altogether displeased to be lumped with boring poets like
Baudelaire, but in general, I'd say that formal education, like formal
techniques in poetry, is a tool, and can be used wisely or ill.
Same with lack of formal education and embrace of free verse, tearing
out the doors from their jambs -- all can be used either wisely or ill.
Lack of education is no guarantee of artistic excellence.
Free verse is an incredibly powerful tool, and it will produce certain
broadly defined responses. So will form. And yes, there are many, many
people to who form is boring, and a strait-jacket, and who will respond
negatively to a poem precisely because it follows a form. You're never
going to please everyone.
The idea of form as a strait-jacket invented by men is one that had
powerful currency in America in the late 20th Century, as well as in
France in 1839. Poets like Rich and Wakoski consciously turned to free
verse as a revolt against the patriarchy, and their free verse was read
by many with that in mind. More recently, poets like Annie Finch and
Katherine Varnes, while respecting the anti-patriarchal stance of their
predecessors, have turned back to the idea of form as not incompatible
with feminism.
You're never going to please everyone, and I wasn't suggesting that you
can, or should try to. My point was that starting with free verse and
staying with free verse creates a certain effect, and makes a certain
statement to the reader. Starting with a form and staying with it makes
a different statement. Starting with one and then switching to the other
makes a different statement -- and all of these contain multitudes of
statements. Eliot kinda did switch back and forth in the same poem.
Writing in an iambic line, but varying the number of feet in the line,
makes a different sort of statement. Keats and Jonson did it, so how bad
can it be? I do believe, however, that you should use any and all tools
with some consciousness of what effect they'll create.
If you're using more or less traditional diction, and more or less
traditional subject matter, you're going to more or less be
communicating to a certain audience, and you more or less need to think
of the effect your technical choices, as well as your word choices, are
going to have.
Laura also could have ended her poem:
> I fear free will is just the final ruse.
> There is no choice and fuck you if you want me to choose.
But that would have been sending a very different message. Not a message
that never should be sent, but one that she may not have wanted to send.
There...everyone bored enough yet?
Roger Day wrote:
> "Second, her lack of formal education left her free to bypass a
> stultifying rhetorical tradition. In an 1839 letter to her husband
> (Lettres, 1:151), she explicitly rejects the traditional sonnet (which
> Baudelaire was going to revitalize in Les fleurs du mal) - her more
> than 600 poems include only 3 - calling it nothing but a brilliant
> straitjacket created by men. Instead, by experimenting constantly with
> verse forms, original metrical and rhythmic patterns, and diction, she
> achieves a musicality based on actual spoken language: a series of
> short interjections or imperatives, common verbs, rapid-fire questions
> followed by staccato answers, frequent repetitions, strings of
> subjects and verbs without subordinate clauses, and formulaic,
> colloquial and prosaic expressions from contemporary speech. Her
> lexicon includes nonpoetic words such as raser (shave or skim), ciment
> (cement), and forceps, all of which become powerful images, because
> they were then uncommon in literary writing. The conversational
> rhythms harmonize with her frequent use of irregular or free verse
> instead of the classical alexandrine, which favors intricate
> rhetorical effects and a periodic sentence structure."
>
> Michael Dahany (A New History of French Literature, 733:734)
>
> which, by pure chance, I happened to read this morning.
>
--
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
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