Hi Cindy
Thanks for your interesting post. The first poem I consciously
remember writing, at about ten (although I wrote verses of various
kinds before then) was a Shakespearean sonnet. I found a description
of its rhyming pattern in an encyclopaedia and immediately wanted to
make one of my own. Then I spent years copying every formal device I
encountered, and making up not a few impossible rhyming schemes of my
own. The delight of playing with rhyme and rhythm is a real one. I
still write poems of using formal metrical devices for my fantasy
novels, and it is great fun.
However, after a few years of that, as a very young poet, I wanted to
move beyond merely accessing metrical devices, and started writing
free verse of various kinds, as well as exploring different ideas of
lyric. After a while that kind of petered out and then exploded and
aspects of prosaic language began to enter my work as well. I would
not call myself an experimental poet, but I want language to move in
more supple and subtle ways than those I have already used. I want to
break it up and fracture rhythms and make different kinds of beauty. I
stopped wanting to write "good" poems, perhaps partly in a revolt
against those (yes) very reifying ideas of taste and good manners, but
mostly because I was looking for something that seemed a more vital
and dynamic way of responding to the realities I experience, in all
their various dimensions, literary and sensual, emotional and
intellectual. These seem to me inherently questions about form.
I think that anyone who is interested is poems is interested in form,
kind of a priori: a prejudice of mine, I admit. Poems seem to me to be
exercises in formal imagination as much as they are expressions of
feeling and intellect. Form for me is about manipulating the material,
sensory aspects of language. There are lots of ways of doing this.
"Formal" form is just one of them.
All the best
Alison
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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