Fred Beake to Peter Riley

I would not disagree that there are structures other than syllabic. After
all at crudest there is the "sonnet" shape of one block of verse answering
another in some way (i.e. octet to sestet, though not necessarily that
shape). Then there is H.D. in Helen in Egypt with three movements of 7,7,6
books, each book with 8 sections. Then Bunting and Eliot's use of "sonata"
form", or Shelley's undefined but probably conscious structuring of
Epipsychidion into three movements. All these are very powerful read aloud,
which may be significant. Then there is use of numerical patterning in
Catullus and Virgil. And wasn't there a theory Sappho used a conscious
theme recapit system (denied I think in Page's Sappho and Alcaeus)?

However, surely what makes the engine run, the plant grow (what metaphor
you will) is the syllable. Traditional meter gives control over that, and
therefore sound pattern, therefore total shape of poem. My own view is that
one of the Modernist achievements was to find a way to control the syllable
in a more irregular way than the two syllable meter that prevailed
1550-1830, and we are suffering from failure to recognise what they actually
achieved.

As to where poems come from, why some of us at least experience self
generating form, the answer must be obscure. It seems as if ideas half
thought five years before abruptly come to life, in a worked out form. I
suspect poets divide like composers between the Mozarts, who can write
symphonies on the road to Prague, and Beethovens who struggle endlessly to
achieve something apparently very simple.

I don't incidentally like pure performance. Substance on the page matters!
Yet (you may contradict me) the big poems perform. I've been involved with
performances of Eliot, Shelley,Williams etc and they work...


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