New Forms and Frameworks
I love to come across new poetic forms, even though I don't generally consider myself a formalist poet. New forms give a fresh image to the concept of formal poetry - poetry strongly patterned in terms of line length, repetition, refrain, lineation, rhyme, stanzaic structure and so on. Formal poetry, especially writing in the fixed forms of villanelle, etc, can feel restrictive to the poetic novice, although of course this is not necessarily the case. 'The poet,' said Sylvia Plath, 'becomes an expert packer of suitcases,' and I think of the fixed forms as the sort of sturdy case which won't easily or happily be pushed out of its given frame. Immensely solid; built for the distance, for duration. Also safe and sufficiently well made to contain delicate things, precious things; words of resonance and value that might otherwise break from the writing hand and flood the page uncomfortably.
This extension of the suitcase metaphor as a suitable container for raw thoughts is in a sense somewhat reactionary; such separation of poetic form and content arguably went out of favour with the late eighteenth century-and-onward development of Romanticism, and a sense that form and content were organically fused; each an aspect of the other. I don't argue with this, and of course it's always been the case that some poetic forms are associated with particular moods and themes. You wouldn't have much success if you tried to write a love poem as a limerick, for example. Nor (though it might be slightly more possible) a joke sonnet; nor a villanelle with a clear sense of narrative development or resolution - villanelles are far better suited to obsessive worrying, experiences of loss, or those repetitive thoughts which grab the insomniac psyche. However, from personal experience, I'd stick to my opinion that some of the fixed forms can be a safe, enabling container to shape inchoate emotion, such as grief, into a more measured eloquence, to transport it safely from one mind to the reading mind of another.
So what are the implications of newly minted poetic shapes, contemporary strategies and structures that have been created by living poets, practising poetry in this postmodern, fast moving, media saturated age? Let me count the ways. Or the implications.
Firstly there's that word postmodern. It inevitably has connotations of pastiche, of play, of unserious riffing on a previously serious theme or tradition. It breaks things up and collages them back together again. It works in fragments and layers. Not a bad age in which to write a blog, then. And not a bad age in which to rediscover the ludic, the slightly crazy patterned phrasing of the trickily prescribed poetic line. All the more entertaining if the freshly presented form is passed off as a troubadorian flourish of old: Billy Collins's paradelle form is the most familiar example here. Collins claimed that 'The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century'. In fact it is a tortuous repetitive form of his own inventing (and his own example was deliberately terrible), though this hasn't stopped other poets - Annie Finch for example - writing some smart paradelle poems of their own. Less well known but more do-able and I think more enjoyable to read too, is Kim Addonizio's 'sonnenizio', which - pretending again to be recovered from historical precedent - invites the poet to take the first line of a traditional sonnet as their own first line to a fourteen line poem, and then take a word from that first line, placing it in all subsequent lines, and end with a rhyming couplet. Addonizio's own begins with Drayton's 'since there's no help, come let us kiss and part' : 'part' or words grown from it ('parting part', 'party') feature in each line following:
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
or kiss anyway, let’s start with that, with the kissing part,
because it’s better than the parting part, isn’t it—
we’re good at kissing, we like how that part goes
I find it a very entertaining form and one that can carry warmth as well as wit. In addition this constant repetition of one given word has the effect of gradually loosening that word from its semantic moorings; it becomes uprooted and light, although remaining the verbal focus. Something of a postmodern enactment in itself, and, in postmodernly fashion, more intrinsically indebted to the poetic tradition than is the paradelle.
Secondly, our fast moving age has nevertheless yielded a place for new poetry and its moment of pause. It's partly the way poetry gets you - you think it will be a quick gulp of literary firewater (and sometimes it is), but it engenders a stillness and a reflective aftermath. The predominance of short lyric poetry these days plays to a poetry of moments, of glimpses and single gestures played out to their full resonance on the page. So it's interesting to find out that although repetition and refrain have been extensively employed in the traditional poetic forms such as triolet, villanelle, and pantoum, the purest, most mirror-like use of these devices is found in contemporary poet Julia Copus' formal invention which she calls the 'specula': it consists of a single entire stanza being reversed, line for line, in the stanza that follows it. Some punctuation may be altered but lineation and vocabulary are an exact reflection, in reverse, of what precedes, as though the white space between the two stanzas (the form utilises just one reversal, one whole mirroring) is the gateway into a mirrored world, an alternative or complementary might-have-been made up entirely of the first world's components. Copus's best known example is 'In the Back Seat of my Mother's Car' - a searing moment of departure - and she identifies its car mirror as the focus of reflective reversal. It's a clever form, and if as postmodernism might suggest of itself there is 'nothing new to say' in the second half of each specula, there is yet semantic exploration, emotional resonance and skillful revision in the literal reversal of order of poetic lines.
Finally, a week is a long time in a media saturated age. Roddy Lumsden has recently devised a poetic form, the 'hebdomad' which invites the poet to gather information, imagery and experiences over the course of a week, then to arrange this gathering of poetic data into nine tercets of long unmetred line, allowing two thematic strands to develop in the poem. His own examples in Third Wish Wasted work very well - quirky but touching, full of tangential insight:
'I've also heard that at any given moment in London
there are more chicken wings than people
frozen or frazzling or thrown to the pigeons
('The Microwave')
There's something about letting a week's worth of life filter through the mind and condense into a poem which seems immensely satisfying - redemptive even, in such a predominantly throwaway culture as ours. The shaping spirit of imagination is alive and well and at work - or play.
This extension of the suitcase metaphor as a suitable container for raw thoughts is in a sense somewhat reactionary; such separation of poetic form and content arguably went out of favour with the late eighteenth century-and-onward development of Romanticism, and a sense that form and content were organically fused; each an aspect of the other. I don't argue with this, and of course it's always been the case that some poetic forms are associated with particular moods and themes. You wouldn't have much success if you tried to write a love poem as a limerick, for example. Nor (though it might be slightly more possible) a joke sonnet; nor a villanelle with a clear sense of narrative development or resolution - villanelles are far better suited to obsessive worrying, experiences of loss, or those repetitive thoughts which grab the insomniac psyche. However, from personal experience, I'd stick to my opinion that some of the fixed forms can be a safe, enabling container to shape inchoate emotion, such as grief, into a more measured eloquence, to transport it safely from one mind to the reading mind of another.
So what are the implications of newly minted poetic shapes, contemporary strategies and structures that have been created by living poets, practising poetry in this postmodern, fast moving, media saturated age? Let me count the ways. Or the implications.
Firstly there's that word postmodern. It inevitably has connotations of pastiche, of play, of unserious riffing on a previously serious theme or tradition. It breaks things up and collages them back together again. It works in fragments and layers. Not a bad age in which to write a blog, then. And not a bad age in which to rediscover the ludic, the slightly crazy patterned phrasing of the trickily prescribed poetic line. All the more entertaining if the freshly presented form is passed off as a troubadorian flourish of old: Billy Collins's paradelle form is the most familiar example here. Collins claimed that 'The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century'. In fact it is a tortuous repetitive form of his own inventing (and his own example was deliberately terrible), though this hasn't stopped other poets - Annie Finch for example - writing some smart paradelle poems of their own. Less well known but more do-able and I think more enjoyable to read too, is Kim Addonizio's 'sonnenizio', which - pretending again to be recovered from historical precedent - invites the poet to take the first line of a traditional sonnet as their own first line to a fourteen line poem, and then take a word from that first line, placing it in all subsequent lines, and end with a rhyming couplet. Addonizio's own begins with Drayton's 'since there's no help, come let us kiss and part' : 'part' or words grown from it ('parting part', 'party') feature in each line following:
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
or kiss anyway, let’s start with that, with the kissing part,
because it’s better than the parting part, isn’t it—
we’re good at kissing, we like how that part goes
I find it a very entertaining form and one that can carry warmth as well as wit. In addition this constant repetition of one given word has the effect of gradually loosening that word from its semantic moorings; it becomes uprooted and light, although remaining the verbal focus. Something of a postmodern enactment in itself, and, in postmodernly fashion, more intrinsically indebted to the poetic tradition than is the paradelle.
Secondly, our fast moving age has nevertheless yielded a place for new poetry and its moment of pause. It's partly the way poetry gets you - you think it will be a quick gulp of literary firewater (and sometimes it is), but it engenders a stillness and a reflective aftermath. The predominance of short lyric poetry these days plays to a poetry of moments, of glimpses and single gestures played out to their full resonance on the page. So it's interesting to find out that although repetition and refrain have been extensively employed in the traditional poetic forms such as triolet, villanelle, and pantoum, the purest, most mirror-like use of these devices is found in contemporary poet Julia Copus' formal invention which she calls the 'specula': it consists of a single entire stanza being reversed, line for line, in the stanza that follows it. Some punctuation may be altered but lineation and vocabulary are an exact reflection, in reverse, of what precedes, as though the white space between the two stanzas (the form utilises just one reversal, one whole mirroring) is the gateway into a mirrored world, an alternative or complementary might-have-been made up entirely of the first world's components. Copus's best known example is 'In the Back Seat of my Mother's Car' - a searing moment of departure - and she identifies its car mirror as the focus of reflective reversal. It's a clever form, and if as postmodernism might suggest of itself there is 'nothing new to say' in the second half of each specula, there is yet semantic exploration, emotional resonance and skillful revision in the literal reversal of order of poetic lines.
Finally, a week is a long time in a media saturated age. Roddy Lumsden has recently devised a poetic form, the 'hebdomad' which invites the poet to gather information, imagery and experiences over the course of a week, then to arrange this gathering of poetic data into nine tercets of long unmetred line, allowing two thematic strands to develop in the poem. His own examples in Third Wish Wasted work very well - quirky but touching, full of tangential insight:
'I've also heard that at any given moment in London
there are more chicken wings than people
frozen or frazzling or thrown to the pigeons
('The Microwave')
There's something about letting a week's worth of life filter through the mind and condense into a poem which seems immensely satisfying - redemptive even, in such a predominantly throwaway culture as ours. The shaping spirit of imagination is alive and well and at work - or play.
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