Lecture 2:  What is Poetic Form?

 

The idea of form is a powerful one in art, and has a long history in the English language.  The Oxford English Dictionary reports a very early usage of the word in English in 1297, where it appears to signify the shape of a thing, or the configuration of its parts.  This is a sense that persists in all our understandings of form, even when we translate the idea to refer to a thing made out of words—what we might call a verbal artifact, like a poem.  We might begin by thinking of its actual visual shape on the page, and even the shape its parts make (we can tell a lot about a poem simply by looking at it, where there's text and where white space, whether things look even or uneven, and so on).  For instance, read Robert Lowell's short poem "Will Not Come Back (after Bequer)": 

Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak;
but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty
and my good fortune . . . as if they knew our names—
they'll not come back.  The thick lemony honeysuckle,
climbing from earthroot to your window,
will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;
but these . . . like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,
the tears of day—they'll not come back. . . .
Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;
but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,
as men adore God at the altar, as I love you—
don't blind yourself, you'll not be loved like that. 

There are no exact rhymes, though there are some loose slant rhymes; but the very shape of the poem recalls a sonnet, and if you count the lines, you'll see that there are fourteen.  In its physical appearance on the page, the poem takes—or impersonates—a form. 

But we don't apprehend a poem, nor its form, merely by looking, and so we have to think of poetic form as existing primarily in a verbal dimension, which means paying attention to the sounds and rhythms of words, to patterns of repetition and difference, and to meaning as well.  Form in poetry takes shape on the page, but also in the ear, in the mouth, and in our minds.  Robert Hass, in "Listening and Making," says that he is interested in listening, and "the kind of making that can come from live, attentive listening" (109).  What he implies, of course, is that in order to think about poetic form, one needs to learn to attend to the rhythms (and by extension, the sounds) of poetry.   He believes that a lively, careful attention to rhythm shows us the ways we constantly deploy rhythmic patterns to establish order, then vary those patterns to create a sense of freedom.  An established pattern is part of what we mean by form, but form also resides in the way a poet varies what we expect from its pattern.  Both things are form:  the pattern and the variance, the repetition and the deviation.  

Hass quotes the poet Ezra Pound saying of rhythm that it is "a form carved in time."  You can see from this definition how metaphorical the analogy of form is when applied to words:  nothing can literally be "carved in time"—time isn't a medium out of which one carves anything.  Nor can received poetic forms—forms like the couplet or the sonnet or the haiku—be likened in any way but a metaphorical one to physical forms, the forms of painting or sculpture or even the things of this world—animals or human beings, stones, rivers, tides . . . and yet we do apprehend the play between pattern and variation in poems, visually at first, perhaps, but more profoundly in its verbal textures, patterns, and surprises.  Moreover, as Hass is careful to point out, even in the most formal poems—by which term we mean "the most conventional, the most highly regulated in its adherence to a prescribed form"—make the forms their own by their variance from them.  As Hass says of a few lines from Yeats, "it seems clear that the main function of the meter is to secure the lulling sound of the first line and a half."  In other words, Yeats makes use of a meter—one of the markers of poetic form—but largely to create an impression of order and regularity, an impression which he can use as he works his own rhythms over and even against that regular pattern.  Again from Hass:  "The line, when a poem is alive in its sound, measures:  it is a proposal about listening."  This, to me, means that the poet uses pattern—the regularities of form—to persuade us to hear the poem in a particular way; that way, even when the line deviates from the regular pattern, we still hear that regular pattern:  it's what the previous lines have urged us to expect. 

Formal expectations, of course, can seem constraining when you're apprenticing yourself to poetry.  Eavan Boland talks about this feeling as she is learning to write:

"I can still see myself, tapping my little finger on the tablecloth
and counting back in drum taps toward my thumb.  I can see myself trying
to judge what a trochee with its long, harsh crowlike noise might look
like at the start of one of my poem.  I think about how to compensate for
its dissonance with nursery rhyme foot stamps.  Not all of it seems like
schoolwork.  Occasionally I see a glitter of movement, like the top edge
of a waterfall in the distance.  But mostly it seems hard, useless, at a tangent
from what I really want to express in poetry." 

She has to learn, as does every poet, the lesson of form, which is that our own lines, stanzas, poems simultaneously submit to the form and resist it: 

Without realizing it, I have come upon one of the shaping formal energies:  the relation of the voice to the line.  That simple discover begins to dissolve all the borrowed voices of my apprenticeship.  I begin to see how it would be to be able to work with the line by working against it, pushing the music of dailyness against the customary shapes of the centuries.  Suddenly I see how these contrary forces make language plastic.  And how exciting it is to find that a poetic language will liberate and not constrain. 

We see this in Lowell's poem, which I quoted above.  Its shape is that of a sonnet—even its logic is sonnet-like (we'll talk about sonnets in a later lesson), in that its examples, one after the other, accumulate to a final crescendo—"Don't blind yourself, you'll not be loved like that"—except that in a traditional sonnet, say one written by Shakespeare, there'd be three examples, each precisely a quatrain long, concluded with a couplet. Lowell's poem, on the other hand, has three examples, but they each spill a half line over into the next quatrain, and so at the end, he only has one line to sew it all up, just one devastating line.  As Boland would say, he pushes his own daily, slightly overheated, music against a centuries-old shape, simultaneously referring to that form and making it serve his own needs.

This is what I hope this class will do:  show you some of the statements that different poetic forms have allowed, and show you also that each poet makes the form his or her own—adds to it, adapts it, wrecks or dismantles it, argues against it.  Form makes poetry possible, but innovation makes poetry alive.  Hass puts it in a succinct way: "A poetry that makes fresh and resilient forms extends the possibilities of being alive." 

Here are the two poems—they were both published in Ploughshares (ed. Campbell McGrath).

Cynie Cory

Western Saddle, I

 set out across the fields anonymous,
drawn inward like a sea of dusk beneath
the cribbed retreat of sun.  Remember us
against the vinyl in that summer like an apocalypse
across the sheetless rising chipped repeat
of artificial light of grocery lists
wrung.  Last night and last night's last night you cheat
the snow, my feet grow old, bark-ripped, baroque.
I search for your clothes in a city I
don't know.  The architecture's broken, blown.
You won't go home you won't refuse, I cry 

out above the hierarchy of tongues.
We forget to run.  I believe we're hung. 

Barbara Hamby, "My Translation"

 

I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay,
into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want
more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation,
more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song,
more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods.
I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian,
into pale-blue Visigoth vernacular, because the bloody earth
is not one color, one stripe, one smooth mulatto
café con leche cream-colored dream, no rumba, no cha-cha,
no cheek-to-cheek tango through the Argentinean
midnight stream, but a hodgepodge of rival factions
fighting over the borders of nothing.  I am translating
the world into blue, azure, cerulean, because there is a sky
beneath us as there is a sea above.  Oh, the fish soar
like dragonflies through empyrean clouds; the mockingbird
swims through the ocean like a man-of-war.  I am
translating the heavens into Gutenberg, into Bodoni,
into offset digital karmic Palatino, every "T" a crucifix
on the shrine of my lexicographic longing.  I am reading
the archaic language of birches, frangipani pidgin
of monsoon, Bali palm dialect of endless summer.  I am
translating the sky into bulls, swans, gold dust,
for a god is filled with such power that mortal husbands
quiver in the shadow of his furious lust,
the bliss-driven engine of his thrumming mythopoesis.
I am calling the world to take off its veils of fog
and soot, shed its overcoat of factories, highways,
skyscrapers, lay down its rocks, roots, rivers,
and lie naked in my naked arms, for I am translating
the earth and all its dominions into desire,
into flayed skin screaming abandon, all tongue, mouth,
flesh-drunk erotic demonology, fiery seraphim
mating with mortals, wings incinerated in the white heat
of love, Apollo turning Daphne into marble, into tree
roots, into chlorophyll, scent of cut grass, a baby's mouth
sweet with milk, because this is my Cultural Revolution,
my Mao Tse-tung, my Chou En-lai, my attempt to go
without sin, to have it my way no matter what, for I am
the way, the truth, the light, third empress of the seventh
dynasty, Madame Chiang, Madame Nhu, Madame X,
Madame Three Quarters of the Left Brain, poster girl
of a million GIs, Betty Grable to you, Jane Russell,
all gams, breasts, blond smiles, brunette tribulation,
Betty and Veronica, the last stop before Kiss-and-Tell,
Texas, Fourth Shepherdess of confabulation, Calliope's
stepdaughter, Erato's girl, it's all Greek to me,
for I am translating the world as if it were a bomb, a thief,
a book.  Chapter One:  the noun of my mother's womb,
verb of birth, adjectives of blood, screams, fluorescence.
Chapter Two:  explosions of words growing into sentences,
arms, legs, tentacles.  Chapter Three:  voyages to unheard-of
territories—here be monsters, two-mile waterfalls, portals
to the underworld.  Chapter Four:  returns, for in all of us
there's an Odysseus ready to misunderstand the sky
and its garbled signs, rumble-thunder theater of missed cues,
because this is our adventure, our calling, our do-or-die
mission, translating the world into the body's bright lie.

 

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