I have some unacademized opinions, yes. I don't think that Dionysius of Halicarnassus left out any lines to make us squint, and I don't think strophic structure (in the usual sense of repeated rhythmic templates) that Dionysius was writing about actually existed, that is, outside of possible papyrus breaks. (Simonides was, I think, probably one of the first early poets to write and revise.) Dionyius was a man of his age, an age that expected a certain kind of writing: metrics, strophes, all that really good stuff. To say out loud that it wasn't there wouldn't do. So Dionysius fudged.

Simonides was an unusually astute man: he invented a number of letters for the Greek alphabet, he wanted to be be actually paid for his work, and what remains of his work sometimes demonstrates extraordinary punch (ex: "Go tell the Spartans..."). He seems to have been widely informed on a lot of things, and might even have known of the "non-metrical" psalmaic poetry current among the Jews, and possibly of some of the motifs associated with that. In any case, this fragment is almost unique in its amorphous quality apart from some sections of tragic dramatic writing, and it demonstrates (for me) two things.

One is that a powerful and moving representation of deeply felt emotion (Danae's feelings as she and her semi-divine son drift in their sealed casket abandoned by her father in the storm at sea) can generate a poetry that can transcend metrics, at least occasionally and perhaps briefly. This has real pathos.

By its failing to be widely imitated, it also demonstrates that for the ancients how hard it was (is?) to find sufficiently convincing moments and how difficult to put them into words.

A third thing I feel isn't related to the fragment at all. That is that how little of modern "free verse" has the punch of this fragment.

Chris, Kirby-Smith actually studied with Winters, though he doesn't consider himself a disciple (but I think the influence is there).

I hope that the implicit relationship between "Organic Form" and my intrusions on the unstructured fragment by the very early Greek poet Simonides wasn't too obscure. If so, I apologize.

Just now, I'm wading into Dirk Obbink's volume on 'Philodemus and Poetry', which has diverse essays by authors staring at the remains of burnt scrolls in Greek from Piso's Herculaneum library, especially those of Philodemus. Philodemus was a great formal poet of short works who settled in Italy and was extremely likely to have been known by Vergil (Horace has fun with some of his lines). He was also a considerable Epicurean philosopher and theorist of literature. It appear that Philodemus did not believe it was possible to divorce form from content. The texts are often in perilous shape and full of holes made by Vesuvius etc., but if I find anything that seems worth while and relevant, I'll tack it on here or somewhere.

'The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form.'

What I want to know is how you actually write a poem according to this precept? The poem 'develops itself from within'. How? How do you start? I start a poem with a line or two that popped into my head. Where did they pop from? Let's leave that aside. But how does Coleridge go at it. Does he meditate? Fall into a trance like the guy in Kubla Khan. He says that the lines of Kubla Khan came to him in a dream? Has any one of you found a poem coming in this way. Did you, if you did, dream it all at once, or in bits.

Is Coleridge's search for organic form the reason why he didn't write much poetry though reams and reams of prose?

It seems to me that this sort of thing is great for producing criticism but not so great for producing poems. It seems to me that Charles Olsen is the Jackson Pollock of poetry. Throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

Here's Whitman's redaction of Emerson:

The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniformity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

I came across this quote today, from Helen Vendler’s overall insightful review of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry ( New Republic, January 11, 2012):

I don’t believe this for a minute (even in terms of modern rationalistic philosophy, Kant debunked such naïve solipsism more than two centuries ago), and I can’t imagine why a self-made reality could matter to anybody else. But the Vendler quote seems to me relevant to the subject of organic form.

It made me think of the lines “as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos,” from a poem that’s been running through my head on and off since this thread started: Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” which I think of as a sort of Platonist or Hermetic take on Olson’s poetics. I realize this poem is not in the taste zone of many Sphereans, but it’s a poem I learned by heart the first time I read it. I still love it. It seemed and seems to me an inspired glimpse at the archetypal form at play beneath the surface of language (similar to the“deep structure” Noam Chomsky writes about).

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

—Robert Duncan

Andrew,

Not entirely just for fun, I’ll match your Kantian transcendental idealism and raise you a Schopenhauer and a Wittgenstein:

The world is my idea. – Schopenhauer

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. – Wittgenstein

I’m not disputing the law of causality or denying the reality of space-time. However, I do believe that, in what matters to an emotional creature such as man (and there are no values, in the axiological sense, without emotions), the world is indeed very much a product of mind – that is to say, of brain and heart. I’d submit that a major objective of religion is to change this reality; and a purpose of art can be to express, even to evoke, a changed world.

I don’t have anything very intelligent to contribute to the organic form discussion; I confess the phrase bemuses me. The limit case, for me is Dickinson, who managed to express just about everything important about human existence, so nearly perfectly, with so little variation in form. Of course, she was a genius.

And there you go: I think I have just convinced myself that that mere mortals like me should pay more attention to form, and perhaps even try to find organic form…

M

Andrew, in the 2nd millenium I remember responding immediately to Duncan's poem as well. I felt a resonance much more than from most of his others, and for a while this poem was one of those loosely written things that seduced me into a long period of writing formless work, a period I now largely regret! Yet the impact is still there, and while I'd prefer it to be more like one of my own incredibly over-determined and Swiss music box roller coaster formal poems that seem to me to touch exactly the same source, I acknowledge his skill.

What I think is happening here is much less Chomskyish (in his to me fairly dubious linguistic approach), than it might be Jungian as in archetype. (And most of that's pretty dubious to me too!)

If you concentrate on Duncan's central visual imagery, you'll find the kind of material young children can dream about and then recite innocently at the breakfast table, unaware of the loaded structure.

I attempted to order Duncan's autobiography the other day--well, not autobiography exactly, and I can't remember what it's called. Anyway, the book came, lovely cover, large, thick, imposing volume, which when I opened it turned out to be nothing Duncan wrote but a Dansk-Norsk / English 'Ordbuch' (if I'm getting the word right)--a dictionary, for a language I don't and will never read or speak. F.

Chris

Greek Architecture

Not magnitude, not lavishness,
But Form--the Site;
Not innovating wilfulness,
But reverence for the Archetype.

- Herman Melville