Form: before or after?
 

In Met, Nemo posed the question:

I feel the opposite is true. Most often, I wonder if my poems are actually "about" nothing more than the form I used to write them. When I start to write a poem, I'm not sure at first what form it will be. But I decide (or the poem decides) by the end of the first line.

What do you think? What is your approach to form?

Do you feel the opposite is always true, Mary? I think hard-and-fast rules like tend toward polemical illusion.

Also, I said thought in my quote, an over-working of thought. One could go further and say that any expression whatsoever is the [over]working out of thought; that language itself is such. Do you actually think in verse forms, or do you think with or through them?

In the case of verse, as I mentioned in the thread in question, I often find that the search for rhymes, the work, yields insights into 'the thought' one might not have had made available to one in any other way.

"Most often, I wonder if my poems are actually "about" nothing more than the form I used to write them." I think that statement sounds good, but doesn't really hold water ultimately. "When I start to write a poem, I'm not sure at first what form it will be. But I decide (or the poem decides) by the end of the first line." But isn't that the beginning of that work: the decision? Finding the form in a thought is a working-over also. Certainly over-working begins with working over; and judging, in the final product, whether the over comes before or after the working is, ultimately, probably a matter of personal taste.

Nemo

This sounds a bit like quasi-aesthetic gobbledygook. A poem is made up of language and words. Words mean something. Language carries thought and feeling.

Sometimes, for example, a poet may set out from the start to compose a sonnet. At other times a poet may begin writing some lines and only after the first two or three realize that a sonnet may be in the making.

Saying that a poem is about nothing more than the form used to write it is like saying a building is only about its underlying skeletal framework. Form is a means, not an end in itself.

Perhaps this is a poem:

____________A
____________B
____________A
____________B


Richard

Hmmm. Only if you agree with I.A. Richards, and believe all that stuff about tenor and vehicle... ;)

Not that I mean to argue with you, Richard, I don't. I just think we often confuse the issues with our own words, the way I get in my own way sometimes when I'm working in the shop.

To give primacy to one or the other, to form or content or thought or feeling, I think misstates the problem. If a piece of wood arrives in my shop, I'm going to treat it differently, based on its condition, my thoughts, and whether I need to make something specific that day. There's nothing determinate in the wood, nor in me, nor in the external demands.

Maybe the only thing that's constant is habit. But I never actually have a thought or feeling. I sit down to write because that's what I do. I look for a subject, because I need one. And then I start writing about it, as is my habit. Form doesn't matter, content doesn't matter. When we get rid of the prevailing veil of flummery that always cloaks such things, it's just me, typing away. I suspect that's how it is with most people... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

I usually start with the punctuation and then fill everything else in.

David R.

Careful there, David, you'll run afoul of the Anti-Conceptualist Police.

Nemo

Conceptualist and Anti-Conceptualist, maybe. But police is over the top.

I think Roethke's famous line 'I learn by going where I have to go' is famous in almost equal parts because it's so apt, and because it's so fuzzy. Form sparks ideas sometimes, as Nemo says, that's for sure.

Ed

I just kind of assumed, when I read Mary's post, that she didn't mean "nothing" absolutely literally, that there was an implied "in essence" or "at heart" lurking in there somewhere. There's nothing ridiculous about the idea that a poem can be about its form. Isn't every poem about its form to some extent? And anyway, that's not really the main point of her post, is it? I thought she was interested in hearing how different poets choose, or arrive at, forms for their poems. And since she's talking about "formal verse" I assume she means received forms rather than the more general "form" that all poems have (correct me if I'm wrong, M).

(LOL re: your "reason", Rose.)

Yes, you are correct right down the line.

Each (received) form seems to have its own personality, leading me to write a certain way, even about a certain subject. A form isn't just its rhyme scheme, meter, stanza pattern, but the sum of all its parts, its history, origins, best examples. I feel influenced by all of it.

In my opinion, a great formal poem should strike a perfect 50/50 balance between form and content. At least that's what I strive for personally. Some of my poems have been started without form in mind. Some of them have been started with a specific idea for length / meter etc. Most are in the latter camp, but when all is said and done, if you don't have the content to fill the form, it's just an exercise. And if you don't have form to rein in the content, it's just prose.

Again, it's my opinion. No facts were harmed in its formation, I promise you.

I don't think there is any one right place to start when writing. Most of the time I start with a line or even a phrase and then gradually build on it until I have some idea of a form it could fit. Sometimes the line arrives with an idea for the form it will fit. In a few cases, I have aspired to write in a particular form and then have waited for the idea to arrive that would fit it, or have just started writing lines to see if any would work. I often have an informal tally of my current obsessions, as well as lots of scraps of paper (or a computer file) with assorted phrases that have yet to find a poem. I take the ideas gladly, no matter where they come from. Of course, they don't all lead to finished poems.

Susan

What the poem says is its center. The form is merely the suit or gown it wears to the dinner party. (The few parties I attend are always formal.) I have never written a poem which is a contemplation on its own form. Anyone who so misinterprets my work, well there's a nether hell for the likes of same.

Ed,
Here's a Bukowski for your Roethke:

When the spirit dies,
the form appears.

Bukowski is a poor poet though. ;)

Susan's take on things sounds about right. Sometimes I start with an idea that is suited to a particular form and I mine for the words after. Other times it is pure intuition and force rather than form, the force of the impulse itself determining the form - Nemo's egg.

a sonnet is complexed

villanelles are obsessed

tet lines are music

tri lines are urgent

dimeter lines are spells

In the end I am a collector of images, emotions and insights. I arrange them as they arrange me - some poets write free verse, some formal. All of us are using words as vessels.

All things are bound into form, for only through form can spirit express itself. Without form, formlessness in moot; a spiral of pointlessness--

J

Pertinax

Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.

Robert Frost

Usually poems, like speech, take shape in the doing. Whatever I start with, whatever subject or form, changes as I write or talk. I imagine it’s this way for most writers and talkers.

I understand Mary’s point about form as saying that the content of poems often doesn’t add up to much, as any paraphrase will show. Go through Petrarch’s or Shakespeare’s sonnets and paraphrase them: not much is left. The poem’s form—not just rhyme and meter, but phrasing, sentence structure, wordplay, etc.—is, in a certain (and not necessarily gobbledegooky) sense, what the poem is saying. Of course, if the content lacked passion or something that matters to people, the form wouldn't matter either.

Remembering that Yeats’s “Cuchulain Comforted” started with a journal entry, which he turned into terza rima (transforming it as he went), I searched online to find that journal entry, but it did not turn up. Instead, I found this from an article on Yeats by Eric Ormsby, referring to a book that reproduces Yeats’s working manuscripts:

What the drafts demonstrate most compellingly is that for Yeats composition did not entail the elaboration of “ideas;” indeed, all his ideas were conspicuously second-hand. Rather, the writing of a poem involved the discovery of a musical argument. The propositions of the poem to be written were inordinately clear (for at least one poem Yeats even wrote a prose summary beforehand); it was the music that remained to be discovered.

Amen, say I.

I'll see your Amen and raise you an Alleluia...

Andrew,

Eric Ormsby was one of my first mentors. At the time we were both on staff at McGill and he graciously agreed to read an early MS of mine. His eye and ear for "the real thing" in poetry is, IMHO, unmatched. Thank you for quoting that passage of his re the "musical argument". It's what I strive for as well. I also agree with Nemo and others that form, rather than being restrictive, is actually liberating.

(Just signing on so as to get the updates.)

Interesting topic. Many of my poems start out intending to be sonnets (background thought: "Maybe this would do as a Nemerov entry") and then turn out to be better as 4 quatrains or blank verse. Sometimes an idea will occur that seems better as tetrameter. But in general I stick to rather simple forms, and the first lines and the form usually come to me at the same time.

PS: All you Americans might want to go out for a wildly expensive weekend. Come Tuesday, the dollar may be worthless except in Patagonia.

I think Yeats always wrote a prose summary. He was, as Stevie Smith would have it, 'a 'foot off the ground person' and perhaps he felt these things grounded him a bit if you see what I mean.

I couldn't possibly do such a thing.

Thanks for all these fascinating responses. I was reading an interview with Eve Sedgwick today, and she said she likes to be silent in the classroom sometimes, to “give room” to her students. Then I realized that if a received form could talk, it might say to me: Here, I’ve “made room” for you. I understand you’ve been squeezed out of the world in various ways, but you are welcome here in my imaginative house. You’re free to look around the rooms, look out the windows, and work in the study. We’ll have tea and biscuits (sonnet), or petit four (triolet), or spanakopita (sapphics), or dolma (ghazal).

I know this isn’t exactly the question that started this thread. The first question is whether you can write something in one form, then re-write it in another form. I still feel that this method is less successful. Certainly, one can write reams of prose in advance of writing a poem, but when it’s time to write the poem itself, it seems best (for me! let Yeats do whatever he wants!) to approach the form with a clean slate. Then you have the best chance of hearing what the form and you have to say to each other, of learning about each other.

To revise something I said before. It isn’t “most often” that the form and I meet in thin air before the poem is written. I just find that the most thrilling way to begin a poem - not knowing anything in advance. Many times I’ve decided to sit down to write in one form or another, but as I practice different forms, the thrill of not knowing which form will appear happens more often.

Form informs informally, for me.

Cally

Hello, all--

I've only refrained from adding to this thread because there's so MUCH I'd like to say about this crucial issue.

I finally decided to offer just one very personal observation: I am amazed by how many of the ideas, stories, and images with which I work seem to demand the sonnet form. Or is it my mind that's shaped that way???? I've done some research and writing on this, but it remains mysterious and astonishing to me (and sometimes even annoying!).

On the other hand, I can't imagine rewriting any of my villanelles in another form--which leads me to believe that a big part of our job as poets is discovering the "right" form in each case.

Ah, now I've started to go on and on, as I feared I would . . .

Best,
Jean

"Form informs informally, for me"--that's one of the great pithy statements I have read of late...The "for me" is , of course, the kicker.

Dave

JK, MM, "We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms," as the Dean told us four centuries ago. Sonnets comprise less than ten percent of my ouevre, but for the leading women poets of our day, including many at this site, the figure is far higher. I often read manuscripts and first books where the ratio easily exceeds fifty percents. And this isn't a new phenomenon. Look at three generations, Espaillat, Chandler, and Dubrow.

I'm guessing your musical bent has a big influence on which forms call to you, Jean. If the converse is also true, it may help explain why I find villanelles so hard to write.

Has anyone else felt their heart thudding in tune with the drums? I don't know, but I think that's a universal feeling; so I wonder to what extent beat -- where our preferences may shift, but on a more instinctive, reflexive level -- drives our choice of forms, and even (perhaps) attitudes and topics.

Best,

Ed

Well, now that I've joined the conversation, I'm not quite ready to shut up . . .

Ed, for me the relationships between music and poetry are intriguing, challenging, and sometimes troubliesome--but yes, there must be a link between the specific types of music and poetry that appeal to me.

And yes, much of it is about the beat. It's usually clear to me that certain material needs either a more pronounced or a more subtle sort of beat--there's a poem languishing in my files that I honestly think is both thoughtful and metrically skillful, but the thought and the meter do not match, and I just haven't managed to recast the thing succesfully.

Also, while my previous post exclaimed about how often the material that interests me seems to seek the sonnet form, I should have added that I have also worked with ideas that seem to "demand" other forms. I've occasionally had the experience of totally recasting a poem-in-progress, finding the form it really wanted from the start--and then I feel like a real poet.

Best,
Jean

I have never been convinced that the parallels sometimes drawn between the formal properties of music and metrical writing – or, more generally, verse – are anything other than analogies. Of course, such analogies can be a stimulus to creativity, but so can – for instance – painting, architecture or the formal properties of a walk.

As to the original question, very rarely indeed I have written a poem in a set form or metre with the intention of writing in such a form or metre. Discovering the form, discovering the rhythm, occurs as part of the process of “discovering” the poem itself. For me, even where what I end up working towards is indeed a poem in a set form, form itself is usually much less important – much less to the fore in the process of writing – than matters such as tone, diction, the exploratory or open-ended nature of the evolving imagery and perhaps above all syntax, whose expressive subtleties I am constantly fascinated by.

Also, I very much like these well-known passages from Valéry:

The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. Degas occasionally wrote verses….But he often found great difficulty in this work….One day he said to Mallarmé: “Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I am full of ideas….” And Mallarmé answered: “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.” – “Poetry and Abstract Thought" in Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), page 63.

Poetic necessity is inseparable from material form, and the thoughts uttered or suggested by the text of a poem are by no means the unique and chief objects of its discourse – but means which combine equally with sounds, cadences, meter, and ornaments to produce and sustain a particular tension or exaltation….If I am questioned; if anyone wonders…what I “wanted to say” in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said…. – “Concerning ‘Le cimitière marin’” in Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), page 147.

Clive

Clive, I couldn't agree with you more about syntax. Syntax is the territory I feel, instinctively, is the place I need to explore. I feel it so strongly. I'm looking everywhere for help.

Love the Valery quotes. Thanks! I've always aspired to this by him: "Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit."

Cally

“Because, if the poet isn’t careful, meaning has a way of too insistently shouldering its way in, so that we readers then have the meaning but miss the experience.”

Christopher Ricks, Introduction to Austin Clarke’s Collected Poems

I agree that the impulse is to make something, not to say something, at least for me. But it's clear that not everyone feels that way. So often at Erato someone makes a suggestion for a poem, and the poet says something like, "Thanks, but that would change what the poem is saying," or "But that would make it a different poem," or "But what I was attempting to show was . . ." There's definitely a notion afoot that the goal isn't just to write a good poem, but a particular good poem that the poet has in mind.

To me this is a counterproductive attitude, since as a reader I really don't care in the slightest what a poet I never even met "wanted" to say. It's easy enough for me to just assume that the poem says what the poet set out to say. If it's a fine poem, I don't care at all if the poet is frustrated because it's not the fine poem she set out to write in the first place. Readers don't judge a poem by how successfully it satisfies the poet's pre-existing ideas or agenda.

I'm not saying that meaning doesn't play a role in the experience of a poem. Though you don't make a poem with words, but ideas, the poem you make with words can't help but expressing ideas as well since words do have a sneaky way of saying things whether you like it or not. To me, ideas are a vitally important element in a poem, just as rhyme and meter and form are vitally important elements, but just as I'm willing to change a rhyme to make the rhyme scheme come out correctly, I'm also willing to change an idea to make the 'idea scheme' come out correctly or to solve a technical or formal problem. It's all up for grabs, so long as the final poem sounds like it's saying exactly what it set out to say in precisely the words that say it best.

Roger, I broadly agree.

I take it that the point of Valéry’s “one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words”, a remark, which after all reflects his own practice as a poet, is that, in the extended act of making the poem, ideas – that is, abstract or philosophical ideas – are elements to be deployed alongside other elements of a kind I mention above and should not automatically be given the priority our prose habits would accord them. The implication is that this is why Degas is not a poet. As you say of your own practice, “I'm also willing to change an idea to make the 'idea scheme' come out correctly or to solve a technical or formal problem”. Of course, there are other ways of working. I don’t imagine Pope, when he was writing An Essay on Criticism, worked in this way: presenting his thoughts in a sharp and orderly fashion, would surely have had greater priority in the process of composition. When he was working on The Dunciad, however, the balance may have shifted rather in the direction suggested by Valéry’s remark.

You are right, too, to point out that words unavoidably bring ideas – and indeed ideas about feelings – with them. Nonetheless, poems are made from words and, for me at least, exist only in and through the medium of words, which is why, contra Degas, Valéry’s remark (in fact Mallarmé’s as reported by Valéry) is so valuable.

Clive

Roger said:
I agree with you, Roger, that this applies when a poem is finished. But until it is finished, it belongs to the writer who may have a specific goal or message or intention with it and wants to come as close as possible to that goal in the reader mind.

Once it is written and "released" to the general public, the writer has lost control, and if it is misunderstood in a way that pleases the reader, so be it. But until the launch button is pressed, the writer has the option to hone to a purposeful edge.

But why would the poet want to exercise that option? In my view, it's for reasons that ultimately have nothing to do with the satisfaction to be derived by his readers. It's a personal thing. Just as I don't actually care whether a painter's portrait of his Aunt Sally is an accurate depiction or her, since I don't know Aunt Sally, and I only care whether it is a good portrait. The painter, though, may take great pains to make sure that everyone in his family can recognize Aunt Sally.

Certainly, it's a personal thing, but it's an entirely legitimate aim. I absolutely have specific things to say in poems. Workshopping at its best recognizes that the poet may be doing things that detract from the main aim, or that there may be more than one emotion coming through and that the combination may not be effective. Good critique can help the poem make the decisions it needs. But the critic should respect that there is an original impulse that can't just be tossed without loss of desire to write the poem in the first place.

I can't call up the exact wording of the famous quotation about poems being devices for recreating in the reader a specific feeling, but that's the definition I endorse. I think we have to assume that there is a sensation the poet wants to recreate in the reader by means of the words. At least in that sense, the poem does begin in ideas.

To return to the original question about form, I do sometimes start with a specific form in mind. Sometimes it works; sometimes it's a mistake. If I start with blank verse, I can turn it to form or to free verse later, but I can't go the other way. This is just the way my head works (or fails to!).

Maryann expressed it very well.

Taking also her lead about the original question, I do it both ways. Sometimes I start with a form because I want to learn to use it well and amazing things can happen as one constructs.

Sometimes I start with a word or a phrase or an unarticulated thought and as I fiddle the form asserts itself. However I am not very good at going from one form to another once I am underway.

It is like how I cook. Sometimes I say, "well, what have I got in the fridge and on the shelves and what delicious meal can I make from that?" And sometimes I open a cookbook and read this great recipe that literally demands that I go shopping for the ingredients. We hope to dine well in either case.

And sometimes I burn the beans.

I never quite know what I want to say until I've said it. One of the points of poetry, I would have thought.