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.