This is an amazing discussion—I am saving it for when I teach my creative writing class this fall! I loved Ed’s quote from Roethke and his own comment:
“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.”
That’s closest to the way work. Actually, when I start scribbling in my notebook, I am writing what seems like prose—no lines. And then the music starts to emerge—I literally start to hear it. (My God, I have something in common with Yeats!) And I sometimes surprise myself by writing a sonnet without intending to. As Jean said, sometimes a poem seems to demand the sonnet form—the inherent argument structure of a sonnet, perhaps, the mini-essay approach? But I don’t write many sonnets, Tim! Re your comment about women poets. Hmmm… Perhaps Shakespeare really was a woman? His sister Judith, perhaps? (!)
I’m not a musician, but poetry is music—people tell me that when I read, I move my entire body as if I’m dancing. The comments about music, drums, are all so pertinent. There’s an essential sound that’s right for each poem, I think.
However, as a fairly recent newcomer to poetry, I find it worthwhile to set myself the task of writing something in a difficult form, a Sapphic or a sestina, for example, just to see where it will take me. BUT I always start with a subject. The only Sapphic I have written started because those that I read in that form seemed to have something tender but contemplative about them. (Those that I read!) My poem ended up being about a kind gesture.
Sometimes, fairly early on in the process, I find that a poem just falls into iambic pentameter. Lately, everything is coming out in trimeter—what does that mean?! Perhaps form AND feeling come to some kind of agreement in the subconscious—and we don’t have any choice in the matter at all. Which ties in with Mary’s initial comment, and those subsequently in agreement, that there is some kind of “essence” of form in what we write.
But Tim Murphy says it best: “What the poem says is its center.” What is a poem without a center? A dead body?
And Clive is right: poems are neither simply form or substance. Why do students find them so hard to take apart? Because there’s a huge juggling act going on between language, syntax, sound (including the music of assonance, etc), substance (often the working out of quite complicated ideas), and on and on…
Tim Love’s quotes suggested to me that ideas about “form” shift from era to era, too; and that Michael Donaghy caught the complexity of the matter “… serendipity provided by negotiation with a resistant medium." I love that!
But of course, of course…. we’re all different! With different approaches to writing… There’s no such thing as the Essential Poet Person. (Is there?!)
And is there an “essential truth” in a poem? I’m not sure that’s always the case. Ellen Bryant Voigt once said to me (after a lecture she gave on syntax) that formalists like poems that end with a click (doesn’t that come from Yeats?) and free versers leave things open. Perhaps all poems leave something open? That’s something to debate, perhaps.
As for having tea and biscuits with sonnets, as Mary said…. to me, as major (English-born) tea-drinker that sounds like bliss!
But yes, I also burn beans (Thanks, Janice. Great image.)
And I now understand the blurb from Mark Irwin on my most recent chapbook: “Charlotte Innes finds nothing but form in devouring passion.” He must have been thinking of Kant. (I hope! I’ll have to ask him…)
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