Quote:
Originally posted by Rose Kelleher:
Yeah, yeah, you could make all kinds of fancy arguments about how this particular form is a good match for this particular theme, and that's why the poet chose it, but it would be BS (as are most of the justifications-in-hindsight that critics are so fond of inventing for poems written by famous poets, without extending the same courtesy to unknowns), and the truth is, the form itself is lovely. Those trimeter lines with their feminine endings, and the way they tie the stanzas together in twos, are just gorgeous. If this were written another way, it would not be the same poem.
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I agree with Rose to an extent, that is, that the form is lovely and that it works well here. I disagree, however, that justifications-in-hindsight are necessarily BS, or that it would not be valuable to attempt to articulate
why this form is effective for the subject. It's true, the reader's desire to understand the relationship between form & content is motivated first of all by a poem's success; we love the poem first, and then we want to find out why we love it. But if one agrees with, say, Don Paterson, than a poem is the art of saying something once, it's worth our time to consider why this poem needed to be said in
this way rather than some other way. It seems to me that anyone who regards form as embellishment or adornment or some superfluity superadded to content does not properly understand its function. In a poem like this, the form represents both an insight into the subject matter and the architecture which makes insight possible. I know that when I write a poem, my first goal is to find the form--more often than not, a nonce form. I don't reason it out in an abstract way beforehand, saying, for example, I need a five line stanza, with envelope-rhyme in the first four to suggest the confinement of death, followed by a fifth line, chiming with the fifth line in the stanza above or below it, to suggest something beyond the confinements of mortality as we know it, only just caught at the edge of hearing or just seen at the edge of vision. Instead, I try things, and when the form comes right, I flatter myself that I know it, submit, and write the poem; that's what I mean by form as both insight and architecture. My suspicion, then, is that finding this form was an integral part of Nemo's process of discovery also known as writing, and that critical attention to it would not be BS, but an attempt to understand the poetic sensitivities at work, and in so doing to sharpen our own. In my class, since we concentrate on form for the better part of a semester, we always ask, what about this matter lends itself to couplets? quatrains? ottava rima? nonce stanzas? etc.. I submit that these are not idle questions, but they go right to the heart of our enterprise. I myself find the relationship between form and content endlessly fascinating, and worth a lifetime's study.
Apologies for the late contribution when everybody else is writing their thank you notes. I wanted to say this earlier but didn't find the time.
Chris
Editing in to make it clear that I am not trying to make a straw man of Rose's position, or suggest that she doesn't understand the proper function of form, but merely to suggest that the kind of justification she dismisses as BS is in fact worth contemplating.
[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited December 17, 2008).]