[Clive Watkins]

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

[Cally Conan-Davies]

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

[Mary Meriam]

“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

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Clive Watkins]

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

[Janice D. Soderling]

Roger said:

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.

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

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.

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!).

[Janice D. Soderling]

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.

[John Whitworth]

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