[Chris Childers]

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.

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).]

[Tim Murphy]

Wilbur has talked about this too, Chris and Rose. More likely than not, he is finding a nonce form in the course of constructing the first stanza. Not a form that will fit where he wants the poem to go, but a form that will help him FIND where the poem wants to go. The same is true for me. First stanza? I'm just catching a tune. But I'd like to hear Nemo discuss this phenomenon in this particular poem. These tag lines whose rhymes bridge stanzas and are pretty far apart, strike me as a corollary to the "a meter-making argument." Aren't they the "matter-making integuments" of this poem?

[R. Nemo Hill]

I think Rose has been misunderstood here, as I think she would pretty much agree with Chris's argument about the search for a form being part and parcel of the evolution and integrity of the poem itself: "If this were written in another way, it would not be the same poem." I think her BS Detector creeps in with after-the-fact justifications, in the case of already famous poems: theories which posit the divine formal forethought of canonized poets, rather than maps which chart the blind formal groping of struggling artists.

Searching for a companionable form in the first stanza ("catching a tune" as Tim writes) is exactly how this (like most of my poems) was written. The process is anything but rational. This is often followed by a moment of panic somewhere later in the poem when I regret having locked myself in. And in rare occasions a change may then occur if I discover a more reliable path toward where the poem and its form have now convinced me I must go. In this particular case those tag lines were a partial recanting, a sort of fork in the road that I chose once I was confident I could sustain their detour throughout. It is rare that I successfully choose a form for a given poem beforehand, for instance a sonnet; and in such cases it is usually the subject matter that decrees some set form and the poem is often almost fully outlined (though not "colored in") in my head beforehand. In cases where a discovered form works well, however, I will often call upon it in another instance as I did with this one in my poem "Something Less." What strikes me now about the distantly separated rhymes in this form is how satisfying their echo is to me; whereas I confess that a classic abba form (in a sonnet for instance) always leaves my Rhyme Ear vaguely frustrated.

Nemo



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited December 18, 2008).]

[Chris Childers]

What I would say about the effect of this form with this matter is what I already nestled away in my previous post: there is both a sense of confinement in the envelope rhymes (abba), which seems to me to correspond to the poem's concern with mortality (i.e., the confinement of a life-span), as the parents sputter on the speaker, as well as a sense of something (in the c rhymes) slipping that confinement--the spirit of the dying parents, which evaporates; the voice of the living son, which continues. The c lines could rhyme or not; that they do is somehow comforting, even mystical.

My suspicion is that Rose would call that "justification" BS, even though it's done for unknown Nemo rather than well-known George Herbert. But it's my reading, and it's what I would talk about if I were to teach this poem. Which isn't to say that I think Nemo planned it all like that beforehand, & in this way, maybe, I could dodge Rose's disagreement, since I wouldn't presume to legislate Nemo's intention, only to express the intellectual, as well as musical, pleasure provided by the choice of form in this poem*. However it happened in the drafting process, I think those distant c rhymes were a great insight--in some way, are the insight embodied in the poem. I guess I saw Rose as dismissing a type of formal analysis in which I frequently engage, and not just of Great Dead Poets either (certainly of Wilbur!). Of this poem, I'll go on thinking what I wrote in the above paragraph, until somebody offers a more convincing or more appealing reading of the form.

*I should say that whether the poet "planned it out beforehand" or whether the form was discovered in the process of writing strikes me as immaterial to critical discussion of it; likewise, whether the impulse was merely musical or whether the poet would have copped to a more elaborate justification. But we should be able both to appreciate the form and attempt to articulate its effect--otherwise, my whole approach is wrong, which I don't think.

Chris

[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited December 18, 2008).]

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

What an interesting coda to the "Deck the Halls" event this is! I agree that it's valid to investigate what it is that makes a certain form right for a specific poem, even though I can't always answer that question even about my own poems, let alone anyone else's. I can always say why a form "feels" right, but not how it was chosen. I'm not a very calculating writer--the calculation comes later, with the revisions--because when the poem begins to form in my head it seems to bring all its paraphernalia with it, and I do more internal listening than anything else.

That doesn't mean I'm not doing the choosing, of course: I'm the only one in the room, after all. But I'm not fully aware of how I'm doing it, and can only guess, afterward, at what I was half-thinking when I settled on this or that pattern. Is it kosher to advance theories afterward as to those unconscious processes? Well, why not, so long as they don't spin out into sci-fi or harden to certainties?

[Janet Kenny]

It's interesting that Nemo wrote these words about a chosen form when writing:
This is often followed by a moment of panic somewhere later in the poem when I regret having locked myself in.

Absolutely. And then, if it's a complex form and one is too far gone to reverse gear one has to continue. Often at this point a mood change happens and the formal restrictions can deepen the exploration.

I never read to my parents Nemo but because my character is so dependent upon what they gave me in one sense I am always reading to my parents. That is how I read your poem.
Janet