[Richard Wakefield]

There has been discussion on one of the threads about whether the arbitrary nature of poetic forms necessarily means we can be -- or should be -- capricious with them. Great writers often take liberties with form and get away with them because the result works in some unexpected way, and then whole legions of lesser writers take up the new form in poems for which it is ill suited. But maybe after a form, however arbitrary, is around for a while it becomes engrained. The brain's cognitive functions seem to be malleable, able to adapt to various ways of doing things, but once adapted they resist change. So a form that was perhaps someone's nonce choice becomes part of our way of knowing, maybe even wired into our neurology. Certainly any native speaker of English who learns German has a hard time ever feeling quite right about stringing all the verbs at the ends of sentences.
In the current New York Review of Books the poet and critic Brad Leithauser in reviewing a new collection of sonnets suggests that a 4/3 ratio, like the ratio of octet to sestet or of the lines of a ballad (tetrameter/trimeter), has become intrinsically pleasing to us simply by long use.
I suspect that breaking out of those familiar forms can seem deliciously daring, seemingly putting us in the company of the great innovators. Trouble is, most of us don't have anything quite so astonishing to say that it justifies an assault on others' thinking apparatus. In fact, a lot of the time -- for me, at least -- what I have to say gains something by subtly echoing the many generations of writers and readers who have gone before me.

So, what are the advantages -- I mean the communicative advantages, the expressive advantages -- of adhering to abritrary forms or of deliberately smashing them? (Never mind for now the writers who simply haven't read enough to know the difference!)
Richard

[MacArthur]

Richard,
I'm curious what you mean by departing from form. There are, broadly, two ways:

for example, a sonnet (that's mostly what we're talking about, right?)
It could have a novel rhyme-scheme...although, probably not by now-- the logical possibilities within 14 lines are exhausted. Or it could be off IP and off-rhyme. The former has made for many pleasant suprises...the latter, almost none. Classic in the "with-all-this-horse-s#$t-there's-gotta-be-a-Unicorn-someplace!" category is the Tetrameter sonnet-- Shakespeare couldn't make it convincing.

Stanzas can accomodate any meter, and absorb off-rhyme pretty well. Some discrete forms give a choice of meters...although, I suspect strongly some choices are better than others. But sonnets...nah!

(So?...I could be wrong.)

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited April 13, 2001).]

[ChrisW]

I think I've been on both sides of this in recent threads. (In LOL's thread on the poetry board, I defend the possibility of writing something very close to a Shakespearean sonnet but varying it somewhat -- in the Fenton on Larkin thread here, I point out the conventionality of meter does not show that it can be arbitarily defied.
On the one hand it's bad to let certain traditions die because there may be nothing to replace them. But the surest way to kill a tradition is to accept it blindly, never permit departures from the letter of the law simply on the grounds that "that is not a sonnet" or whatever.
And I would rather not say that only geniuses may depart from form -- I'd rather ask "does the departure work here?" whether by good luck or from skill (otherwise who will ever dare break the rules even when they have a good reason?).

Here's an example of the value of tradition in a poet's departure from that tradition:

Here war is harmless like a monument:
A telephone is talking to a man;
Flags on a map declare that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
Who can be lost and are, who miss their wives
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

Yet ideas can be true, although men die:
For we have seen a myriad faces
Ecstatic from one lie,

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now.
Nanking. Dachau.

The expectation of a pentameter line in the sonnet form makes the final line more powerful by making those four syllables speak volumes.
This breaking of the rules relies on our knowledge of the rules to help us hear more than is directly said by the poet. This is how tradition helps us achieve greater compression than one can have without it.
But if Auden were some new poet without an established name, I'd still want to defend him against those who say "but this isn't a sonnet" -- such worship of the letter of the law is what kills its spirit -- the tradition behind it.

All this leaves open the question of what one does once the tradition itself is smashed (once few poeple read sonnets with any understanding of them as sonnets) -- it isn't at all easy to revive a tradition.
Well, hope you don't mind my weighing in, though I might count as one of those writers Richard refers to parenthetically above.
--Chris

[SteveWal]

The Auden sonnet is terrific (is it Auden? I wasn't clear) and works because it departs from the tradition just enough. It wouldn't work in free verse, and it wouldn't work if it were a "proper" sonnet. It works because your expectations are deliberately frustrated. It doesn't satisfy the urge for order - because in some sense, that's its subject - that maybe the urge for order has led to a disaster.

There is something about "formal" poetry that can lead to a kind of comfortable sitting back in your armchair kind of feeling - because it is so familiar. It doesn't have to - Tony Harrison, here in England, has written some very uncomfortable poetry - but it can be terribly safe.

So maybe that's why poets do this kind of thing - they want to mess with our heads. An awful lot of free verse is actually as "comfortable" in its way as a lot of nice sonnets about squirrels on the lawn. But if you want to shake people up a bit, you probably need to live a little closer to the edge yourself.

------------------
Steve Waling

[Richard Wakefield]

Mac: I had in mind pretty much any traditional form, even including something as basic as having a fixed number of feet in each line, but I'm glad my lack of clarity led Chris to post that fine departure from the sonnet form. I have a little poem somewhere about building a load of hay up, up , up, until the jouncing of the truck nearly brings it all down; the poem is iambic pentameter until the final two lines, which are hexameters -- probably way, way too clever, but at least an attempt to use a departure from form (or a variation, I guess) for expressive purpose. As has been rightly pointed out, the stunt won't work if the reader isn't at least somewhat sensitive to form in the first place. I have a poem coming out soon in a fairly respectable journal, the editor obviously a good reader of poetry in lots of important ways. However, he asked for one change that resulted in ending up with a tetrameter line in a poem of thirty-two lines of iambic pentameter. I suggested an alternative change that would have preserved the meter, and he replied that the short line didn't affect his reading of the poem, so why fuss? Well, it would be easy to say that he's an example of the fall of western civilization, but in fact he's actually doing a lot to promote poetry, and I know from my reading of his journal that he's a good editor. But I fear that in this one (perhaps small) way he has lost his sensitivity to an important expressive element of poetry.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

Juster once posted a little poem of mine here in which I imagined myself being consigned to the antechamber of Hades with the pagan poets. It was a trimeter poem in which I inserted a tetrameter:
"and toil until the end of time
to learn Latin and Greek."
The expressive purpose is obvious, even funny, but Tim Steele warned me: "I'm sure many things will be forgiven you by the pagan poets, but a metrical liberty? I wouldn't chance it!" Greg Williamson weighed in with the opposite advice, and I decided to listen to Greg.

[graywyvern]

poetry is not well served by any revival which treats its formulas as sacred cows. instead, we should go back to the early renaissance when there was a set of formal possibilities but very few fixed forms. then, we need to cultivate a sensitivity to what the unfolding meaning of the poem requires for its best expression. (i don't know how many sonnets i've seen murder an idea that would have made a perfectly good 7- or 17-line poem.) finally, we need to learn to keep an open mind about what constitutes syllabic-accentual meter. meter is a music. it's not about iamb-chopping. very few great poems are at all "regular". and syllables in english are far from being divisible into uniform sets of interchangeable binary ones & zeros, in any context that takes into account the living voice of the speaker.

[ChrisW]

Originally posted by SteveWal:
The Auden sonnet is terrific (is it Auden? I wasn't clear) and works because it departs from the tradition just enough...
There is something about "formal" poetry that can lead to a kind of comfortable sitting back in your armchair kind of feeling - because it is so familiar. It doesn't have to - Tony Harrison, here in England, has written some very uncomfortable poetry - but it can be terribly safe.

Sorry, yes it is Auden -- one of the "Sonnets from China" -- will try to remember to look up which number it is and edit this message to reflect that information.

On your second paragraph, now that it is not brand new, and has really come to dominate at least the American poetry scene, free verse is surely at least as likely to seem "comfortable". Much free verse I've read seems rather prosy and unmemorable -- not all of it, of course.
By now free verse is more familiar to many readers than is metrical verse. I'm not sure why free verse would automatically take more risks. 3rd rate poets of either school will be imitative -- and one takes few risks in imitating someone else, no matter how many risks that original person took.
I'm inclined to think that a comfortable but competent sonnet will be somewhat more memorable than a comfortable but competent bit of free verse.

[Julie]

Originally posted by ChrisW:
I'm inclined to think that a comfortable but competent sonnet will be somewhat more memorable than a comfortable but competent bit of free verse.

Well, if by "memorable" you mean "able to be recited from memory," then sonnets have a definite advantage, since they have features like meter and rhyme to aid memory.

If you mean "I remember having read a poem once that did X" then I don't think either form has an advantage.

Julie

[ChrisW]

I didn't just mean "able to be recited from memory". I was thinking of cases where one or two lines from an otherwise pedestrian poem stick with you -- where, not the whole poem but some fugitive fragment, pops up at odd moments in your memory. Meter and rhyme are a little more likely to produce such memorable fragments.

Of course, I have the latest Pillsbury commercial running through my head all the time because they've found one of those tunes that lodges in your head and won't get out (catchy tunes are the brain's equivalent of a computer virus).
Some lines of verse might be memorable in that annoying way -- and their memorableness might not be such a good thing. (Still, if you believe in your message, why not take advantage of meter and rhyme to make it stick better in memory?)

If you press me I can give up any claim that metrical verse has any advantage over non-metrical without much regret.
I mainly wanted to question why we should assume that free verse (i.e., non-metrical verse) would be any less "safe" than metrical verse.
If either one is safer in 2001, it is surely non-metrical verse -- because many people still assume that metrical verse is permanently old-hat and has been forever superseded.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 16, 2001).]