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Alex: You talk about form and content as if they’re
two different things, not just two aspects of the poem, which is the way
most people talk about them.
Beth: In my mind, form and content are radically different entities.
Form represents, or manifests, content. The content, the meaning, of a
poem is always greater than the sum of the poem’s expressive formal
parts. Yet it can be conveyed only through form. Just like in this life
my material being, my persona, this me that most people
"know," is my form, a very limited form, that expresses my
content, which I see as my spirit, which is in exile here but still
transcends the material. Many people today don’t believe in the
spirit, so for them I guess content would be the same as form. For them
a poem would be communication, but for me, an interaction with a great
poem, as with a high quality person, is a "form" of communion.
Alex: So for you, form should express some meaningful content.
Beth: Absolutely. And it’s all magic, really, that fusion of form
and content.
Alex: Is the content what gives a poem its greatness?
Beth: It’s a matter of integrity, not just in the moral sense, but
in the sense that we say that a solidly built building has integrity. If
a poem or body of poetry doesn’t have integrity, doesn’t have
anything solid to say or give to future generations, it will collapse
under the weight of time. Not that a poem can’t be written purely for
the sake of playfulness. All artistic expression is at bottom a form of
play. But it’s purposeful play. If there’s nothing purposeful, if
the poet has nothing meaningful to say, if there’s nothing there that
won’t eventually be tossed aside as boring, what’s the point? Being
truly creative is pushing the edge beyond the given. And the amazing
thing about true greatness is that its edge stays sharp forever.
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Whitman.... They understood the magical
interplay of high form and high content. Of course there is the
apprenticeship period, when even great poets are learning their craft,
and that involves emulation. But I think for some poets it never occurs
to them that it’s time to start working on their content. In art as in
life.
Alex: You mentioned the fusion of form and content being magic.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by magic?
Beth: It’s just that I think that a truly great poem transcends
even the poet’s conscious intentions.
Alex: So it comes from the unconscious?
Beth: Partly. But truthfully I think it’s even deeper than that.
Spiritual — it’s hard to say that, so many people would roll their
eyes at that — but that’s what I think. Many people who should know
better say that Aristotle’s notion of representation means mere
copying, and that is the opposite of what he meant. For him,
representation expressed, or manifested, the essence of the person, or
whatever. The fragment of the Poetics we have is the section on tragedy,
so character was what he was talking about there — the hero, who was
exactly ourselves, our deeper, in a sense our potential selves, in
being, as he put it, greater than ourselves. In other works he talks
about representation in art. He does not mean mere copying. For him
representation conveys de anima, the soul, the essence of the person or
thing or all of us collectively, not just the exterior "form."
Alex: I know you have alot of publishing credits, mostly free
verse poems. What percentage of what you have published are formal
poems? Have any of the major literary magazines accepted some of your
formal poetry?
Beth: Besides the Literary Review — there was a formal
poem, a nonce form, a couple years ago in 13th Moon, a journal I
very much respect, and the San Francisco State faculty journal, Magazine,
published I guess my first formal poem, called "Love," a
very intense sonnet about rape, and then Exquisite Corpse
published a sonnet that is a radical re-vision of John Donne’s poem,
"Batter
My Heart" — mine called "Battery," about just that. I had a
sonnet crown published in Mobius. And many years ago, some haiku
here and there. And now that I think of it, I won some contest for a
couple sonnets when I was an undergraduate. Those no longer exist. I can’t
think of any others.
Alex: Even though journals say they’re open to that, formal seems
to be much more difficult to publish.
Beth: It has been. But formal poetry is making a comeback. New
formalism is something that most of the best poets are at least dabbling
in.
Alex: I look at the Hudson Review and some of the other
highly respected journals like Poetry, and there seem to be more
formal poems these last few years. When you’re writing formal poems,
does it change your voice, is there a total shift in attitude or stance
or writing style?
Beth: I wouldn’t say a total shift. I would say a subtle shift,
and part of it’s just determined by the form itself, just fitting
everything together. A formal poem has an inherent loftiness to it, it
does have an elevated sense to it just because it’s so strict. The
repetition, rhyme, meter, the regularity of it does elevate the tone of
it a bit even if we don’t intend that to happen. When you’re writing
any poem it’s a deliberate process, you’re looking at every word
very closely, but with a formal poem you’re also looking at how
everything has to fit into the form itself. You’re looking at the
words deliberately to convey the meaning you’re going for, and you’re
also more limited, and that limitation shifts your attention. So you’re
looking with two different levels of deliberateness, the deliberateness
of conveying the meaning through the words and images themselves, and
then with the deliberateness of fitting that into the form itself, so it’s
doubly deliberate.
Alex: It’s almost a type of compression when you’re writing the
poem, because you have an idea and you have to fit it into the form. You’re
pouring all your meaning into this container and you can only have so
much inside.
Beth: And sometimes you’re groping for the right word, and you’re
like, there is no single syllable word that is going to work, I need
this word that is a two syllable word, so I’m going to have to
rearrange things a little to make that word fit, and you compress it and
you start to change things, so yes, the form forces you — or I would
put it more positively — allows you to look at things a little more
closely than you would have before, and I think that can only be very
positive. I love the whole process.
Alex: It’s true that your work becomes alot more deliberate,
because you really have to pick just the right word to fit within the
meter and the rhyme scheme and everything else.
Beth: And when you put the wrong word in there, it sticks out like a
sore thumb.
Alex: When you’re writing and you have a certain idea for a
sonnet, do you find yourself becoming very selective about what you fit
into the poem? Do you end up leaving good things out?
Beth: I’ll tell you my process for writing a sonnet on an art
work, because I did alot of those. I love that, I wish I had six weeks
to do nothing but write poems inspired by art works. Or better yet, six
years. One way that I went about it was that I looked at a picture of
the painting or sculpture and I just typed in at the top of the page
what I actually saw that was important and ideas that came to me and
twists on the usual interpretation of those works, and I put it all
running together at the top of the page. And then I divided it so that
it began to be distributed according to the weight of the ideas — here’s
an idea that should take up a whole line, and here’s an idea that can
be antecedent to another idea or image, but I can pack a little bit more
in with that one... In other words, I try to balance the poem line by
line, so each line has about the same amount of weight, and I’d
arrange things so there was a logical flow. I’d keep the book open on
my lap or on the table next to me so I could keep looking at it, and
other things would come out, the picture just came alive, and it’s a
very fast process, or feels fast, as poetry writing goes, I just kick
into this flow and I’m just sucking out all I can suck out from the
picture and splurting it back on the page — it’s a rush, a high. And
during this process I’m compressing, but I try not to ever leave out
anything that’s good, that has a certain amount of weight, I will find
a way to fit it in there, so I’m also weighing each bit of
information, each image, each nuance of each image and each idea. And
then there are some things that as soon as I start working with them I
know are too weak to be with everything else, and then I just cut all
that out right away — to have a good healthy poem you just have to be
willing to prune out all that scraggly wood. That’s basically how I
worked on the art sonnets. It’s a whole different process than free
verse, when things are coming to you and you’re arranging them, there’s
not the pressure to weigh things quite so much, it just flows out.
Alex: You keep everything in free verse. You don’t have incentive
to take out things that are weak.
Beth: You can take out things that are weak, but you’re not
thinking about it in the same way.
Alex: You’re not forced to do it.
Beth: It’s not as essential. There’s a necessity to going
through and making every word matter, and fit, in formal poems. You
should look at every word in a free verse poem, and I do look at every
word, but you can go off on a tangent and that’s ok, because you have
an infinite field to work in, you could write an epic if you wanted. But
if you write a sonnet, you’ve got 14 lines, you’ve got 10 syllables
per line, and if it’s strict, the accent falls on every even number
syllable, and there is a very regular rhyme scheme, and there are
definite places for turns, which vary according to the type of sonnet,
and that’s it.
Alex: The good habits that you get from writing formal poems, do
they generally translate over into free verse?
Beth: Absolutely. And I think you develop a sense of rhythm that you
don’t necessarily get when you’re doing only free verse. There is a
rhythm to free verse, and it can be very poetic, but I think your ear
becomes more attuned to closely listening to the musical undertones of
poetry when you write formal verse.
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