two peas

The avant-garde has its own formalism.

patterns and pairs

A poetry that was a matter of pattern and pairings.

forever forms

You can see a strange kind of Neoplatonism propounded by certain crackpot defenders of poetic forms. They have come to believe that certain poetic forms are ideal forms, immutable and outside of time.

late to the party

Woe’s me—born just a little too late for the crest of formal poetry that rose in the 1950s, so that my stuff didn’t begin to appear till the great stampede out of traditional form was on. So I came to the poetry scene like some guest who shows up just when the party is ending, the punchbowl drained, the streamers all tromped to the floor.

—X. J. Kennedy, notebook entry from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts form Notebooks of Contemporary American Poets (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall and David Weiss.

end stop line

Elegy for the formalist: He gave us his last full measure.

reading report

I heard the poet A.E. Stallings read today. It was the 54th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program reading. Her work was weaker than all the past readers I’ve heard (going back over a decade). She has a strong background in the Classics (Greek & Latin) but it seems wasted when it comes to her poetry. Stallings read a ‘limerick sequence’ (if you could believe someone would think writing one was a good idea) based on various mythic figures and tales…wow, that was a painful experience to hear. I did like one poem based on the Minotaur myth, wherein the Minotaur isn't slayed by Theseus, but dies trapped below earth after an earthquake has collapsed the structures above his labyrinth.

Stallings is also a translator from the Greek and Latin. I liked something she said about that. Paraphrasing her here: ‘I prefer to translate dead poets. They don’t have any opinions about or objections to your translation.’

regulatory department

The masthead of the formalist magazine listed both an editor and a compliance officer.

narrowed to error

Constraints are both opportunities for escape and discovery and pinch points where many forced errors occur.

table setting

He’d properly set the table with the form, however no meal was served.

comic turn

After modernism, formal poetry became a special case of light verse.

poem factory

Unfortunately he used forms as though they were molds for pouring in content and making very similar poems.

slows it down

One of the great practical uses of the literary disciplines, of course, is to resist glibness—to slow language down and make it thoughtful. This accounts, particularly, for the influence of verse, in its formal aspect, within the dynamics of the growth of language: verse checks the merely impulsive flow of speech, subjects it to another pulse, to measure, to extralinguistic consideration; by inducing the hesitations of difficulty, it admits into language the influence of the Muse and of musing.

—Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (Counterpoint, 1983)

bible thumper

A Bible-thumping formalist, he pounded on his Big Book of Forms. [Thinking of Lewis Turco]

requisite forms

Fixed forms for those who need them.

well layered language

A sonnet of fourteen-ply strength.

cease and desestina

A cease and desestina order had to be issued against the rime-crazed poet.

free as in free of

Free verse poetics is based on the immediacy and robust resources of prose itself. By eschewing both traditional/formalist artifices (regular meter and/or rime scheme) and the typographically disjointed arrays of projective verse, free verse avoids the verbal distraction of excessive mediation and visual display.

form without a model

When one speaks of traditional form, one is speaking about the haphazard product of a culture's literary history. How many poetic forms arose naturally out of a particular culture or language? Borrowed, grafted, adapted, one could even say ‘translated’, forms are not inherent to the culture and its language. Trial & error, chance, and the arbitrariness of custom all play a role in the development and perpetuation of forms within any language's poetry. There is nothing particular to the Italian temperament that naturally spawned the fourteen-line sonnet.

form's nadir

Form’s nadir: A trivial form like the acrostic.

procrustean

All form is procrustean. The paradox of form: what is de rigueur often leads to revelation.