Free
Verse Mind – Part 6
1.
Some
time ago I posted a few times on the topic ‘Free Verse Mind’. I’ve wanted to post further on this topic,
but have been stopped by the complexity of what I’m writing about. There are many factors; sociological,
political, esthetic. And it is difficult
for me to sort them out into something that is coherent. At this point I want to make some
observations that may or may not be completely coherent in the sense of a well
thought out position.
2.
Several
years ago I read Beautiful and Pointless
by David Orr. I enjoyed the book. There was one comment Orr made in particular
that stuck with me. Orr observes that
nothing gets modern poets more agitated than discussions about form. As someone who is keenly interested in poetic
form this observation resonated with my own experience. It’s almost like there is some kind of
aversion in the wider poetic community to the subject of form. Free verse poets are dismissive, reluctant,
or openly hostile to entering into these kinds of discussions. Like Orr, I remain puzzled by this kind of
reaction.
3.
I was
once at a poetry reading where one of the poets read a poem and then concluded
the reading of the poem by saying, ‘That’s a modern sonnet.’ I went over the poem in my mind and my sense
of the poem was that it didn’t scan, didn’t rhyme, and I suspected it was not
in fourteen lines, and it did not have any turn. At the conclusion of the reading I went up to
a table where the poets were displaying their poetry books. I found the book with the ‘modern sonnet’. I was right: the poem that the poet called a
‘modern sonnet’ had zero indicators, or markers, of the sonnet form. I was baffled. Why would she call it a sonnet? Why would she want to?
4.
Christian
Wiman made a similar point in his review of The
Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Wiman
writes, “What is a sonnet? Careful,
because if this anthology is a reliable guide, your definition needs to include
some poems that have neither meter nor rhyme and aren’t fourteen lines
long. The editor, Phillis Levin, states
that her own working definition was that a poem ‘act like a sonnet,’ which must
have meant that it lay quietly on the page when notified of its inclusion,
because there are some contemporary poems here that have in common only ink and
English.”
5.
Part
of the problem, I think, which I have teased out in conversations and from my
reading, is that if someone, like myself, or like Wiman, says that a poem that
is called a sonnet is not a sonnet (or some other form), that means that we are
saying that the poem is a bad poem. But
the issue of form and esthetic value are separable. I could like a poem and still argue that it
is not, in fact, a sonnet even if the poet calls it a sonnet. It is my observation that these two
evaluations are often confused.
6.
Recently
I read a collection by a poet who has achieved a significant following. In his collection there are two sections of ghazals. None of the ghazals follow the
traditional formal constraints of the form.
There is no refrain. There is no
metric unity (either with meter or syllabics).
The only carryover from the traditional ghazal is that the poems are
written in couplets. The poet does not
use either end rhyme, or the rhyme before the refrain which are standard
markers of the form. Now and then the
poet will take advantage of rhyme; but their appearance is haphazard rather than
structural.
Is
writing a series of couplets enough to make these poems ghazals? I don’t think so. Again, my remark is not about if these poems
are good or bad, pleasing or distasteful, insightful or trivial. My question is simply, why would he want to
call these poems ghazals when almost all the markers of the form are absent?
7.
It’s
kind of like ‘bait and switch’. For
those of you who might not know, bait and switch is a retail technique designed
to get customers into the store. The
store will advertise that an item is on sale for an incredibly good price. But they will only have a few of those in
stock. Or, in really unscrupulous
situations, they may not have any in stock at all. When customers come in the salesperson
apologizes, informing them that the item has sold out, and then steers the
customer to some other item. The sale
item was the ‘bait’; the item the customer is steered to is the ‘switch’. The ‘switch’ is more expensive and usually at
a higher markup than the bait.
I
once worked at such a retail store.
Every Thursday they would advertise in local papers items on sale for
the weekend. At best our store would get
six to ten of the items. I didn’t
realize when I first started that this was systematic and intentional. I just found it embarrassing. When I figured out what was going on I found
another job.
When
modern free verse poets take a formal designation for their poem and then don’t
follow through on it, this has many of the features of the retail bait and
switch operation. To call a poem a
‘sonnet’ is to set up expectations in the reader. The poet, in fact, may get people to buy
their books based on the idea that there are sonnets included. So when the reader goes to the sonnet in the
happy expectation that they will read a poem following the formal parameters
that they know, and then they discover that not a single one of those
parameters is met, it feels to the reader like they have been suckered. I think they are right.
8.
There
is another element to consider here: cultural appropriation. This happens when modern free verse, which is
a western cultural phenomenon, takes a form from another culture and then
eviscerates it of all its distinguishing features. It is then transformed into simply another
free verse poem, indistinguishable from western free verse in general. But the name of the form is retained. It’s like serving macaroni and cheese and
calling it some special Korean dish, like Bi Bim Bop, and then, if criticized,
responding that rice is a carbohydrate and noodles are carbohydrates so what’s
the problem?
I
became aware of this kind of cultural appropriation from reading the poetry and
essays of Agha Shahid Ali; the poet who did more than anyone else to bring the
ghazal to the contemporary English speaking world. In Ali’s collection Ravishing DisUnities he writes,
For a seemingly
conservative, but to me increasingly a radical, reason – form for form’s sake –
I turned politically correct some years ago and forced myself to take back the
gift outright: Those claiming to write ghazals in English (usually American
poets) had got it quite wrong, far from the letter and farther from the spirit.
. . .
. . . I found it
tantalizing to strike a playful pose of Third-World arrogance, laced with a
Muslim snobbery . . . For a free-verse ghazal is a contradiction in terms. As perhaps a free-verse sonnet, arguably, is
not?
(Ravishing
DisUnities, pages 2 and 3.)
For
Ali, who moved to America from Kashmir, the idea of a free verse ghazal essentially ignores the nature of a ghazal. That is to say that it is the very nature of
a ghazal to be formal verse. If it is
not formal verse, it is not a ghazal; it may have borrowed elements from the
ghazal, but it cannot be called a ghazal in good faith. And to call a free verse poem a ghazal is an
act of cultural appropriation or colonization.
Interestingly,
Ali does not see the same necessarily applying to the sonnet. Here I think Ali may, in fact, be blinded by
what he refers to as his own ‘Muslim snobbery’.
My guess is that Ali was not as acquainted with the history and place
that the sonnet holds in English language poetry, and how closely that place
resembles the place that the ghazal holds in the Urdu and Farsi speaking
worlds.
9.
What
I have found puzzling about free verse appropriations of forms is trying to
unpack why there is this tendency to appropriate a name, and implicitly a
tradition. At times I have suspected bad
faith; I mean wanting to stand on a venerable tradition without actually being
qualified to do so. But I know from
discussions with free verse poets who engage in this kind of appropriation that
they do not see themselves as doing this and would, I think, be angry at the
idea that they are engaged in such appropriation. Is this simply a blind spot on their
part? I’m not sure.
10.
I
have said before, in previous posts, that free verse poets are ‘form
deaf’. This deafness resembles a
musician not comprehending the difference between different time
signatures. Such a musician would be
inclined to play a waltz which lacked any distinguishing rhythmic features and
would not be able to see anything wrong with that. In a similar way, because free verse poets
are form deaf they are unable to feel the distinguishing rhythm of a particular
form and therefore feel no constraints at doing away with that feature; because
they literally lack the ability to sense that feature. This lack resembles colorblindness. Just as a colorblind person lacks the
capacity to perceive certain features in the world, so also the free verse poets
seems to lack the capacity to perceive the rhythmic shape which makes a formal
verse distinguishable from a free verse poem.
I
don’t know if this is a physiological deficit, like colorblindness; I suspect
that it isn’t. But here’s the thing: if
a poet does not exercise this capacity for hearing form, then that capacity
will atrophy. This is true of many of
our capacities which explains why many people exercise regularly.
And I
think this partially answers Orr’s inquiry as to why poets today become so
agitated regarding the subject of form: because they sense that they have lost
the capacity for hearing form and this is, at some level, embarrassing.
11.
The
end result of this rejection of all distinguishing features of a form is that
all the poems in that form, but lacking the formal distinctives of that form,
look simply like standard free verse poetry.
They are, in fact, indistinguishable from ordinary free verse. A free verse ‘ghazal’ simply looks like, and
reads like, an ordinary free verse poem.
The same is true of free verse haiku, or free verse sonnets. They all become assimilated into the free
verse collective understanding of how modern poetry should be written. All distinctions as to type vanish and we are
left with an undifferentiated fog of featureless pseudo-forms. This procedure resembles that of the Borg
Collective, from the Star Trek Next Generation series. The Borg would search out sentient life forms
and then assimilate them into the Borg Collective (symbolized by a spaceworthy
gigantic high-tech cube). If a life form
tried to resist they would be overwhelmed by the superior technology of the
Borg and forced to become a part of the collective. The Borg would announce, ‘Resistance is
futile. You will be assimilated.’ And then the Borg would proceed to do just
that.
In a
similar way, free verse has combed the poetry of the world, finding forms here
and there, and then absorbing them into the Free Verse Collective
understanding. Free verse has done this
by ejecting all the distinguishable features of particular forms (like metrics
or syllabics, rhyme, and other formal markers) and then forcing the form into
the standard parameters of modernist free verse. And they have been very successful in doing
this. Free verse haiku, free verse
tanka, free verse ghazal, free verse sonnets; they all more closely resemble
each other and standard free verse than they do the forms that they would like
to think they are connected to. In this
way they are assimilated into the Free Verse Collective.
12.
Using
language like ‘The Free Verse Collective’, and comparing them to the Borg, is,
admittedly, hyperbolic. I don’t believe
there is an actual free verse collective engaging in the practice of cultural
appropriation and imposing its will on any and all cultures of formal verse
that dare to resist. I hope that is
clear; but in case it isn’t, and in our overly literal time people have
difficulty spotting this kind of thing, I so clearly state.
Rather,
I am describing a frame of mind that simply sees its way of doing things as
naturally superior and therefore cannot see any negative consequences in the
kind of cultural assimilation described.
No doubt the Borg considered themselves superior as well and, if they
gave it a thought, would think that their absorbing peoples into their
collective to be uplifting them.
I
once gave a reading of my poetry, focusing on my collection of quatrains, Hiking the Quatrain Range. I was reading from my quatrains that mimic
the formal parameters of the Chinese quatrain tradition: that is to say I used
five or seven count lines with a traditional rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B. I read excerpts from several sequences. Then I paused for questions and comments.
A
woman in the audience, a free verse poet I slightly know, asked why I used so
much rhyme. I responded by saying that
rhyme was an essential feature of traditional Chinese poetry and my goal was to
mimic as closely as possible the parameters of the Chinese form. She didn’t understand what I was saying. The conversation continued politely, but for
the most part we were talking past each other.
The
difficulty was that she could not understand why I would want to impose
constraints upon my poetry, why not just write a free verse line? This is what I mean by being deaf to
form. For the most part, free verse poets
lack the capacity to perceive the beauty that underlies a particular instance
of formal verse; to perceive the form beneath the manifestation.
But I
don’t think the situation regarding formal verse is hopeless. To see what is going on with formal verse at
this time you have to pull your gaze away from what I call ‘official poetry’;
those organizations and journals and MFA programs that are representatives of
elitist culture. When you do lift your gaze you find a remarkable outpouring of formal verse scattered here and
there. There is Cowboy Poetry, the
emergence of a huge variety of new forms, small groups dedicated to particular
forms found here and there, the lyrics of popular song, and dedicated
individuals who persist in composing in forms which the elites have either
rejected or absorbed into the free verse Borg.
When I look at this wide variety of emerging poetry I think of it as a
‘yearning for form’ which the elite poetry institutions no longer satisfy. Form provides us with a deeper dimension of
the poetic experience, a dimension that has been lost among the elites, but
which ordinary people find appealing and beautiful. The beautiful is, by definition, attractive. And it is by turning to beauty that form is
found.
