WHY I WRITE FORMAL VERSE 2

For the past couple of years I’ve been writing formal poetry. Some of it is traditional, and some of it is made up. I’ve always been fascinated by rhyme, and have always written strongly stressed verse, but I never consciously followed a pattern, and wrote free verse. If I had to find a category or aesthetic, I’d say I was a third generation New York poet, or perhaps a Romantic Language poet, if such a beast can exist. It feels like a natural evolution, both of my basic poetic DNA and a closer aligning of my reading and writing. Writing in forms has been liberating. Puzzling things out, constructing poems like tiny boxes, forcing my brain to think in new ways, making lists of rhyming words, tinkering with lines, has been sheer pleasure. And I have always thought of art in terms of pleasure, the pleasure of creation, and the pleasure of consumption. I use that word intentionally, because I have always disliked strategies in art that are suspicious of the sheer pleasure of reading. I want an absorbed reader. I do want a reader who works, who thinks, who sees the art, and is not naïve. But I do not want a jaded intellectual or competitive reader, a reader whose first task is to put a poem in a box called a movement, or whose passion is for a handle of definition, a division of us and them.

As I started to write this way I thought I’d revisit some of the formal poets of the 20^th century who had either left me cold or whom I dismissed, or didn’t even know, and also some I had once liked, like Dylan Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Louise Bogan, the really bizarre work of Djuna Barnes, John Berryman. Berryman I discovered I STILL didn’t like. I adore Elizabethan poetry. I don’t adore pastiche. Bogan is a recent discovery, via Roethke. I love her writing.

About 20 years ago I moved into the first house I owned, a little house built in the mid 19^th century for industrial workers, in a poor neighborhood. It had a functioning bathtub. I was a single father. I’d feed my kids and put them to bed and take a long bath with a book. A friend gave me a book by Denis Donoghue, either Ferocious Alphabets or Connoisseurs of Chaos (I read both at the time, in the hot water). The friend was Bill Ford, an excellent formalist poet. We would argue ceaselessly about the canon, and about formal versus free verse. I felt it was a false dichotomy, a binary of no use at all. Free verse was a form. The architects of free verse all wrote formal verse as well. The poet wars were meaningless and outside of the concern of artists, which should not be with schools, manifestos and agendas, but with writing poems. One thing we shared was a hatred for post-modern criticism, Deconstruction and Lacanian versions particularly. Hence the Denis Donoghue book.

One of the essays was about Blake’s London. I had an epiphany (I think baths or generally conducive to epiphany). I had not really read Blake because he was a Romantic (I liked Keats, but that was as far as it went), and he seemed hopelessly obscure. Why not read all of the Songs of Innocence and Experience? That would be easy, surely? So, after my bath, I got out my unread Everyman edition of Blake and began reading. It became evident that I would have to read all of Blake, and that if I did so the later poems would be elucidated by the earlier, less obscure ones. I would have to read some criticism. I resolved not to read any critical writing about a poem until I had read the poem or poems and understood them in my own way.

It wasn’t so simple. What followed was a project of reading all of Blake and books about Blake. But also, to understand Blake, I realized I needed to read Milton and the Bible. And to understand Milton I would need to read all of Spenser, the Aeneid, Ovid and Dante. And then there were all of the Shakespeare plays I had not read, much of Chaucer. This led to Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey. And then Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats again…. Which led to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Freud…you get the idea.

All of that reading meant I was, for over ten years, immersed in the canon and in formal verse. The web spread further and further. It got to the point that the only poets I really loved reading on my own time, for pleasure, were poets writing formal verse. This whole time I was writing novels and less and less poetry. I made a decision: I was a poet in the same way a Sunday painter is a painter. I would stop collecting my poems into little books. I would not give readings or submit poems for rejection from journals. I would write a poem if the mood struck, otherwise no.  I wrote a few poems I liked. A couple were rhyming more than usual, but not in a regular way. But I liked that. So I resolved that if I ever went back to writing poetry it would rhyme.

All of this has got me thinking about how in the perspective of time one set of values falls away and a new set becomes relevant, and how this process of change is vital to art, and that poetry, as it exists, has been resistant to this change, and stuck in the battles of the 1950s. My old bugbear Ron Silliman is THE case in point. A free verse dinosaur, he insists, still in 2014, on setting up straw dogs. Louise Bogan was a highly successful poet of the 20^th century. She was widely published, wrote little, and was poetry editor at the New Yorker for almost 40 years. Her Wikipedia article has two evaluations (given in quotes): one is that she is the greatest Woman poet of the 20^th century, and the other is that she was a brilliant minor poet part of a reactionary mid-century movement. The latter assessment is one I would have shared, reading her work, in the 1980s say. But when I read the brilliant, reactionary minor poets of the 20^th century now I find that evaluation to be ludicrous. In a 2006 post about the dreaded School of Quietude (dismissal of which he traces back to Poe) Silliman essentially dismisses her because she was successful, because she edited the New Yorker, because she wrote formal verse. He holds up Lorine Niedecker as the counter example of an ignored avant-garde writer. Except Niedeker has a definitive collected edition published in the early 2000s and has attracted widespread critical writing. She is not ghettoized as a minor poet. Bogan has received little of the same critical attention. The idea that avant-garde poetry has to fight for a place in the anthologies might be true, but who cares about anthologies? The fact that Poetry has published Formalist verse is another big so what? I dislike, no, really hate the New Formalists as much as anyone. But they are, in the poetry field, WEAK. Try finding a journal that publishes formal verse, and then tell me that formalist poets have an advantage in publication. Free verse in America is the defining aesthetic. Is it mostly School of Quietude? Sure. It’s pabulum. How does that make our age any different than any other? And what about all of the boring, pointless, artless, careerist, empty, nauseating ‘cutting edge’ poetry out there? LangPo is just a style among others, as are Post LangPo, Conceptualist or what have you. You can only judge individual poems and the context, and the context is constantly changing.

But if the fight is about attention and money, then really, who cares?  The whole notion that we should be fighting about the rewards accorded to certain aesthetics is ridiculous when no poet can make a living by writing verse. You can have any job on earth and write all of the poetry you want. There is no need to make a living at poetry. That is entirely a choice. If a person has the ability they can write The Faery Queen in their spare time. Spenser did! Chaucer, Blake and Milton wrote everything they wrote in their spare time. Their money jobs had nothing to do with poetry. So if it’s not money, what is the fighting about? Attention. Silliman wants a few things; for School of Quietude poets and the ‘establishment’ to admit that they are just a genre and do not DEFINE all of poetry (I’m sure they would), and two, for the avant-garde to be included alongside conventional writers even though they have total contempt for those writers and spend an awful lot of time attacking them.

A small list of poets ( the names that pop into my head as I write) who wrote formal verse in the 20^th century: Adrienne Rich, Philip Larkin, Theodore Roethke, Louise Bogan, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brookes, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Richard Wilbur, Yvor Winters, JV Cunningham, Ted Hughes, WH Auden, Weldon Kees, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Edwin Denby, Robert Frost, WB Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed.