Introduction: On Claimed Verse Forms
from
Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
by David Caplan
The challenge to contemporary poetry would seem to be a pair of unhappy alternatives: either to contrive new schemes of empirically meaningful repetition that reflect and – more importantly – transmit the color of contemporary experience; or to recover schemes that have reflected the experience of the past. To do the first would be to imply that contemporary experience has a pattern, a point that most post-Christian thinkers would deny. To do the second would be to suggest that the past can be recaptured, to suggest that the intolerable fractures and dislocations of modern history have not really occurred at all, or, what is worse, to suggest that they may have occurred but that poetry should act as if they have not... [W]e yield now to the one demand, now to the other, producing at times a formless and artistically incoherent reflection – accurate in its way – of some civil or social or psychological reality, and at times a shapely and coherent work of art which is necessarily an inexact report on the state of affairs, not to mention the state of language and meaning and coherence, in our time.
— Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural history dooms this poetry to failure, irrelevance, or political and aesthetic conservatism."[T]he pentameter is a dead form," Antony Easthope notes, "and its continued use... is in the strict sense reactionary."1 Many other commentators agree, calling contemporary "neo-formalism" "a dangerous nostalgia," "the new conservatism in American poetry," and a Reaganite "return to old values." Despite these admonishments, poets continue to write metrical verse; during the last two decades especially, a wide variety of American poets have turned to these forms.2 Oddly, the insults remain more widely known than the poems they attack.
This study reexamines contemporary metrical verse, the poetry that would seem to pursue the second of Fussell's "unhappy alternatives." Yet it does nothing of the sort. Instead, the poets I will discuss have developed possibilities outside these two options and the familiar set of oppositions that underlie them: the choice between "new schemes" that "transmit" "the intolerable fractures and dislocations of modern history" and older verse forms that seek merely to "recapture" a more coherent past.
Anthologies of postmodern poetry and critical discussions typically exclude metrical verse because it advances, in two anthologists' characterization, a "retrograde poetics."3 When more broadly considered, though, postmodern art resists the false choice between "new schemes" and "the schemes... of the past." The postmodern novel, for example, has often been characterized by its interest in historical modes and techniques, including the romance, the picaresque, and the early English novel's mixture of genres. As Milan Kundera has noted, this fiction "rehabilitat[es]" earlier "novelistic principles." Its aim is not "a return to this or that retro style"; instead, it seeks "to give the novel its entire historical experience for a grounding."4
The commitment to this ideal is also evident in recently developed artforms. Just as Bill Viola's earlier video/sound installation The Greeting borrows from Jacopo Pontormo's sixteenth-century painting The Visitation, Viola's Going Forth by Day draws from Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel fresco series, which Viola calls "one of the greatest works of installation art in the world."5 Recorded in high-definition video, Going Forth by Day uses Renaissance framing techniques to depict a terribly contemporary moment. One screen stays focused on a city building whose neoclassical doorway and shuttered windows provide a symmetrical background to the various actors who move in and out of the shot. In an eerie anticipation of the events of September 11, the scene suddenly changes, depicting (in Viola's words) the "panic [that] ensues as individuals rush to save themselves.... Individual lives and personal possessions are arbitrarily chosen to be lost in the process" (Viola, Going Forth, 38). Torrents of water inexplicably pour from the building whose inhabitants desperately flee the disaster. "[W]hen the future arrives, this is how it looks," the science writer James Gleick notes. "It comes all mixed up like a junkyard, the old and the new jumbled together."6 Demonstrating this idea, Viola elegantly "jumbles" fresco conventions with cutting-edge technology.
Rejecting the notion that metrical verse cannot express contemporary existence, crucial figures in the development of postmodernity specifically advocated metrical technique. In a 1985 article devoted to the subject, Primo Levi promoted rhyme's "spontaneous return." As Levi argued, rhyme inspires, not hinders, formal experimentation. "The restriction of rhyme," Levi asserted, "obliges the poet to resort to the unpredictable: compels him to invent, to 'find'; and to enrich his lexicon with unusual terms; bend his syntax; in short, to innovate."7 Jorge Luis Borges similarly called an interest in metrical technique part of an aspiring poet's necessary "curiosity." During a 1971 visit to Columbia University, Borges advised creative writing students to follow his example and write "classical forms of verse," although the students "may think of [such forms] as being old-fashioned." When an audience member confessed, "I can't imagine writing sonnets or rhyming couplets," Borges replied, "I am very sorry."8
To call Borges a "postmodern" prose writer and a "traditional" poet overlooks the crucial point: that this exemplar of postmodernity saw no contradiction in writing sonnets and fables, rhyming couplets and picaresque tales, rehabilitating the "classical forms" of poetry and of prose fiction. As he reminded his audience, he wrote free verse as well as sonnets and enjoyed reading poetry in both forms. Speaking of Whitman's Leaves of Grass and "a sonnet by Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Keats or Yeats," Borges remarked, "There is no need to like one and discard the other, since you can keep both." Indeed, Borges called "the question" of which is better "meaningless" (Borges, Borges on Writing, 70).
Vibrant, diverse, and contentious, contemporary poetry demands the catholicity that Borges advocates. His sensible comments capture many readers' tastes, as they enjoy poetry that literary criticism separates into different groups. (This lack of partisanship makes the poetry recommendation lists that amazon.com customers post livelier than most college syllabi.) To write more personally, Borges's remarks speak to my own experience. While some of my favorite poets use metrical technique, many do not. I admire Marilyn Nelson's "new formalist" poems and Charles Bernstein's "nude formalist" parodies. Following Borges, I refuse to "like one and discard the other" because to do so would severely limit the pleasure and wisdom that contemporary poetry offers.
To understand contemporary poetry, we need to range from its well-worn debates to visit, for instance, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Opened in 1999, the museum renovated an abandoned nineteenth-century mill complex into the world's largest center of contemporary art. The mill's sprawling, idiosyncratic arrangement and large open spaces — what the museum's director calls its "legitimate architecture of accretion, and the grace of an inherited gift" — provides a unique forum for innovative work, such as installations, video art, and sound environments.9 Simeon Bruner elaborates in his architect's statement: "MASS MoCA retains what is historic, provides an exciting way to use the new, and winds up creating a single new piece that is both old and new at the same time. There is no conflict between the two, and they enhance one another seamlessly" (Trainer, MASS MoCA, 113). Instead of opposing the "new" and "old," "innovative" and "historic," Bruner explores how the contemporary moment might carefully reconsider preexisting styles and forms, not repudiate them. "There is no conflict between the two, and they enhance one another seamlessly"; this hope also inspires many of the poets I will consider.
This study departs from most discussions of contemporary metrical verse in that it is less interested in poetic movements than the movement of poetic forms. Instead of concentrating my efforts on promoting or dismissing certain schools, I consider the particular forms that contemporary poets favor and those they neglect. These choices reveal both the poets' ambitions and their limits, the new possibilities they discover and the traditions they find unimaginable. I focus on five especially suggestive verse forms, five points to trace the particular contours of contemporary metrical verse and poetic culture: the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, heroic couplet, and ballad.
Such forms are often called "traditional," although many remain eccentric within English-language literary history, and "given" or "received" as if poets passively accept them. Yet Adrienne Rich's observation about education is also true of poetic forms: they must be claimed.10 Unlike certain moments in the eighteenth century or during the Renaissance, the contemporary era features no obligatory verse form, no structure that any respectable poet "must" write. The contemporary poet instead enjoys a wide variety of available poetic forms. When composing he or she must claim one: choose it from a host of possibilities. This process lacks the passivity that "given," "received," and, to a lesser degree, "traditional" imply.
Written by the last great American poet to promote his work as "traditional," T. S. Eliot's "Reflections on 'Vers Libre'" suggests why we need a more precise vocabulary to discuss poetic form. "'Blank verse,'" Eliot notes in one of the least discussed passages, "is the only accepted rhymeless verse in English — the inevitable iambic pentameter. The English ear is (or was) more sensitive to the music of the verse and less dependent upon the recurrence of identical sounds in this metre than in any other."11 Just after he calls "iambic pentameter" "inevitable," Eliot withdraws the claim. "The English ear is (or was)" more attuned to this meter than to "any other" (my italics). This telling qualification marks an important historical shift; it acknowledges that modernity had removed iambic pentameter from its privileged status. Poets continued to write in the meter, but it no longer reigned supreme.
No meter has since risen to replace iambic pentameter as "the only acceptable" option, not even free verse, although it did achieve a near-hegemony in the late sixties and early seventies. The plurality of alternatives that contemporary poets encounter — a situation Eliot would liken to anarchy — stretches the term "traditional" until it describes nearly any preexisting form a contemporary poet might use. (And sometimes even more: an anthology of "Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms" includes what its editors call "'new traditional' forms," that is, verse forms that the featured writers invented.12) This situation makes the poets' formal choices both highly suggestive and nearly impossible to anticipate. In 1919 Eliot predicted that all that was needed was "the coming of a Satirist... to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge." "As for the sonnet," he added, "I am not so sure" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 36). Since then, though, the sonnet has flourished much more than the couplet. Other poets had not accurately forecasted their own metrical choices, let alone larger formal trends.13 Lacking a stable sense of the culture's poetic "tradition," modern predictions about poetic form achieved a near-perfect consistency; they almost always turned out to be wrong.
Exploiting this situation, contemporary poets claim forms by using techniques thought to be in conflict, creating, as Simeon Bruner wrote of the MASS MoCA, "a single new piece that is both old and new at the same time." The results mystify readers wedded to anachronistic notions of literary influence. When asked about recent trends in poetry, Jorie Graham marveled at the various techniques that younger poets employ. "They're managing," Graham commented,
a synthesis of the many — oftentimes balkanized — aesthetic devices the generation previous to them developed.... It fascinates me, worries me, and in many ways delights me — especially as a poet who has witnessed such great antagonisms between differing aesthetic schools — to see them sample and synthesize and invent without feeling the need to be accountable to the beliefs that gave birth to those voices and styles they imitate.14This "synthesis" thrills and unnerves Graham because she believes the younger generation enjoys a new freedom, one that she and her peers lacked. Instead of negotiating the "great antagonisms between differing aesthetic schools," the younger poets "sample and synthesize and invent."Like all powerful new literature, such vital poetry compels a reexamination of the previous generation's work. Following the hints that it offers, we must remain alert to the inspiration that shrewd writers have found in seemingly unlikely sources, even amid a "balkanized" literary landscape. Toward this goal, I will explore how Donald Justice, often labeled "an academic formalist," borrowed composition methods from John Cage, a central figure in postwar and contemporary avant-gardist movements. Also, as another chapter will show, certain gay and lesbian poets have dominated the art of the love sonnet, reviving this most "traditional" form by drawing sustenance from queer theory, scholarship's most "radical" field.
By highlighting this commerce between allegedly antagonistic practices, between prosody and "theory," "traditional" and "experimental" poetry, I hope to move discussion beyond the simple oppositions that often impede discussions of contemporary American verse. This study instead contends that much of the most vital and interesting contemporary metrical verse shows a voracious curiosity, an openness to seemingly incompatible techniques and procedures. These poems stand with, and on the shoulders of, surprising influences. For this reason, I pay close attention to what the authors say and to what their verse forms reveal, attentive to the possibility that the forms the poets claim violate the partisan assertions they express in interviews and in essays.
But why study poetic form at all? Two reasons in particular recommend the subject. First, it obsesses twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poets, who compulsively frame historical and artistic challenges in formal terms. Though hardly unprecedented, this fixation constitutes a defining characteristic of the period's poetic culture. This tendency transcends considerable differences in sensibility and political orientation. Any subject that fascinates poets as different as Adrienne Rich and Donald Justice, T. S. Eliot and Ron Silliman, Marilyn Hacker and John Crowe Ransom demands serious critical attention.
Interest in poetic form has only grown more intense in the last two decades, as contemporary poets have produced an impressive body of literature about prosody. At least two handbooks of prosody have been published recently, along with several collections of essays, and an anthology of verse forms — all written and edited by poets.16 One title announces prosody to be "the poem's heartbeat"; another considers "the politics of poetic form." Together, these two titles suggest what the wider conversation confirms: that the study of poetic form rewards close attention because even a seemingly minor technical matter such as a poet's eccentric enjambment finely intertwines the aesthetic and the political, the idiosyncratic and the shared.
Second, there are many reasons to believe that our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse, remains inadequate. Central to this failure is the most familiar set of oppositions I alluded to earlier. Criticism generally frames postwar and contemporary verse as a contest between "experimental" and "traditional" poets. Every decade or so, the terms shift, but the basic opposition remains nearly constant. Read as a rivalry, this division inflects the various postwar and contemporary "poetry wars," raging between the proponents of "the raw" and "the cooked," writers of "open" and "closed" forms, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writers and new formalists. For at least the last two decades, the most interesting studies of poetic form have tended to focus on the first half of this pair. I have in mind Cary Nelson's Our Last First Poets, "a collection of readings of individual poets working in open forms," Charles Bernstein's wonderfully provocative essays, and Marjorie Perloff’s groundbreaking work on "the poetics of indeterminacy."17 If discussed at all, metrical verse is invoked as a neat contrast, a weak opponent quickly dispatched.
These dismissals rest on two problematic assumptions. First, such readings depend on an antagonistic, unnuanced model of literary change, in which a new form of avant-garde writing simply displaces an older one. Martial metaphors are often invoked in order to divide various writers into two warring camps. Second, these claims about the politics of poetic form betray impatience with the mechanics of both politics and poetic form. They assume a straightforward correlation between verse structure and "politics" in its most common meaning. Though William Carlos Williams's rejection of the sonnet as "fascistic" offers an extreme example, it nicely captures a general tendency to see poetic form as a simple reflection of political allegiances.
A poem by Billy Collins, America's poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, more gently illuminates the xenophobia that underpins such pronouncements:
We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like SpenserCollins's "American Sonnet" drolly expresses a commonplace: that the sonnet remains foreign to American experience. "We" Americans do not write like Italian and English authors. Gerald Stern makes the same point in reverse, titling a recent col1ection American Sonnets. The book's poems are only loosely metrical, do not rhyme, and range from sixteen to twenty-four lines. Like Collins, he uses "American sonnets" as a contradiction in terms. While Collins cites the postcard as the form's truest example, Stern presents free verse.19
and it is not fourteen lines
like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field
but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation.18Such poems cleverly advance a familiar understanding of American literary history that posits the most authentic American artists rebel from Old World traditions and start anew. They slight our country's many fine sonneteers, poets as diverse as Marilyn Hacker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Frost, implying that they exert an alien influence. They ignore populist verse such as the sonnet that adorns the Statue of Liberty's base, presenting a narrow vision of American and Americanness, where "foreign" poets and verse forms need not apply.
Instead of assigning stable values to poetic forms, we need the patience to trace the forms' shifting movements, as their political and their aesthetic uses accommodate new imperatives and contexts. We must attend to the complications that make poetic forms fascinating.
In 1919, just as Eliot foresaw the sonnet's demise, the members of an all-black railroad dining-room crew wept when a fel1ow waiter read a sonnet he had just composed, inspired by the summer's race riots and an editor's chal1enge to address the horrors "like Milton when he wrote 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.'"20 Quickly published, the poem expressed black rage forceful1y enough for government officials to denounce it. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. read it into the Congressional Record as a dangerous example of what he cal1ed "Negro extremism," just as a Department of Justice investigation "against persons advising anarchy, sedition, and the forcible overthrow of the government" cited the recently published poem with alarm.21
The poem's next generation of readers read it very differently. Famously and perhaps apocryphal1y Winston Churchill is widely reported to have quoted the sonnet to rally England during World War II. Churchill, according to Melvin B. Tolson, "paraded in it before the House of Commons, as if it were the talismanic uniform of His Majesty's field marshal." A white American soldier carried the poem to his death in battle, where it was found among his remains.22
Since World War II, the sonnet — and I speak of course of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" — continued to fascinate readers. Millions of schoolchildren have memorized it. It even made Time magazine after a reporter discovered it in the Attica State prison following the September 1971 uprising, the largest penal rebellion in American history. Reading the sonnet as a call to action, the prisoners circulated it to each other, along with banned books by Malcolm X and Bobby Seale. Time reproduced the poem's first quatrain, meticulously copied in a prisoner's neat script. Showing far less care, the magazine identified the words as "written by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic sty]e."23 Two issues later, a concerned reader, "Gwendolyn Brooks of Chicago," corrected the error, rebuking Time's "poetry specia]ist," who failed to recognize "one of the most famous poems ever written." Pointedly Brooks conc1uded her letter by quoting the poem in full:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O, kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!24Poetic form played shifting roles at the various stages of the poem's reception. By definition a Shakespearean sonnet such as "If We Must Die" employs a host of mnemonic devices; its brevity and rhyming patterns make the poem relatively easy to memorize. Whether or not they could name the form, the prisoners at Attica surely appreciated the fact that "If We Must Die" remained brief enough to smuggle. For a poem to inspire them at crucial moments, the prisoners needed to know it by heart, to quote appropriate lines to themselves and each other. Highly portable and memorable, the sonnet form helped make "If We Must Die" a great prison rebellion poem.
The sonnet form also contributed to the poem's nearly immediate popularity among African American readers a half-century earlier. "If We Must Die" made McKay's career in black America, so much so that he later rued that "the Negro people [who] unanimously hailed me as a poet" on the basis of "that one grand outburst" showed little interest in his other work (McKay, Long Way from Home, 31). These readers had no trouble recognizing the sonnet's author and the "we" he spoke for as "black," even though the poem made no overt racial references.25 The verse form assisted this identification. Several major poets of the Harlem Renaissance, including McKay, Countee Cullen, and James Weldon Johnson, wrote sonnets. Though subsequent literary criticism generally privileges black poets' use of more putatively "black" forms such as the blues and jazz, McKay pursued a well-established strategy when he used what he termed "older traditions" to express his "most lawless and revolutionary passions and moods."26 His sonnet employed the grand Miltonic rhetoric familiar to many black churches, where ministers sermonized with it. Houston A. Baker Jr. has called this black culture "a world bent on recognizable (rhyme, meter, form, etc.) artistic 'contributions' where familiar structures such as ballads and sonnets presented the greatest 'use.'"27 In this context, the verse form and rhetoric acted as racial markers.
The sonnet also addressed a decade-old score. McKay started his literary career in Jamaica, his homeland, writing dialect verse. In a memoir he scornfully remembered the local poetry scene:
Our poets thought it was an excellent thing if they could imitate the English poets. We had poetry societies for the nice people. There were "Browning Clubs," where the poetry of Robert Browning was read but not understood. I had read my poems before many of these societies and the members used to say: "Well, he's very nice and pretty, you know, but he's not a real poet as Browning and Tennyson are poets." I used to think I would show them something. Someday I would write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them.28Motivated by these slights, "If We Must Die" proved the poet's mastery of the English literary tradition, as he successfully imitated the appropriate models. His technical skill carried more than a hint of defiance, a determination to "amaze and confound" the black anglophiles who misunderstood the very literature they defended. While "If We Must Die" assailed the state of American race relations, circa 1919, its form settled old grudges from the British West Indies. It both rebuked and sustained colonialism's intellectual influence.These brief episodes in the sonnet's long history resist any single value one might ascribe to the form. Instead, they demonstrate poetic form's ability to claim contradictory political meanings. Because verse form is essentially senseless — an iamb, for instance, merely defines an abstract pattern — it stays open to multifold meanings, to new uses and unexpected inflections. It can express racial solidarity as well as air intraracial grievances; its brevity and technical devices recommend it to prisoners plotting a rebellion, schoolteachers who need a poem to assign, and, perhaps, a Prime Minister fond of Shakespearean cadences. Reviewing McKay's Selected Poems, Tolson spoke for many when he charged that McKay's "radicalism was in content — not in form."29 A form's "radicalism," though, should not be judged so abstractly. Poetic form, like politics itself, relentlessly accommodates local conditions, whether of the Harlem Renaissance, colonial Jamaica, or Leninist Russia, where McKay read "If We Must Die" to Red Army troops, "transformed into a rare instrument and electrified by the great current running through the world" (McKay, Long Way from Home, 210). To account for such moments, literary criticism must stay alert to each form's elasticity, vigilant to the uses that verse technique makes of each context and occasion.
Given the prevalent critical bias against metrical verse, my first task is recuperative. For this reason, I begin with the sestina, a much-maligned form, whose popularity is often interpreted as the sign of formal complacency. In English the form entered the twentieth century during the Great Depression, as poets grappled with the dilemma of how to address the day's most pressing social concern but not compose (in Elizabeth Bishop's phrase) "'social conscious' writing."30 The resulting poems taught younger metrical writers the form's modernity, its ability to confront the age's urgent challenges.
My second chapter considers the ghazal as a case study of how poets import a verse form, revising it to address their own cultural and artistic exigencies. In the late 1960s, Adrienne Rich turned to the ghazal, a canonical form of Persian poetry, in order to construct a poetry of witness. As Black Nationalism and Black Power split from the Civil Rights Movement, her project revealed its fissures and rifts, the oversights and presumptions that ghazals written during the previous decade underscored. Two decades later, Agha Shahid Ali used the same form to reassert the differences Rich sought to elide. Yet Rich's ghazals leave a remarkable record of the late 1960s' cultural moment, as poets sought to fuse their political and formal commitments, forging alliances with fe11ow artist-activists.
During the last two decades gay and lesbian poets have reinvigorated the love sonnet. Yet scholarship in the field neglects this achievement because it fits uneasily between queer studies' commitment to new verse forms and many prosodists' hostility to identity politics. My third chapter seeks to rectify this oversight, showing how writers such as Rafael Campo, Marilyn Hacker, and Henri Cole discover a new relation to the form's Petrarchan past, an avenue around the impasse that the form otherwise faces.
While the sestina is rare in English-language poetry before the twentieth century and the ghazal almost nonexistent, the sonnet and the heroic couplet are mainstays of the canonical Anglo-American poetic tradition. Yet even amid a "return" to "traditional" forms, few poets write heroic couplets. My fourth chapter explores why, pointing to the division between the disciplines of creative writing and literary scholarship and the way these institutional divisions inform a very different understanding of the heroic couplet and eighteenth-century poetry and culture.
The ballad presents an opportunity for a more communal poetry and a point of contact between "experimental" and "traditional" poetics. Drawing examples from Charles Bernstein and Marilyn Nelson, I show that the ballad offers a manifold resource: the structure necessary for Bernstein to achieve a personal resonance often missing in recent avant-gardist work and the shared technique for Nelson to speak communa11y, not as a self in isolation. Building on the book's emphasis on the relations between allegedly antagonistic groups of poets, the final chapter develops a vocabulary to discuss the most interesting contemporary poetry. To do so, I propose we discuss "contemporaries" who "share the language," not partisans who wage "wars." My study investigates five forms; it does not catalogue all the forms currently in use. I focus on American poets and international poets, including Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Agha Shahid Ali, whose work exerts considerable influence on the contemporary American poetry scene. By its very nature, then, my study leaves out a host of poets and forms worthy of attention; the omitted forms include, but certainly are not limited to, the villanelle, pantoum, and cento. Though regrettable, such omissions are inevitable for a study of this size and scope. More agreeably, they provide subjects for future research.
While arguing that this metrical verse remains more interesting and vital than commonly accepted, I feel little need to pit "closed" verse against "open." It is important to note the instances when a poet such as Derek Walcott employs poetic form to signal his distaste for a certain, historically specific, kind of free verse. Yet much more common are other kinds of exchanges, where poets associated with different verse traditions inspire and inform each other's work, by suggesting new avenues for exploration. In this spirit, I take my title, Questions of Possibility, not from a sonnet or sestina but from Lyn Hejinian's My Life, a work in what John Ashbery calls "the other tradition." Composed of thirty-seven prose poems of thirty-seven sentences apiece (in the first edition) then forty-five sections of forty-five sentences (in the second edition), Hejinian's book expresses the hope that inspires this study when she writes, "Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work."31
Notes
1 Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen and Company, 1983), 76.
2 Ira Sadoff, "Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia," American Poetry Review 19, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 7-13; Diane Wakoski, "The New Conservatism in American Poetry," American Book Review 8, no. 4 (May-June 1986): 3.
Anthologies provide the most conspicuous evidence of an increased interest in metrical verse. See Philip Dacey and David Jauss, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Robert Richman, ed., The Direction of Poetry: An Anthology of Rhymed and Metered Verse Written in the English Language since 1975 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Annie Finch, ed., A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1994); and Mark Jarman and David Mason, eds., Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1996).
3 Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds., Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2:3
4 On this point, see Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Ralph Cohen, "Do Postmodern Genres Exist?" in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 11-27; and Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 74-76.
5 Going Forth by Day, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2002), 94. Viola lists Botticelli's drawings of the Inferno and Purgatory, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Cathedral fresco cycle as other influences for Going Forth by Day.
6 James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 79.
7 Primo Levi, "Rhyming on the Counterattack," in The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 112, 113.
8 Jorge Luis Borges, Borges on Writing, ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1994), 71, 74-75.
9 Jennifer Trainer, ed., MASS MoCA: From Mill to Museum (North Adams, Mass.: MASS MoCA Publications, 2000), 16.
10 Adrienne Rich, "Claiming and Education," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 231-35.
11 T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 35-36.
12 Dacey and Jauss, Strong Measures, 13.
13 In a 1970 interview, Donald Justice insisted he would not be interested in writing sonnets. When Justice edited the interview in 1983, his footnote wryly confirmed that he had "conquered" this "prejudice." See Donald Justice, Platonic Scripts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 17.
14 Jorie Graham, "That Glorious Thing." Interview with Mark Wunderlich. American Poet (fall 1996); The Academy of American Poets. http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?45442B7C000C070D0876 (accessed December 15, 1999).
15 Martin Corless-Smith, untitled interview with Rick Snyder. Read Me 4 (spring-summer 2001). http://www.home.jps.net/~nada/corless.htm. See also Martin Corless-Smith, Complete Travels (Sheffield: White House Books, 2000), 71-96.
16 Timothy Steele, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Alfred Corn, The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Brownsville, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1997); Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, eds., The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Charles Bernstein, The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (New York: Roof Books, 1990); Annie Finch, ed., After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition (Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1999); R. S. Gwynn, ed., New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History (Ashland, Ore.: Story Line Press, 1999); Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, eds., An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); David Baker, ed., Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996); and Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Shoerke, eds., Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
17 Cary Nelson, Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), ix; Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Bernstein, Content's Dream: Essays, 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986); Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). See also Marjorie Perloff, "The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed," in Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 134-70, especially 134-36; and Perloff, "'A Step Away from Them': Poetry 1956," in Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 83-115.
Two studies of contemporary poetic form have been especially helpful to me. Mutlu Konuk Blasing's Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O'Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) anticipates my distaste for the easy elision of metrical verse with conservative politics and "experimental" forms with political opposition. Yet Blasing's reading of individual poets differs from my readings of poetic forms by taking as a "[g]iven the political neutrality of technical options" (17) while my study explores the changing political and aesthetic implications of certain poetic forms. As my chapter of the heroic couplet indicates, James Longenbach's interrogation of "the 'breakthrough' narrative" in Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) echoes some of my own suspicions about the critical reception of metrical and free verse, though my subject is not "modern poetry after Modernism" but contemporary poetry's metrical forms.
18 Billy Collins, "American Sonnet," in Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001), 23.
19 Gerald Stern, American Sonnets (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
20 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 21,31-32.
21 Senate, Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, 66th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 153,167. Lodge is quoted in Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 39. The black press quickly learned of the Department of Justice's monitoring. See "We 'Rile' the Crackerized Department of Justice," Crusader 2, no. 9 (May 1920): 5-6.
22 Melvin B. Tolson, "Claude McKay's Art," Poetry 83, no. 5 (February 1954): 287; McKay's comments on "If We Must Die," Anthology of Negro Poetry, Folkway Records Album No. FL 9791. The often-repeated story of Churchill reading the poem has two main versions. The first suggests that, as Arna Bontemps writes, Churchill "quoted it ["If We Must Die"] as the conclusion to his address before the joint houses of Congress prior to the entrance of the United States into World War II." This story is told in Arna Bontemps, ed., introduction to American Negro Poetry (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), xvi; and Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 35. Churchill's December 26, 1941, speech, though, makes no such mention of McKay's poem. The second and more common version is harder either to verify or to disprove. It suggests that Churchill read the poem sometime during World War II at the House of Commons. A specific date is never mentioned. This version is especially popular with black poets. See Tolson (supra, this note); Gwendolyn Brooks, letter to the editor, Time 98, no. 16 (October 18, 1971): 6; Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, eds., The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 99; and Robert Hayden, ed., Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 45. Wayne Cooper claims Churchill never read the poem to the House of Commons; David Perkins writes that the poem may have "stirred the Edwardian heart of Winston Churchill, who is said to have read it in the House of Commons"; and Jean Wagner writes "it seems true" "but we have no confirmation of this." See Wayne F. Cooper, review of Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity, by Tyrone Tillery, Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1656-1757; David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, vol. 1, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 404; Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Lawrence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, trans. Kenneth Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 230, n. 95. None of these accounts cite a specific date for Churchill's recitation of the poem. I can find no mention of McKay's poem in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), or in Churchill scholarship. Regardless of whether or not Churchill actually read the poem to the House of Commons or quoted it in some other occasion, the currency that this story has achieved makes it an important part of the poem's reception.
23 "War in Attica: Was There No Other Way?" Time 98, no. 13 (September 27, 1971): 20.
24 Gwendolyn Brooks, letter to the editor, Time 98, no. 16 (October 18, 1971): 6.
25 Nathan Irvin Huggins notes that when "If We Must Die" was published "in the Messenger in 1919 and in Harlem Shadows in 1922 no one could doubt that the author was a black man and the 'we' of the poem black people too." See Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 72.
26 Claude McKay, "Author's Word" in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), xx.
27 Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 87.
28 Claude McKay, "Boyhood in Jamaica," Phylon 13 (spring 1953): 42.
29 Melvin B. Tolson, "Claude McKay's Art," 289.
30 Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, eds., Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 293.
31 John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 208-9; Lyn Hejinian, My Life, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 48.
Questions of Possibility:
Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
by David Caplan
Oxford University Press
© 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form — Hardcover
