Mother Content, Father Form
The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must . ..
circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
WHAT holds a poem together?
Coleridge saw the poem as a living, moving body whose genius, like the leopard's or the mole's, is "the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination." Organic form. It is a powerful figure, and not easily dismissed.
And yet its descendents, inbred, decrepit, rule our poetics. So the modern poet, to be more than an enervated Romantic, must insist: a poem is words -- not lymph, not sinew. The leopard does not invent the law it obeys. If the poem does, it is not an organism, but art, a construct.
What kind of construct? One that is whole. It shows us our lives arewhole.
How do I make it whole? Form makes it whole.
What is "form"? Inherited cages, sonnets and sestinas? Whatever one says it is? If we reject the tradition, its prefabricated shapes, its smalltired certainties, what can we offer in its place?
Anything at all? Nothing at all?
A poem is pattern and variation.Sometimes the variations eclipse the pattern. We call it "free verse."Or, because it is not free, just irregular, the operation of form inverse.
We use "form" broadly here. Form is the set of rules, whatever theyare, by which the poem holds itself together. It is the poem's interest in how it says what it says - its concern for how it assembles, arranges, paces, makes a shape of, its content. It is sterile and virile.It's how a moment's melancholy is caught in the minor third of two adjacent vowels. It is to content as the dancer is to the dance.
A poem that is not formal in this sense is no poem at all, but prose, or misbegotten.
IN other poems the pattern remains, no matter how many variations enter, regular, perceptible, and sovereign. This is verse in form. It manifests in specific forms - sets of specific rules for putting a poem together.Blank verse: ten syllables to a line, alternately stressed and unstressed ("iambic"); when the poet introduces variations (an extra syllable; reversed stresses) the pattern expands to accommodate them. Forms may dictate the length of the line, the shape of the stanza, the shape of the poem; they may require repetition of sounds ("rhyme"), words, and phrases ("refrains")in prescribed places.Sonnet, ballad, limerick, madrigal, villanelle, ghazal, haiku, glosa- permissive, natural, strict, artificial, musical, bawdy, lofty, contemplative, austere, fecund, knotty, expansive, circular, subversive - the forms pass within cultures, across cultures, from one generation to the next or directly across centuries.
They are the gift of the dead to the living.
Any poet receives them who seeks out mentors - mothers and fathers to his thought who will open vistas, give guidance, and demand responsibility.
THE poet learns to handle form in verse by writing verse in form.The poet who doesn't, doesn't.
RULES contain our freedom. They limit our freedom, and they also articulate a space in which freedom is possible.Or - rules are the exercise of power by those who have it over those who do not.
We are right then to be wary of rules. They are the groundwork for tyranny.They are also essential to civil society, the family - however constituted- and the growth and flowering of the individual.
The question for the citizen is: how do we make a world in which rules imposed from without express a "law of (one's) own origination?"
THE sonnet form places strict limits on the poet's freedom. And yet, rightly entered, it is his freedom.He made a noise at the end of the first line. At the end of the fourth he needs to make a similar noise. But what he means to say does not fulfil the rhyme. He runs through rhymes in his mind - one catches his attention- he pencils it in. Something feels right about it. He doesn't know why.If he is patient, stubborn, and lucky enough, the word gives birth to aline that ends in it. A line nothing like what he thought he meant. A line that is entirely right. The form has set him free of himself.
This is the marriage of truth and beauty in which the poem writes itself.
It is an outer rule becoming an inner law.
It is a son learning who he is through struggle with his father.
I want to be what he is - I want to be everything he's not - what willI be? (The dead poet as father.)
Or - I want to do this - he wants me to do that - what will I do? (The form itself as father.)
The struggle can only be entered if the father is a warm and vital presenceat the son's side; if the poet is aware "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence" (T.S. Eliot). But most modern Canadian poets look at the tradition, at form, the way a young boy looks at a father he visits on alternate weekends. "The bees shake / them loose, as, for good, he wishes he could make / me his. This small forlorn."
WE are wary of fathers because we are wary of rules. Good. That'sone of the things fathers are here to teach us. But we lack the courage to stay in that place of fear and unknowing and possibility. So we reject fathers. We laugh at the rules. We go too far. We lose ourselves.
OUR project is a collaborative form called a glosa (from "gloss," orcommentary), in which a source stanza by one poet is broken into parts by a second poet, who interweaves his own work.We mean to embody, to make tangible, the father-son relation at work in any poet's relation to any other. The bond might be likened to the single strand of spider silk -- fine, almost invisible, easily broken, not easily brushed off. In plural it might be likened, as literature, to an infinitely extensive, continually shifting web of paternal relations.The poet's gender is beside the point. We take our most immediate inspiration from the Canadian poet P.K. Page and her use of the glosa in Hologram.The source stanza is from my unpublished poem called "Weedflower Mind".That poem adapts the stanza from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, John Berryman's invocation of, homage to, and spirit-tryst with the poet Anne Bradstreet. A man tormented by the loss of his father, Berryman, borrowingthe octave from Petrarch, the alexandrine final line from Spenser, and a tortured syntax from his inner life, fashioned an entirely twentieth-century form: hybrid, irregular, subtle and rich in its expression of psychological process.
A spider web. Or a house passed down from father to son. The son learns from the father the art of hammer and nail. He becomes a father himself.Rooms are altered and added on.And the dead pass effortlessly from room to room. They converse with us and among themselves. The front door is open. The back door is open. If we think we're trapped, we haven't understood a word they've said.
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Christopher Patton, © May 1999,
in collaboration with T.S. Thomas
Poetics (in)form
