Form in poems

  One often views form in poems as giving a cohesive body to the mind, order to what might otherwise be incloate. Sometimes the formal choices so clearly give a complementary shape to the ideas of the poem (Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet,” an obvious model with its fractal lines mirroring the natural line of the shore: Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the fourteen lines of which emulate the rhetorical turns of a traditional sonnet) that the harmony of mind and body are patent.

  But formal choices can just as easily create structural ironies (Housman’s use of iambic tetrameter…a mostly comic-sounding measure…for “To An Athlete Dying Young,” or, in a melding of the sacred and profane, the Blind boys of Alabama’s singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun”) that  exploit the tensions they create. In these examples, elements of the structure actually complicate and shift meanings.

  Modernism has lately been discussed in term of its reliance upon collage, fragment, disjunctive syntax, and other formal elements that reflect  the anxieties and difficulties of the post-industrial age. But looking at poems of the era as “a heap of broken images” is an incomplete appreciation of their ruptures and estrangements. We are also being invited to see how “it coheres all right.” The blessed rage for order underpins even the most formidable compositions. Just to think of them as composed is to understand the intrinsic organization of all poems, including those whose patterns we might not readily assimilate.

 Contemporary poets borrow freely from the challenging, sometimes frustrating practices of the moderns as well as incorporating what many modernists might have found suspect: received, or even imposed, forms. The results can be richy complicated. And why not? We live in a world where people die every day from complications…art should not simply explain the world; sometimes, it most show us how inexplainable it is.

January 3, 2010. Uncategorized.