Matthew Zapruder, Los Angeles Times:
Form is the literary expression of our need to be consoled by some kind of order. This is why funerals have rituals and procedures, so we can keep it at least a little bit together in times of great grief and disruption. It is also why, right after Sept. 11 — when sitting together silently would have been too difficult and weird and sad — people read poems, more often than not ones that had meter and rhyme, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”
There is a great satisfaction in hearing rhyme, either in poetry or song, and knowing the world is at least for a moment orderable, that the seemingly disconnected elements can be convincingly fitted together. But while rhyme can be funny or witty, or a lovely, even essential consolation, it is obviously not necessary for poetry: Too many great poets have written free verse for the past 150 years for that to be the case.
Indeed, nowadays there’s simply no way to rhyme and not sound a bit out of time. Our world is too wary and conscious of the different space rhyme and meter create. This doesn’t mean great formal poetry can’t be written today. But because rhyme and meter are not essential, formal poetry is by its nature a subcategory of poetry as a whole.
Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry.
When I look at the poems I wrote in my early 20s, I realize they are bad not because they are written in forms, but because they are essentially fake. Whatever moments are true and good in them exist despite the formal elements. Poems in rhyme and meter don’t suit my mind or the way it needs to move. It’s like style: It might seem cool every once in a while to wear a vintage suit, but the fact of the matter is it just doesn’t work for me.
One thing I do notice about my poems is that, though they might not have overt formal elements, there is always a rhythm that develops, subtly, in the voice of the speaker. Maybe something more like a cadence. Most poetry is “formal” in that way.
And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”
September 20th, 2009 at 1:40PM
Ha, multiple reactions in multiple directions. First:
> And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual”
That brought to mind all the world’s distinguished medical researchers: "I think I am the author of this paper. Conceptually, it is my work."
Second, in re: rhyme: I hope UD will post a reflection sometime on rhyming education slogans and what they say about the people who employ them. "Don’t be a sage on the stage, be a guide on the side." "Chalk and talk." "You need a vision before a decision."
Third:
> nowadays there’s simply no way to rhyme and not sound a bit out of time
I’m not convinced this is true. I realize he may be talking about "nowadays" more narrowly, as in 2009, and I’ll stipulate that I don’t read much brand new poetry. But I think what sounds out of time is not so much rhyme or form as it is obvious rhyme or form. End-stopped verse does sound hackneyed and has been out of fashion for decades, but if the lines are sufficiently enjambed you can have a very high degree of formal order that is almost impossible to notice upon hearing. It works in an almost unconscious way — but when you look on the page there it is, demonstrating the poet’s craftsmanship. Even today it’s hard to see e.e. cummings as anything but wildly avant garde, and yet half of his poems are highly formal sonnets. Here’s a poem I was thinking of this week, by Elizabeth Jennings. It’s fully rhymed and fully regular, and yet the syntax crosscuts the form so extensively that the effect is very subtle.
Song at the Beginning of Autumn
Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.
Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this—
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.
But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names—
Autumn and summer, winter, spring—
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.
But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.
December 19th, 2011 at 2:28PM
I doubt Zapruder would countenance the gracious genius of Jennings—
not postmod enough for his taste—
thanks for posting this lovely poem, which sent me in search of my copy of her Selected—