Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

My cleaners came today. Ever since the very savvy lady who runs the business has been struggling with back problems, I never know who to expect. Today it was the stalwart Kirby and her sister, who I hadn’t met before.

I was supervising the kids’ homework when the sister came down from the spare bedroom carrying reverently a frame containing a poem written by my friend Donna. “I love this,” she said. “Do you mind if I copy it down?”

Do I mind? Isn’t this the entire point of poetry? I told her I could do better than that and gave her a copy of Donna’s chapbook The Next Exit, because I happened to have a few lying around.

She was thrilled. I am thrilled. Lyn Hejinian needs to understand that this is the point .

While collecting MFA books from the library recently, I spotted Best American Poetry 2004, guest edited by Lyn Hejinian. Having been favorably impressed by the 2005 version, guest edited by Paul Muldoon, I picked it up, and over the last few weeks, mainly while being Gymnastics Mom, I have got around two thirds of the way through the poems.

This endeavor, along with some debates I am currently having with my professor, Liam Rector, has pushed an issue to the forefront of my mind, that I think deserves some examination. It is actually several debates, I suppose, but the key questions are these. How clear should poetry aspire to be? And at what point does clarity become prose?

Lyn’s Anthology comes into this debate because the majority of the poems in this anthology are not at all clear. In fact, they range from infuriatingly obscure to peculiarly incomprehensible. I haven’t read much of Lyn’s poetry (okay, I’ve read one,) but I have garnered that she was a big proponent of Language poetry, back in the day, and it’s clear that’s where her sympathies still lie.

During a discussion with a friend we looked up the book reviews on Amazon.com. The majority, clearly written by members of the general public who choose to read poetry for enjoyment, were singularly unimpressed. A couple, probably written by people more directly involved with the literary establishment, supported the anthology as a means of introducing the American public to some of the more experimental work being done in poetry.

Hmm. I have a problem right there. Best American Poetry is intended for the American public, or at least they seem to have thought so, or they wouldn’t have attempted to read it. Shouldn’t it actually give them what they want, rather than what some academics think they should want?

Also today, while checking out the complete list of US Poet Laureates, I came across the unsurprising fact that Billy Collins is the most well-read poet writing in America today. Personally I find much of Collins’ stuff a little too easy and conversational, but clearly that’s where the American poetry reading public feels comfortable. If we’re trying to develop and broaden their tastes in poetry, perhaps it might be better to start from Collins and move just a little deeper–say Kim Addonizio or Mark Strand–rather than jump headlong into the Avant Garde stuff that even I, an MFA student, drop in disgust or boredom halfway down the first page.

As to my own personal preferences and the poetry I try to write, these are both evolving. I am famous in my Graduate workshop for finding poetry “prosey.” In particular I have problems with first person free verse narratives that are neither allegorical nor contain striking metaphors. I am trying to move away from narrative poetry myself right now, partly because I’m going through a somewhat dull but pleasant period in my personal life where everything is ticking along quite nicely thank you very much. But also because I’m experimenting with making less sense.

Note: I did not say making NO sense, I said LESS sense. As an engineering graduate in a previous life, I have often had issues with illogicalities and disconnects in poetry. And yet, as my reading has broadened, I have realized how intense and exciting poetry written outside of normal narrative rules, and syntactical constraints, can become.

But my lodestones are my girlfriend-who-likes-Billy-Collins and my husband-who-only-likes-mine. If they don’t get enough of it to enjoy the second reading/hearing, then I need to work on my clarity.

If the American public gives up on poetry altogether, who knows how bad things could get. As WCW said: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, but men and women die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” We need readers who aren’t just academics. It’s okay to push the envelope; exploding it is best done in the laboratory conditions of a university.

Below here I intend to post my MFA essay on the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes. A few thoughts before I do so. In the essay I disagree with the criteria the editor used to select poets to feature in the anthology. Because of the criteria the editor used, the poets whose inclusion I debate are ethnic poets. I have tried, tried, tried to present this in non-offensive language, but the nature of political correctness today means that any such criticisms can be deemed offensive. Please understand: it is not my intent to offend anyone of ethnic origin, merely to criticize the editor, who, by the way, is Caucasian.

A Formal Feeling Comes, Or Does It?
 

As I read this anthology, described as “Poems in Form by Contemporary Women” several questions surfaced in my mind. Firstly, to what extent should we distinguish between poems in form and poems which have form? Secondly, how rigorous should we be in applying that distinction to an anthology of this kind, assuming that there is a need for such a niche collection? And finally, to what other criteria and standards should the editors of such anthologies hold themselves?

Addressing the first concern, greater poets than I have said that all poems must have form. Devices such as rhyme (with a leaning towards internal or slant) and repetition can be employed in free verse poetry to great effect. However, for me a poem in form is one in which there is a predictable structure or pattern, and when the pattern is broken, the change itself is obvious, striking and justified.

Annie Finch has employed a broader definition of in form than I would like. One of the user-friendly features of this well-organized book is Appendix I, a Formal Key to Poems, which summarizes the form used in each piece. I was often unhappy to discover there, after reading a poem that I would call free verse, descriptions such as “Repeated elements directly follow each other” (“Mother With Child” by Lenore Keeshig-Tobias) or “Free verse, with anaphora” (“Peace #3” by Alma Luz Villanueva.)

I wish that we did not need niche poetry anthologies, but I cannot change the state of American poetry single-handedly. If you read an anthology like Best American Poetry 2005 you will find few formal poems. Various ethnic minorities are also under-represented, although I note that the ratio of men to women has been carefully balanced. This is why there are myriad anthologies called In Other Words: Literature by Latinas and A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women and 360 Degrees of Blackness Coming At You, all of which are other anthologies mentioned in the contributors’ notes for this one. And they are necessary, yes. But I would argue that you are most definitely required to be a Latina, or a North American Indian Woman or an African American to have your work featured in such an anthology, and it follows that the poems in an anthology subtitled “Poems in Form by Contemporary Women” should be in form.

Of course many of them are, and there are some excellent examples of formal poetry at its best. Suzanne J. Doyle’s and Emily Grosholz’ contributions tempt me to look for their books, and I will definitely try some more Marilyn Hacker and Maxine Kumin. Julie Fay’s “Dear Marilyn,” Joan Austin Geier’s “On Your 21^st Birthday,” Josephine Jacobsen’s “Only Alice,” Suzanne Noguere’s “The Secret,” Molly Peacock’s “Chriseaster” and Patricia Storace’s “The Archaeology of Divorce” are worth the price of the anthology alone. As a practitioner of the art I am always on the lookout for tips and techniques. I love how Emily Grosholz intersperses trimeter lines in her blank verse to create emphasis. I wrote my first crown of sonnets after reading Hacker’s “Eight Days in April.” I want to write a paraclausithyron (lament sung before the locked door of the beloved) like Rachel Hadas.

But, I fear that Annie Finch’s criteria for assessing the merit of formal poems are different from mine. I would ask: is the subject riveting? is the rhyme scheme subtle and unforced? are the repetitions put to good use? is there closure? At the risk of being politically incorrect, I suggest Annie Finch appears to have asked, all too often: who is the writer?

Why oh why, does Cheryl Clarke deserve three poems in here, even if she is the foremost African American Lesbian poet writing today, when she produces lines like:

I’ll still follow you, primordial

thing, out of the swamp to the vague median
and beyond. Your shell is hardly cordial (what?)
and my spiky fur has gone seedy
I would similarly question the inclusion of the poems by Alma Luz Villanueva, Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Dolores Kendrick, and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias. All may be terrific free verse poets, and are, I’m sure, wonderful women. It is their place in an anthology of excellent formal verse I question. Annie Finch has gone out of her way to include well-known minority poets in this anthology by choosing quasi-formal or rare, stilted, formal poems written by predominantly free verse poets, an admirable, but in my opinion misguided, instinct.

Less admirable and equally misguided is her decision to include four of her own poems in this book, none of them particularly striking, when she restricted Marilyn Hacker and Maxine Kumin to three.  Louise Bogan managed to write Achievement in American Poetry: 1900-1950 without once mentioning herself; I wish that Ms. Finch had learned such humility.

This book confirmed for me the things I love about formal poetry—clever sestinas, villanelles and pantoums; loose, slant rhyme sonnets and meticulous iambic pentameter ones; accentual poetry, ballads. It also reminded me of the things I hate: over-abstraction, iambic meters ruined by Latinate diction, forced rhyme and syntax distorted for rhyme or meter, self-conscious worthiness. I lament the fact that Annie Finch’s worthiness led her to choose poems on other than formal excellence. It means that somewhere out there, a much better anthology of this type remains un-edited. Hmm. Maybe there’s a job for me there?

I am currently reading this anthology of poems by contemporary women, written in form. It’s very interesting, and I am gestating my 2 page essay on the subject which will form part of my February MFA packet.

Being saturated in metrical poetry has of course had its usual effect. I’ve written a rondeau, a single sonnet and a crown of three sonnets. Oh, and I genuinely did dream in Iambic Pentameter the other night, although I think it was blank verse.

It was also quite exciting for me to see that one of the contributors (Leslie Monsour) is someone who I have been published alongside. Is it very unrealistic for me to assume that if they composed a similar anthology in a few years time, I might be in it? Ah well, a girl can dream…