Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Raid, warp, push: the pedagogy of poetic form
Writing creative writing pedagogy

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Raid, warp, push: the pedagogy of poetic form

WANDA CAMPBELL

In the MTV television show Pimp My Ride, people convince the host that their dilapidated old cars should be whisked off to a custom body shop to be restored, personalized, and generally jazzed up with new paint and shiny accessories ranging from the practical to the outrageous. The verb pimp means “to customize or modify so as to be more stylish, ostentatious, or flashy” (Oxford English Dictionary) in relation to the conspicuous wealth associated with pimps, but may also be connected to the French verb pimper meaning “to adorn or attire.” So why, a century after Ezra Pound’s Imagist Manifesto called for “direct treatment,” “absolutely no word that does not contribute,” and “the musical phrase [over] the metronome” (3), would a poet want to adorn a poem with rhyme, metre, or any number of complex patterns and embellishments? The analogy between pimping a ride and pimping a poem may be imperfect, in that the former means taking an old car and making it new and the latter appears to mean taking a new thought and making it old, and yet the enduring desire to trick out the unvarnished image with inherited chrome challenges us to reconsider the value of writing in fixed forms.

When I enrolled in my first creative writing class as an undergraduate, convinced that formal rhyming poetry was a thing of the past, imagine my surprise when our professor handed us a list of traditional forms to tackle throughout the semester. I soon realized that writing in form is not about afterthought and adornment, but rather about forethought and fusion. It is not about the outside in, but rather the inside out. As Mark Strand argues, “All poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes” (69).

Though I rarely still write in the fixed forms I attempted in that first creative writing course, it was essential to convey my craft “into its own roots,” as Walt Whitman puts it in his discussion of “the profit of rhyme” in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass (11). Because those early efforts still bear subtle fruit in my own work, I have made writing in traditional forms a part of my creative writing pedagogy for over twenty years, and though students are not always satisfied with the product, they are, without exception, positive about the process. The student feedback I have incorporated into the discussion that follows confirms that students agree that writing in traditional forms is a vital and rewarding component of a poetic apprenticeship. According to Annie Finch, one of New Formalism’s most eloquent advocates, “aspiring poets and creative writing students need to learn the full range of English prosodic possibilities. They will gain fluency and resourcefulness as writers, flexibility and sophistication as readers, from learning to hear the many different metrical patterns in English and the rhythmical variation on those patterns” (121).

Dana Gioia’s “My Confessional Sestina” begins with the line “Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas / written by youngsters in poetry workshops….” The practice of forcing creative writing students to write in traditional patterns is often mocked and rightly so. Former student and now published poet Christine McNair explains why it can be risky, even dangerous: “Dangerous if students are only taught with classic examples. It can change their voice and make them creaky-sounding, often Victorian. Dangerous if there’s no exposure to other poetics, hybrids, mutant forms (those who have warped the form/broken the rules/ re-written them). Dangerous if students are taught that form work is the only acceptable way of writing poetry and that anything freeform or different is incompetent or lazy.” Richard Wilbur goes as far as to say, “Disgusting idea that someone should sit down with a determination to write in some form or other before he conceives of what the hell he’s going to say” (Cummins 133), and yet throughout the last century and into this one, there have been many poets who have returned to fixed forms with memorable results. By encouraging students to explore the full range of poetic possibilities — to invent, reinvent, and experiment — we seek a lively dialogue between the best of past and present. This is not about nostalgia but about making it new. Ken Babstock argues, “At times this seems to me to be a function of being a Canadian poet; performing these backward raids into larger, more powerful traditions; warping them slightly to suit experience and vernacular, and pushing them up against asymmetrical subject matter.” Babstock’s dynamic troika of verbs — raid, warp, push — provides a useful way to incorporate fixed form into poetic pedagogy in a contemporary and kinetic way.

Raid: Continuity

The notion of a raid suggests an inroad or incursion made by those who are outside. It also suggests there is treasure, something we want and need, on the other side of the wall. This is not mere guerilla warfare but rather taking advantage of our freedom to glean the best from the fiefdom. And now, for inhabitants of the global village, both past and present traditions are wider and richer than they once were in that we can draw on not only the established forms of Europe but also those of the whole world. Former student Tegan Zimmerman argues that working with fixed forms “can teach the historical ’progression’ of poetry’s history and movements so the student has a solid understanding” of the roots of contemporary poetry. Though it seems to be the goal of each generation to break with the past, the benefits of continuity should not be underestimated. Mary Oliver reminds us that “five hundred years and more of such labor, such choice thought within choice expression, lies within the realm of metrical poetry. Without it, one is uneducated, and one is mentally poor” (ix).

Through these backward raids, we become connected with the community of poets that has come before us, the strong shoulders upon which we stand, with the treasures of past poetic practice, and even with the fundamental human rhythms of our own bodies. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), William Wordsworth speaks of the “complex feeling of delight” generated by “the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome” (317). Nearly two centuries later, Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel argue that human information processing is, among other things, rhythmic, reflexive, and hemispherically specialized: “Poetry, as we have seen, enforces cooperation between left-brain temporal organization and right-brain spatial organization and helps to bring about that integrated stereoscopic view that we call true understanding” (247). Even Keith Mallard, who questions some of their conclusions and the science behind them, admits that the article “The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time” is “a fascinating read” (58). Turner and Pöppel suggest that “our species’ special adaption may in fact be to expect more order and meaning in the world than it can deliver” (248), and that our efforts to seek them in poetry and elsewhere may be one of our most effective survival strategies. “We now know more of the linkages which connect any art to human function,” writes Louise Bogan, “and this knowledge should make us take more pleasure, rather than less, in form” (213). Former student Jen Huizen puts it this way: “These traditional forms still exist for a reason. They appeal on some level to our mind, how we perceive words, or quite possibly simply stimulate distant memories of more ancient days, when the primary way of obtaining knowledge was through oral tradition.”

Warp: Constraint

Accustomed to the more intuitive and organic practice of free verse, some students resist attempting fixed forms, but according to Oliver, “Trying on such forms needn’t be like putting on a straitjacket. In fact, if you’ve never had to make creative use of language to fit a formal requirement, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. Yes, it’s challenging and often difficult, but may well send you down interesting paths you wouldn’t have taken otherwise” (140). The key for poets is to rise to the challenge of constraint in a way that is conducive to discovery. Babstock compares writing in form to running an obstacle course. By being forced to scramble through tires or over walls, we are more likely to encounter interesting insights than if we merely make a beeline straight to the finish. He expands on the benefits of constraint in a discussion of writing sonnets:

I am attracted to its no-holds challenge to composition. It says, “Here’s a squarish block of text on a white field in which something or, more likely, nothing will occur. Are you up to it?” It gets strange here as, obviously, there is no real “block of text” anywhere present before one writes a sonnet — except perhaps there is; a blast shadow from history, a kind of dimly perceived “dark matter”-sonnet that can serve as a vessel or threat or foil.… There’s a game or risk or pressure inherent in knowing the end is on its way. Which is to say constraint does appeal to me, as does his­tory; and perhaps more so the volta.

In contemporary practice we are likely to warp the traditions “slightly to suit experience and vernacular” (Babstock), to bend both ourselves and the form with intriguing results. Former student Corey Liu explains it this way: “A lot of the students in class were able to write sonnets well because they were able to adapt to the form better than I could. But the form also adapted to them, if that makes any sense.” In his discussion of the constraints of the Oulipo [ouvroir de littérature potentielle] Movement, Christopher Beha writes, “It may be obvious why a poetic form as austere as the sonnet qualifies as an Oulipian constraint. Less obvious may be the extent to which any literary form — the very effort, in fact, to express oneself in words — limits, in often arbitrary ways, what a writer might express and how she might express it.” Beha goes on to explain that “constraints can be used for giving words a kind of examination, for pushing away the extraneous jazz to see the beating heart within.” In keeping with this musical metaphor, former student Abby Whidden argues that “fixed forms could be compared to scales, etudes, or the twelve bar blues. Musicians spend hours on these areas and that close attention to technique helps them in freer forms of music.” W.B. Yeats once claimed he “would be full of self-contempt because of [his] egotism and indiscretion and foresee the boredom of [his] reader” if he wrote in free verse “unchanged, amid all its accidence” (522), and contemporary writers like Catherine Wagner still speak of the positive impact of constraint: “We may find, too, that meter can at times valuably caution us, in the manner of a resistantly honest friend or spouse, against hasty, ill-considered, or arbitrary speech. And we may realize that meter often has a magical, magnetic power to attract to our poems words and thoughts truer and better than those that normally come to mind.” Female poets, in particular, speak of the power of constraints to allow the writer to cope with emotionally challenging subject matter. Adrienne Rich, in her essay “When We Dead Awaken,” puts it this way: “In those years formalism was part of the strategy — like asbestos glove, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up bare-handed” (18). Molly Peacock states it even more simply: “Formal verse often makes impossible emotions possible” (71). We can descend the dark staircase with the handrail of form to steady our step. Ironically, just as years of musical discipline can prepare the way for improvisation, what feels like work can actually open the way for play. As former student Amy James explains, “The best assistance of a fixed form for me is simply that you do not have a choice but to be ruthless in word choice and number…. I have found it refines and strengthens the poem, and allows new opportunities for play; play on words, on repetition, on line length, on the system itself.” Eavan Boland describes a similar epiphany emerging from a personal encounter with form: “I begin to see how it would be to be able to work with the line by working against it, pushing the music of dailyness against the customary shapes of the centuries. Suddenly I see how these contrasting forces make language plastic. And how exciting it is to find that a poetic language will liberate and not constrain” (xxix).

Push: Connection

The push and shove between classical symmetrical forms and contemporary asymmetrical subject matter and expression creates a new kind of flame, a firing across the synapses of understanding. So we have Sylvia Plath’s sonnet “To Eva” beginning “All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it / The way you’d crack a clock;” (304). That opening “All right” catches fire in us by its very casual presence in an elegant symmetrical form. Kim Addonizio’s sonnets about love as phenylethylamine or touching tattoos on naked skin, or Satan as earth’s new CEO, strike us as particularly contempor­ary and compelling. Similarly, Babstock delivers a Shakespearean sonnet in the voice of a hockey player in the penalty box, and Anne Simpson shapes an entire corona of sonnets by juxtaposing Breughel paintings with scenes of 9/11 and the collapse of the Twin Towers. In “The Music of Poetry” T.S. Eliot writes, “I believe that the tendency to return to set, and even elaborate patterns is permanent” (36), and in “Reflections on Vers Libre” he explains why: “It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse” (185). Former student Rose Grieder writes, “I encourage curiosity in that which is foreign to you.” If students habitually write in fixed forms they should be challenged to attempt free verse, and vice versa.

As human beings we are drawn to structure. When there is stone and wood, we build with these things. If we are beyond the tree line we build with snow. André Gide advises: “Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant” (299). Using structures imposed upon us, Julia Alvarez argues, makes us Scheherazade in the Sultan’s room: “I use structures to survive and triumph” (17). For the female poet, the journey through fixed forms of the past can be particularly vexed. “I wanted to go in that heavily mined and male labyrinth with the string of my own voice. I wanted to explore and explode it too” (17). Rita Dove asks, “Can’t form also be a talisman against disintegration? The sonnet defends itself against the vicissitudes of fortune by its charmed structure, its beautiful bubble. All the while, though, chaos is lurking outside the gate” (57). To keep poetic forms contemporary and compelling, we cannot, indeed must not, lose sight of the world around us, the world that presses on the perimeters of our created structures. We must be constantly forging connections between outside and in. Oliver again: “Assimilating the experiences and the references of the poetry of the past requires that our relationship with the physical world be fresh, forceful, and firsthand” (73). Only then can writing in forms be a surprising and sustaining gesture.

Students lacking a technical vocabulary often resort to the word flow in commenting on the work of their peers. “Whatever else may be happening within the prosody of a poem, the student is sure that it makes the poem ’flow.’ As a teacher, exasperated, I have forbidden students to use the word ’flow.’ But I will use it here. In some textbooks the poetic stanza is presented as a fixed pattern, a static shape to be replicated.… I prefer to think of the poetic stanza as a dynamic shape, a kind of river channel through which the syntax of the poem, with all its pent-up kinetic energy, all its forward momentum, must find a way, despite swerves and obstruction, to flow” (Adams 71). The metaphor of the river channel is particularly apt in revealing how the contemporary and kinetic use of classic patterns can help propel modern poetry through ancient stone. As we raid, warp, and push, the results of our labours can be full of movement, music, and if the muses are kind, magic.

According to Keith Mallard, “The enemy is not someone who writes differently from you. The enemy is the same old enemy who has always been around: someone who tries to tell you that there is only one way to write” (68). Or as Miller Williams argues in his introduction to Patterns of Poetry, “The freedom not to wear a tie is an illusion unless there is also freedom to wear one” (10). The word formal brings to mind uncomfortable and constricting ball gowns and tuxedos designed to impress, but Patricia Monaghan reminds us that the word actually derives “from a proletarian source, the molds used by potters” (Sellers 329). In this expansive era, we can both use the moulds and break them, as long as we do so with intelligence and imagination. Sometimes the way back can be the way forward.

Works Cited

Adams, Stephen. Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms and Figures of Speech. Peterborough: Broadview, 1997. Print.

Alvarez, Julia. “Housekeeping Cages.” A Formal Feeling Comes: Poem in Form by Contemporary Women. Brownsville, OR: Story Line, 1994. 16—18. Print.

Babstock, Ken. “Suspension, Evasion, and Inversion: A Conversation with Ken Babstock.” By Sina Queyras. Harriet. Poetry Foundation, 23 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Jul. 2012.

Beha, Christopher. “Oulipo Ends Where the Work Begins.” The Believer, Sep. 2006. Web. 20 Jul. 2012.

Bogan, Louise. “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry.” The Poet’s Work. Ed. Reginald Gibbons. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 203—14. Print.

Boland, Eavan. “Poetic Form: A Personal Encounter.” The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York: Norton, 2000. xxv—xxix. Print.

Cummins, James. “Calliope Music: Notes on the Sestina.” After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative and Tradition. Ashland, OR: Story Line, 1999. 133—43. Print.

Dove, Rita. “An Intact World.” A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Brownsville, OR: Story Line, 1994. 57—58. Print.

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