The Metrical Persuasion

One of the sempiternal arguments in poetry, even as authors acknowledge that poetry must be representative of all voices in order to be culturally significant, is the factional contest for the validity of the forms we use to express our ideas. Some critics, when reviewing the "mature" works of modern poets, consider traditional forms and meter as a relic, part of the writer's juvenalia, to be given up to find an authentic voice. If you've read poems like this by Philip Levine:

Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong ...

one often feels instead that the traditional touchpoints were discarded when the budding craftsman met the limit of his talent or patience.  From this point, the writer often talks about the new freedom in his or her work rather than the rewarding perserverance that comes with mastering an intricate art; to preserve the notion of techné, one then will often argue for imagery as the differentiator and count peculiar line breaks as redemptive.  When in defense, the argument over the techniques that at minimum establish the work as art for those who disparage traditional forms cannot help in the end feel fussy or sour. 

(As an aside, I often feel that poems like the one cited above, as ridiculous as the catalogue of food is, could truly use the distraction of rhyme and meter so that we can for a moment forget how desperately we wish a potato and some onions all got stuck in the back of his throat.)

On the other side, I do not think it is too fine to say that there are those who consider classical forms such as the sonnet an integral and living part of an important tradition, as well as a fundamental part of guild membership to an art form, a craft (as opposed to an open party for an amorphous class of diarists). All mythologies are available and nothing in the foundation of our experience, our past, is extinct to them, even as the experience is transformed in the modern element.  What is universal is a continuing experience and we find we are able to return to the lyrics of "Sumer is Icumen In" with the same felicitious expectation as the season of that first praise. Because traditionalists draw their forms and allusions from far-gone models, they are a group often associated with a specialized training, with all the responsibilities and resentments due them.   

However, it must be said that those resentments are not without justification. Until the Harlem Renaissance and the work of the Objectivists, there were few real invitations available for marginalized writers. Without those bold declarations, we would certainly have no opportunity for what is most vital and free in poetry now (though I do confess that I prefer Countee Cullen as much as I appreciate Langston Hughes; and I assert that Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is as supreme a revolutionary tract as it is a work of art because it is a work of song; the same with Swinburne's "On the Russian Persecution of the Jews"...)  Work from Levine and Matthew Dickman stands to speak to the proletarian quality in every person, with the idea (professed or not) that traditional poetry more often than not excludes the workman's experience and modes.  The canon is a foregone elite, not in an artistic sense but in a class sense, a stain of imperial exclusion. For those who continue to see any kind of classicism or academic interest as elitist, the continuing popularity of artists like Robert Frost and TS Eliot may be less baffling if explained away more by their general availability in a traditional market than on superseding merit; it seems the battle cry is, "Write for the common man and the common man will come," though I suspect that for this group, the readership is still the same as it is for traditionalists, comprised in the majority by other poets and academics. Academics and those with academic curiosity are the only people you'll find who will drink themselves to death as well as take time to read poems about drinking themselves to death.  When the common man applies to either of those groups, he joins your real base.

While I happen to side with the traditionalists in the matter, I am not willing to advocate that there is a proper approach to poetry, either in subject or form, in intention or expression. Life is at once broad and small and only the high and the low together can capture It; the high and the low require only every possibility to convoke them. I am therefore convinced that those with real talent can make a masterpiece in any form, on any subject, in any mode of expression. It is my opinion that the best poets show the best range throughout their body of work. Where poetry is concerned, we live in a time of real liberty, provided we can put away the divisive meritocracies of formal verse and vers libre in favor of the hallmarks of the art: imagination, diction, empathy, music, historicity, worship and vision. The base unit of poetry is moment.

All of this was brought to mind after reading the submission guidelines to Punchnel's:


"If you send us something sing-songy (overt use of meter and/or rhyme), we’ll assume it’s supposed to be funny, and we’ll treat it as such. Doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t publish it, though. We like funny."

Few things are as beautiful and less awkwardly humorous as Frost's "Acquainted with the Night", an apex poem where overt meter and rhyme is concerned and yet the presumption is that this poem, according to these guidelines, would be grossly out of touch.  To be fair to Punchnel's, I hardly believe they are talking about this kind of achievement and are doing all they can to stave off an eagre of clotted poetry (I'm sure they've seen the worst of it); and to defend them further, they have not also said they are averse to publishing metered work.  But it is interesting to me that the form is the culpable part in the matter rather than the execution as a whole (as form is an inextricable part of a poem, along with the hallmarks earlier stated.)  It plays to the prejudice against traditional poetry in many circles currently prevailing and as such takes no elaboration or qualification, finishing its argument a fortiori, to wit, that form being out-dated therefore content and song cannot have any contemporary power.  We do not do ourselves any favors in poetry when we dismiss opportunities or balance what we know with what we assume. How else will we ever get anything new?  Or should we give up because the way is hard or our first works are not gratifying?  Whatever we choose, we best uphold freedom in the arts when we assert that tradition and novelty have equal potential.

                                                   

                                                                                             ~William Frank