red bamboo
I can understand my poetic grandparents of the 1920s and 1930s wanting to throw off the mantle of Formal poetry; let's face it, after Romanticism the idea that perhaps rhyming poetry had gotten a bit stale, that forms for forms sake did not make the best verse was, I am sure, a revolutionary idea. Why not chuck the whole thing out the window and start over again? Why bother rhyming at all? World War II was looming in Europe and perhaps the poets of West had good reason to believe no one was going to survive. Why not break a few rules before it was too late?
I suppose doomsayers, like many types of poetry, get their day in the sun, become popular and then are shunted aside for the next depressing thing when whatever it is they claimed failed to materialize. I bring this up because there are people out in our world who have been making rather outrageous claims right now — “the Death of Irony,” “the End of Postmodernism,” “Kill the Villanelle” — and perhaps from their point of view all that might be true, regardless of any validity found among the rest of us.
In his Introduction to the anthology, American Sonnets, David Bromwich illustrates this by pointing out that just because a handful of people say it's the end of a form (or the world) does not necessarily make it so. Musing about the giant explosion in creativity seen in the beginning of the 20th Century, he writes:
… Early in the last century, there was a crisis of belief in conventional forms, which made poets and critics think hard about why a tradition like the sonnet should persist. Responding to this situation in “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917), T. S. Eliot observed that modern poets could renew old genres such as mock-epic even as they burned through more recently favored modes like the naturalist novel. His prognosis was uncertain. “We only need the coming of a satirist,” Eliot guessed, “to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge since Dryden and Pope laid it down,” but other forms were in direr straits: “As for the sonnet I am not so sure.” Newness was not the determiner of value, for Eliot; of vers libre he remarked “it is the battle cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art.” But with his well-earned skepticism, he almost persuaded himself that the sonnet was dead. (xxxvii - xxxiix)
And for some time Eliot has appeared correct. Vers libre, also known as Free verse, has held sway in American academia for many years now. It is not necessarily a bad thing when something once seen as radical, a fresh idea, is now canonized by the establishment, I suppose. But, in the same way that once the dominate culture finds out about something — be it hip hop, jazz, Abstract art or Robert Mapplethorpe — whatever sting that Avant-garde idea possessed tends to disappear rather quickly.
Again, just because the sting is gone now does not mean we should get rid of it. Why suggest, as Eliot did, that we need to get rid of a whole form simply because the artists of our time might not have the creative skills to do right by it? To make a claim that any form — regardless of the banal work turned out by a thousand years of talentless hacks — should be considered “dead” is either asinine or egotistical. Perhaps you, Mr. Eliot, do not have the skill to breath new life into a certain form, but why ruin it for the rest of us?
I write sonnets for one reason only; they are a lot of fun. So is Free verse. So are Villenelles. A form of poetry is just that; a shape that allows a poet to do certain things. To blame a form for those who curse or champion it is just as silly as dismissing once edgy poets like Ginsberg or Bukowski simply because they are being taught in academia now. Perhaps right now the sting in certain forms is gone, but given enough time and creativity it will be back.
First I bought a shoot of red bamboo, less
than a foot, and took down the eel-like blade
with the gap jaw handbone. I must confess
it took a day to carve them. I'm afraid
three was all I could master. Then I found
the old clay pot fashioned out of nightshade
and blood. I filled it and then lit a round
fire down low. I carved a question and laid
it on a wood scrap, set it to blaze: who
is out there? The fires crackled until
A.M.E.X.Q. was spelled. What blithesome
spirit are you, love? Next: I wait for you.
My last bamboo cutting was prayer: when will
you come? Hurry spirit – when will you come?
…
Work Cited
Bromwich, David (ed.) American Sonnets. New York: Library of America. (2007)