The Content and Form Debate, part 1

OK, on poetics, chumps.

Here's an issue that's been bugging me lately. Why is it that in the workshop environment, some sort of question about form's relationship to content invariably comes up?

Foremost, I feel that it can be a valid question. And secondly, I feel that it is a cop-out that people use to say something about a poem when they have nothing useful to say otherwise.

Here is why it is a valid question:

1. We poets are not just spewing forth disconnected words and bits of syntax. We are arrangers who use things like lines, stanzas, and other more trickstery units to organize bits of language for a given effect. And so questions of form seem to be along the lines of craft questions, which are often taboo when talked about seriously.

2. Content is sort of a bad marker as to the excellence of a given poet. Not what you say but how you say it, right? Right.

Here is why it is a cop-out:

1. The question implies a reductive reading of form based on mimesis. If I am writing about a river, say, does my form need to resemble either in shape or feel a river? That, it seems to me, would be TOO CUTE. And too cute is not what I want my poems to be.

Don't get me wrong, I like when the poem's form matches the emotional context of the poem. But in those case, I feel that the poem, so well-wrought, is a multi-sensory experience that captures the whole person. If the poem is just going to engage me in like bits of sight-games and intellectual cutesiness, then I just as soon read fiction, which I like and which doesn't have any pretensions when it comes to form.

2. Did Shakespeare consider whether the form of the Shakespearean sonnets "matched" the content of said sonnets? Are Berryman's Dream Songs so overdetermined in form so that you can say things like "this form is hiding away the way Huffy Henry is doing the same"? No. That would be simplistic. Yes, the form seems to us appropriate for the subject matter, but it isn't some one-to-one analogy. It is the particularities of the way the poet strings the words together in patterns, organizing it using either traditional or made-up schemes that constitutes forms. But in this sense, form is more like ritual circumstances in speech, i. e. types of rhetoric. Though this poetic rhetoric is different than a rhetoric for "making a point." To develop later, but suffice it to say that the masters used forms a little more complexly than the average workshop goer assumes is possible in poetry.

3. A hundred years ago, poetry was only beginning to break the pentameter and other classical meters and forms. Now that we are in a free form era, we seem to need to overcompensate for what seems like a monumental lack of effort in craft. And so we want all our "forms" to mimic the content of the poem instead of having the two qualities have a dynamic relationship with one another that does not need to be explained by sloppy periphrasis. This goes for both poems in traditional meter, nouveau form, invented this-or-that, or whathaveyou. Presumably, we poets are still toiling away at something, and it wouldn't be worth much, or be that magical, if any schmuck in an MFA program could reduce our form to a simple, narrative sentence or two or try to undermine our craft when our tree poems don't look like trees.

Boo YA!