Sherry Chandler

I sort of like this little passage from O Body Swayed to Music, part 1, which is R. T. Smith’s review of books on prosody at Poetry Daily:

This does seem a particularly interesting time for taking stock of how poetry writing is taught because I perceive a kind of yin-yang effect on the scene just now. On the one hand, this is the era of unlimited permission when students are often encouraged to say what they feel before they think about what they feel. This trend is augmented by the ineffectiveness of subtle effects when poetry is performed in bars and contests, both of which seem to me to encourage unmediated indulgence and exhibitionism. In counterpoint to this, formal verse is again in vogue; many poets are writing pithy quatrains and terza rima while suggesting that anyone who doesn’t work this way is lazy or sloppy or just plain ignorant. Although I’ll have to go along with Henry Taylor, who said at a conference last year that he didn’t see anything new in the versification he and others (Wilbur, Voigt, Huggins) have been practicing all along, I don’t think a new surge of interest in prosody will damage anyone, so long as it’s understood as a surge and not a second coming.

I hope this surge is more effective than the one we’re about to witness in Iraq.

Sorry — can’t stay away from politics.

Anyway, I stand about where Mr. Smith stands on this issue, a position you might describe as firmly on the fence. I try to appreciate all poetry on its merits. But if you consider performance poetry and high formality to be sort of the two ends of the poetry see-saw, I’d probably put my weight with formality. But by and large, I’m like Bob Dylan: “It’s all music.”

If you’re trying to sort your way through the embarassment of riches in poetry how-to books, I recommend this series.