Sherry Chandler

Form is to Content

Formal dynamics in a poem create content through shapes, feelings, attitudes, and structures that compose the poem. Content is more an attitute toward the work or toward language or toward the materials of the poem than some kind of subject that is in any way detachable from the handling of the materials. Content emerges from composition and cannot be detached from it; or, to put it another way, what is detachable is expendable to the poetic.

— Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Oddly enough, I find this marriage of form and content, which Bernstein likens to the body and the soul, most noticeable when working in form. If the idea of “prose broken into short lines” is that the “story” is more important than the form, then I find that working in formal constraints pushes me away from the narrative line, makes me, in the infamous words of Frost, surprise myself. A formal poem in which the narrative dominates the language is a very bad poem indeed.

I wonder whether it is this kind of thing that separates the novelist’s imagination from that of the poet. But I can’t bring myself to dismiss the importance of form for the novelist, else what difference between Hemingway and Faulkner.

I’ve long been wont to say “style is content.” People then ask me what I mean and I am stumped because what I’ve always thought I mean is that style is content. What you say and how you say it are inseparable.

Perhaps, after all, what I’ve meant all these years is that form is content.

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