Sherry Chandler

At the West Chester Poetry Conference, I’ll have to admit, I sometimes felt like a displaced person in the poetry wars. And like most displaced persons, I was completely innocent and ignorant of the politics of the conflict.

West Chester is not just formalist but ideologically formalist.

Duh.

Well, I knew it was about formal poetry but I wasn’t quite prepared for the defensiveness.

I attended, for example, a panel called “The Movement and New Formalism.” Being mostly ignorant of any prosodic theory since Ezra Pound, I hoped to learn something. What I got was a licking of decades-old wounds. “They called us scum and the Republicans of poetry.” (Interesting that the latter was felt as an insult—on both sides, apparently: meant as an insult, received as an insult.) What I learned was the way in which all of the panelists had been privileged to kiss the hem of Thom Gunn’s robe.

I think there may be those who carry a splinter of Philip Larkin’s bones in a reliquary.

I am inclined to enjoy Thom Gunn’s work. I completely failed to see his halo.

R. S. Gwynn made a great show, at his reading, of these new translations he was about to share. The translations were of work by Ann Carson and Louise Glück.

I laughed like everybody else but I thought I detected a slight taste of sour grapes.

X. J. Kennedy read versions of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the styles of W. S. Merwyn, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell. These were hilarious, and Kennedy did preface his readings with a gracious admission that you can only parody that which you truly love.

Kennedy and Gwynn are great favorites at the conference, maybe because they are funny and very entertaining readers. I was impressed, at a panel called “Prosodies for the Twenty-First Century,” at the clarity and intelligence of Gwynn’s presentation on the vagaries of scansion. He argued that it has to be the ear and not the eye that is trained to detect the meter.

That panel I will remember for the delight of Thomas Cable’s jig to his reading of the fourteenth century poem “Alysoun:”

Bytuene Mershe and Averil
When spray biginneth to springe,
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge:
Ich libbe in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe,
Ich am in hire baundoun.

An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent,
Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
From alle wymmen my love is lent
And lyht on Alysoun.

(Translation here. I can’t vouch for it.)

The other highlight of this panel was Marilyn Taylor’s argument that there is a truce now in the poetry wars, a sort of detente has been found in what Taylor called “semi-formal” verse, a synthesis that poets are finding between the strictures of both free verse and formalism. Vers liber Vers libére*, I think she said, not vers libre.

This is where I buy in. My interest in form is strictly pragmatic. I don’t have much in the way of the “bottom feeders” that Jim Hall talks about, no secret, hidden depths. In fact, I’ve worked hard all my life to develop honesty and openness. My personal traumas have been small ones and such wounds as I’ve received I have not much inclination to rehearse in verse.

Form gives me a way to work in language to find such truths as I know. It’s what I think poetry is supposed to do.

I also want to master meter in the way that musicians run the scales. Impossible to improvise well unless you’ve got the scales in your muscle memory.

In the end, craft is all I have and I can’t see limiting my development of craft through loyalty to any ideology.

*I have been in touch with Marilyn Taylor, who has graciously shared the text of her remarks and allowed me to correct my inaccurate ear. The term vers libére was coined by Graham Hough in the 1960s to describe poetry “that is technically free verse, but that is still very much informed by traditional meters.”

Intriguingly enough, the poem Taylor picked to exemplify this semi-formal hybrid prosody is also built on sonnet scaffolding: Marie Ponsot’s “Out of Eden.”