Sherry Chandler » Tuesday Musings
Tuesday Musings
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.”
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8 Comments
1. andrea replies at 12th June 2007, 10:53 am :
Hi Sherry, I’ve been following your West Chester experiences with great interest. I’m looking forward to hearing more in person. Did you have a chance to talk with Marilyn? She played such an important role in my early development as a poet; I’m interested to hear more about what she said. In her classes we talked a little about the poetry wars, but I saw them as a thing of the past. It’s interesting that some of the wounds are still fresh. It seems to me that poets today have the best of both worlds–all the tools and opportunities of formal and free verse before us (this probably just goes to show what an isolated writer I am).
2. sherry replies at 12th June 2007, 11:13 am :
I wish I could remember more, Andrea. In fact, I was thinking of trying to contact Marilyn to see whether she might share the paper she read. I was impressed by her presentation and by her management of the panel, of which she was moderator. She spoke only briefly, though, to give the other panel members more time.
I was actually expecting something different from the panels, more of a conversation, but for the most part it was set up so that each member spoke for a few minutes and then at the end they’d take questions if there was time.
However, if you are an example of a Taylor-taught poet, then I’d say she’s a great teacher.
3. Heraclitean Fire – &hellip replies at 13th June 2007, 5:29 am :
[...] Sherry Chandler » Tuesday Musings ‘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.’ (tags: poetry formalism blogs) [...]
4. Rebecca Clayton replies at 13th June 2007, 11:47 am :
“The Poetry Wars”–I meant to comment yesterday, but was disabled by a miserable flashback to the many scientific conferences I attended. The taxonomy wars, the embryology wars, the genomic sequencing wars–those dismal academic conferences are one reason I’m photographinc garden bugs on Droop Mountain instead of writing grant proposals at some institute of higher learning.
On the other hand, I never attended a workshop where work happened, or learned about sonnets from a marvelously-named poet. (Molly Peacock! Imagine!)
5. sherry replies at 13th June 2007, 2:40 pm :
Molly Peacock was certainly value added, Rebecca. Sorry to bring back bad memories but I’m glad to know you’ve found a better life. I enjoy your blog too much to think of you living some other way.
6. Jilly replies at 19th June 2007, 4:43 pm :
I attended in 2004. I like many contemporary poets who write in form and I write in form sometimes, myself. It was a little partisan for my tastes. Maybe I’ll go back again someday.
7. sherry replies at 20th June 2007, 6:24 am :
Welcome here, Jilly. Although it’s true that what you might call “official” West Chester is doctrinaire, I found a lot more tolerance among attendees and quite a few presenters. To some extent, some of the West Chester faculty are still fighting the last war. (Is that sentence qualified enough, do you think?) In poets like Marilyn Taylor and Molly Peacock, however, what we’re seeing is a sort of fusion of free verse and form. Such a fusion strikes me as only good for poets because it gives us a broader range of possibilities.
For myself, I started experimenting with form several years ago and I find that it keeps challenging me in ways that free verse does not (at present), so I went to West Chester just to see what I could learn. I also went to study with Molly Peacock because she blows off the form when it suits her and I wanted to maybe absorb some of her confidence in working semi-formally. How do you weave in and out of form without looking as though you’ve failed at form?
I learned a lot. And I met a lot of interesting lively people. So the experiences was a great success. Whether or not I’m a convert remains to be seen.
8. Sherry Chandler » A&hellip replies at 23rd September 2007, 6:56 am :
[...] Once upon a time, free verse poets called New Formalist poets “scum” and “the Republicans of poetry” (an insult that is taking on force again), but perhaps they didn’t start it. Traditional prosodists of the late 19th, early 20th century were not too kind to free verse poets either: If “free verse” were to be admitted as verse at all, everything that had been achieved in the study of prosody would have to be rethought. Verse itself was defined, and still is in many dictionaries, as “metrical composition.” …But the issue was larger still. If the definition of verse were in question, so would be the nature of poetry, with which was habitually confused. And poetry was the pinnacle of civilized achievement, part of “what we fought the war for” against the barbarian Hun. …The prosodic theorists were defending civilization itself. Hence the almost apoplectic attacks on the New Poets: “These men are the Reds of literature; they would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and standards upon which literature is founded” [John Burroughs in Current Opinion, 1921]. At the time, this was not even hyperbole, but metonymy. Meter equals verse, equals poetry, equals culture, equals civilization. [...]
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