What is moving in a poem

In a way that these things sometimes happen, after I made my post yesterday about sincerity and form as an essential part of a poem, I ran across this interview with Mark Jarman in The Cortland Review for January 1999. Asked what he first noticed about a poem, Jarman said:

The first thing I notice about a poem, if I am reading it, is its shape on the page. After that, I notice all sorts of things. I wish I could claim that, like W. H. Auden, I looked first at what the poem was doing technically. But that’s not altogether true. I read the poem and expect it to move me. For that to happen I have to notice everything, of course, consciously and unconsciously. In one poem it will be an apt and surprising metaphor, in another it will be a particular way with rhythm.

What is noteworthy here is that it is the formal elements of the poem that Jarman mentions, not necessarily the sincerity of the speaker or the depth of emotion expressed. For Jarman, it seems, form and emotional impact are inseparable.

Jarman follows this statement up with a close analysis of the form of Emily Dickinson’s #341, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes�” For him the poem is moving because of the formal decisions Dickinson makes. I urge you to read at least the first two questions and answers. Jarman articulates what I have not.

Possibly related posts:

The shape of a poem

A. E. Stallings

Metric integration

Newsflash: poetry’s still dead

“the day it rained children”

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