The shape of a poem

I am taking an eight-week poetry class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Called “The Path of a Poem,” the class is led by Leatha Kendrickk. I take Leatha’s classes whenever they’re offered because she is not only a fine poet and a fine teacher with a wide-ranging knowledge of poetry and prosody but also because her classes always attract the best poets in the area, so the quality of the discussion is high and often technical.

All of which leads me to my point, which is that last night was my night to be critiqued and I had submitted the sonnet crown that has been languishing in my drawer in one form or another for, well, ten years if you go back to some of the root ideas.

The verdict last night was the same as always: there’s some great stuff here but it doesn’t quite make it all the way there.

I ask myself why I keep resurrecting this monster. Over the years I’ve been forced to abandon any number of poems by the knowledge that they were never going to quite make it. As William Stafford says, we have to write our bad poems as well as our good ones.

But this poem is different.

Maybe it’s just my way of running scales. Even master musicians have to do it. Maybe this is just my practice piece, the poem where I burnish up my formal chops.

But why bother with form? Part of the reason is explained by this passage I ran across this morning reading in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones. Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). The question was: Would you be offended to be called a formalist?. The answer, in part:

I wouldn’t be offended but I think it would be a mistake. “Formalist” to me sounds like a kind of doctrinaire position. I totally believe in form; but quite often, when people use the term, they mean shape rather than form. There’s the sonnet shape, fair enough, but it’s not just a matter of rhyming the eight lines and the other six; they happen to be set one on top of each other like two boxes, but they’re more like a torso and pelvis. There has to be a little bit of muscle movement, it has to be alive in some sort of way. A moving poem doesn’t just mean that it touches you, it means it has to move itself along as a going linguistic concern. Form is not like a pasty cutter — the dough has to move and discover its own shape. [p. 447]

If you think about that — you don’t impose a sonnet shape on a poem, you write a poem that discovers its shape as a sonnet.

Sounds mystical but it’s a matter of running the scales until your fingers bleed and then, if you also have some talent (not necessarily genius), you can improvise, you can be free-form within the form.

I think that’s why I keep worrying at my sonnet crown. Every time I ratchet it up to the next level of competence, I discover a level beyond that.

If I can get it right, maybe I’ll have become a poet.

Which, when I think about it, will never happen. If one practices poetry, one is always becoming. That’s part of the deal.