On Form in Poetry, Music and Art

On Form in Poetry, Music and Art by K. Titchenell - Saturday, 20 March 2010, 11:42 AM

The following excerpts from The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry characterise, far better than I every could, the role of form in poetry and the bleak, undifferentiated maunderings into which free verse can degenerate. Please read it and present your thoughts. By form, just so that we are clear, we mean the defining structure of a genre of type. When we say formal, the word should not be thought of as bearing any connotations of stiffness, starchiness, coldness or distance -- formal for our purposes simply means 'of form', morphological if you like. In music, some examples of form would be sonata, concerto, symphony, fugue and overture. In television, common forms include sit-com, soap, documentary, mini-series, chat show and single drama. Over the years docu-dramas, drama-docs, mockumentaries and a host of other variation and subcategories have emerged. ... If [Ezra Pound] was right in determining that his generation needed to get away from the heavy manner and glutinous clichés of Victorian verse, its archaic words and reflex tricks of poetical language, and all out-dated modes of expression and thought in order to free itself for a new century, is it not equally true that we need to escape from the dreary, self-indulgent, randomly lineated drivel that today passes for poetry for precisely the same reasons? After a hundred years of free verse and Open Field poetry the condition of English-language poetics is every bit as tattered and tired as that which Pound and his coevals inherited. 'People find ideas a bore', Pound wrote, 'because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed one on a shelf.' Unfortunately the tide has turned and now it is some of Pound's once new ideas that have been stuffed and shelved and become a bore. He wrote in 1910: 'The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.' It might be tempting to agree that 'the art of letters' has indeed come to and end, and to wonder whether a doctrinaire abandonment of healthy, living forms for the sake of a dogma of stillborn originality might not have to shoulder some of the responsibility for such a state of affairs. ... it is a wonder that any considerable poetry at all has been written over the last fifty years. It is as if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be. Surely better to use another word for such fee-form meanderings... Let us reserve the word 'poetry' for something worth fighting for, an ideal we can strive to live up to. ... Looking back over the last few paragraphs I am aware that you might think me a dreadful, hidebound old dinosaur. I assure you I am not. I am uncertain why I should feel the need to prove this, but I do want you to understand that I am far from contemptuous of Modernism, and free ferse, the experimental and the avant-garde or of the poetry of the streets. Whitman, Cummings, O'Hara, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Jandl, Olsen, Ginsberg, Pound and Zephaniah are poets that have given me, and continue to give me immense pleasure. I do not despise free verse. Read this: Post c***um omne animal triste i see you ! you come closer improvident with your coming then -- stretched to scratch -- is it a trick of the light? -- i see you worlded with pain but of necessity not weeping cigaretted and drinked loaded against yourself you seem to yes bold irreducible but nuded and afterloved you are not so strong are you ? after all There's the problem. The above is precisely the kind of worthless *** dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition. It took me under a minute and a half to write and while I dare say you can see what utter *** it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry. All the clichés are there, pointless lineation, meaningless punctuation and presentation, fatuous creations of new verbs ... -- every pathology is presented. Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also listless, utterly drained of energy and drive -- a common problem with much contemporary art but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all in fact. 'Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.' Robert Frost wrote. Not much of a game at all, really.