Why Formal Poetry?
Jim January 22nd, 2008
The obvious question is, why formal poetry? Didn’t that go out? Why do we want to go back to that stuff? Isn’t free verse freer?
Well, there is one main assumption that underlies those questions, that we here at The Road Not Taken would question, and that is the assumption that somehow poetry, and society is evolving into ever better and higher forms. That what is past is archaic and has been replaced by what is better. I think we extrapolate this from the progress of our technology, which has been becoming more clever. I am not sure I want to say ‘improving.’ But that is another discussion. However, art is not technology, and the analogy that many people assume without question is false and deceiving.
Formal poetry is formal in the sense that it has form. I have students who think it’s formal in the sense one wears a tux to a formal dance. No, it has form. Free verse, which became popular in the 20th century, reflected the post war sense that traditional patterns were restricting. To the Postmodern world, pattern was as irrelevant as tradition. I would argue that this attitude has done much to lead to the Postmodern sense of malaise. We have first concluded the world was formless, and then it should be no surprise that we quickly thereafter conclude that the world is mad and meaningless. Free verse is the poetry of this mad Postmodern world.
So if Don and I seem like a couple of anachronistic madmen, it’s because we hold to the notion that form implies an ordered world. Form implies the possibility of sanity, of objectivity balancing subjectivity. That’s why I believe the best free verse is actually very subtly formal. It’s not that Don and I want to bring back the past. We want to restore a measure of sanity to this vital, though often ignored, art form.
This, I believe, is behind the question my students often ask, when they’ve read some formless bit of free verse and ask, “so what’s the difference between this and prose?” They are right: the rejection of form ultimately results in the rejection of boundaries and the inability to know anything at all. As Lear says, “No, no, that way madness lies.” So welcome to The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry, and welcome to Don and my small crusade for a little bit of sanity in the world.