The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

would not be considered

strange at all, although as

we shall see, how we

manage the lineation of our poems is not a question of random line

breaks, or it had better not be…

Our first clue that the written words on a page might qualify as poetry may indeed be offered by lineation, but an even more obvious indicator is the existence of stanzas. The word derives from the Italian for ‘stand’, which in turn developed into the word for ‘room’ (stanza di pranzo is ‘dining room’, for example). In everyday speech, in songwriting, hymn singing and many other popular genres a stanza will often be referred to as a verse (meaning ‘turn’, as in ‘reverse’, ‘subvert’, ‘diversion’ and so on). I will be keeping to the word stanza, allowing me to use verse in its looser sense of poetic material generally. Also, I like the image of a poem being a house divided into rooms. Some traditional verse forms have no stanzaic layout, for others it is almost their defining feature. But first we need to go deeper into this whole question of form…

What is Form and Why Bother with It?Stephen gets all cross

By form, just so that we are clear, we mean the defining structure of a genre or 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 variations and sub-categories have emerged: form can be undermined, hybridised and stretched almost to breaking point.

Poetic forms too can be cross-bred, subverted, made sport of, mutilated, sabotaged and rebelled against, but HERE IS THE POINT. If there is no suggestion of an overall scheme at work in the first place, then there is nothing to subvert or undermine: a whole world of possibility is closed off to you. Yes, you can institute your own structures, you can devise new forms or create a wholly original poetic manner and approach, but there are at least three major disadvantages to this. First, it is all too often a question of reinventing the wheel (all the trial-and-error discoveries and setbacks that poetic wheelwrights have undergone over two millennia to be caught up with in one short lifetime); second, and this flows from the first point, it is fantastically difficult and lonely; third, it requires the reader to know what you are up to. Since human beings first sang, recited and wrote they have been developing ways of structuring and presenting their verse. Most readers of poetry, whether they are aware of it or not, are instinctively familiar with the elemental forms–for a practising poet to be ignorant of them is foolish at best, perverse and bloody-minded at worst. We can all surely admit without sacrificing any cherished sense of our bold modernity and iconoclastic originality that a painter is in a better position to ignore the ‘rules’ of composition or perspective if he knows exactly what those rules are. Just because poems are made of our common currency, words, it does not mean that poets should be denied a like grounding and knowledge. Besides, as I have emphasised before, initiation into the technique of poetry is all part of becoming a poet and it is pleasurable: one is in the company of one’s forebears, one is not alone.

Ezra Pound, generally regarded as the principal founder of modernism, wrote of the need to refresh poetics: ‘No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliche, not from real life.’ He went further, asserting that extant poetical language and modes were in fact defunct, he declared war on all existing formal structures, metre, rhyme and genre. We should observe that he was a researcher in Romance languages, devoted to medieval troubadour verse, Chinese, Japanese, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian forms and much besides. His call to free verse was not a manifesto for ignorant, self-indulgent maundering and uneducated anarchy. His poems are syntactically and semantically difficult, laden with allusion and steeped in his profound knowledge of classical and oriental forms and culture: they are often laid out in structures that recall or exactly follow ancient forms, cantos, odes and even, as we shall discover later, that most strict and venerable of forms, the sestina. Pound was also a Nazi-sympathising, anti-Semitic,¹ antagonistic son of a bitch as it happens: he wasn’t trying to open poetry for all, to democratise verse for the kids and create a friendly free-form world in which everyone is equal. But if the old fascist was right in determining that his generation needed to get away from the heavy manner and glutinous cliches 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 ones 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 an 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.

Add a feeble-minded kind of political correctness to the mix (something Pound would certainly never have countenanced) and 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 free-form meanderings: ‘prose-therapy’ about covers it, ‘emotional masturbation’, perhaps; auto-omphaloscopy might be an acceptable coinage–gazing at one’s own navel. Let us reserve the word ‘poetry’ for something worth fighting for, an ideal we can strive to live up to.

What, then, is the solution? Greeting-card verse? Pastiche? For some the answer lies in the street poetry of rap, hip-hop, reggae and other musically derived discourses: unfortunately this does not suit my upbringing, temperament and talents; I find these modes, admirable as they no doubt are, as alien to my cultural heritage and linguistic tastes as their practitioners no doubt find Browning and Betjeman, Pope, Cope and Heaney. I will try to address this problem at the end of the book, but for now I would urge you to believe that a familiarity with form will not transform you into a reactionary bourgeois, stifle your poetic voice, imprison your emotions, cramp your style, or inhibit your language–on the contrary, it will liberate you from all of these discomforts. Nor need one discourse be adopted at the expense of another, eclecticism is as possible in poetry as in any other art or mode of cultural expression.

There are, to my mind, two aesthetics available when faced by the howling, formless, uncertain, relative and morally contingent winds that buffet us today. One is to provide verse of like formlessness and uncertainty, another is (perhaps with conscious irony) to erect a structured shelter of form. Form is not necessarily a denial of the world’s loss of faith and structure, it is by no means of necessity a nostalgic evasion. It can be, as we shall see, a defiant, playful and wholly modern response.

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 verse, the experimental and the avant-garde or