Diversity, Constraint, and the Resurgence of Poetic Form
This essay first appeared in American Poetry Review, January 2020
To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structured (not merely decorated, but structured — which means constrained) by the repetition of any language element(s).
Because any repeating language element can structure/constrain a poem, the continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwhelmingly obvious ones. When we think of poetic constraint, we usually think first of discernible language operations. Depending on our aesthetic bent, we might think of an Oulipo poem by Harry Mathews, a poem using a nonce procedure by Joan Retallack, or a poem such as Harryette Mullen’s “Dim Lady,” which constrains itself to sentences that hew to those in Shakespeare’s sonnet 130:
Dim Lady
My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon. Today’s special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, red and white, but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love to hear her rap, yet I’m aware that Muzak has a hipper beat. I don’t know any Marilyn Monroes. My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who’s hyped beyond belief.
(Harryette Mullen, from Sleeping With the Dictionary)
At the fully obvious end of the constraint continuum, we find poems structured by numerous overlapping and highly perceptible constraints, such as those of an ancient, oral-based Celtic form called the Rionnard Tri-nard which has these rules:
● The poem has four hexasyllabic lines ending in disyllabic words.
● Line 2 rhymes with line 4.
● Line 3 consonates with both of them.
● There are two cross-rhymes [in which the end of one line rhymes with the beginning of the other line] in the second couplet, but none in the first.
● There is alliteration in each line.
● The last syllable of line 1 alliterates with the first accented syllable of line 2.
● The poem ends with the same first syllable, line, or word with which it begins.
Years ago, I was asked to compose a Rionnard Tri-nard — the first ever written in English — to demonstrate the form for Lewis Turco’s Book of Odd and Invented Forms. It soon became clear that the only way to focus enough to write such a challenging form would be to isolate myself. Luckily I had a short hiking trip scheduled with my daughter on the Appalachian Trail. I kept the poem in my back pocket and brought nothing else to think about. Still, that little poem was extremely challenging; the four lines took three and a half days to write.
Even after a lifetime devoted to poetic form, the exigencies of composing a Rionnard Tri-nard yielded revelations, clarifications, and electrifying surprises. For one thing, although formalism is often regarded nowadays as a sterile, academic, left-brained approach to poetry, the form had so many different rules, some of which narrowly missed precluding others, that logical, left-brain thinking was useless. If I had ever suspected that the main purpose of formal constraint is to stop a poet from thinking, forcing the intuitive self to produce the poem, this experience confirmed it. It also confirmed my suspicion that form is essentially pre-literary; although an early instinct was to use paper and pen to keep track of the restrictions, it soon became clear that the Rionnard Tri-nard is not a good form for paper. It was most helpful simply to gaze at the earth or the trees, or to meditate on the poem in the darkness of the tent.
Wandering in and out of the edges of the form, I began to wonder about the poets who had invented it: Celtic bards — and the still higher-ranking poets, the “filid” and “ollam” — like those described in poet Patricia Monaghan’s essays on Celtic culture. Monaghan claims that the Celts respected poets even more than priests; poets were the only people allowed to wear a certain rainbow-colored robe, the only ones allowed to criticize a king. Wrestling with these teeny four lines gave a sense of the searing mental focus and power these bards would have developed in the course of memorizing hundred of meters and other poetic labors (one can’t say “literary” labors, because letters had nothing to do with it; the form was developed by the poets — women as well as men, by the way — of an oral tradition long before written poetry).
The skills of crafting language in repeating forms were not only used by the Celts, of course; it seems clear that the same kinds of oral compositional technologies were used across the globe before the invention of writing. Think, for example, of the techniques of the griots of the Mandinka culture in West Africa, the Anglo-Saxon skalds, and the Norse volurs; the payada tradition in Latin America and the ghana of Malta; the Homeric epics, the Vedas in India, and the rhyming structure of the Qur’an in Arabic. All must have used the same basic tools of repetition with variation; rhythm and meter; oral formulae that can fit needed ideas into certain positions in a metrical line; memorization; and a long apprenticeship. All must have required similar skills: metrical fluency, verbal ingenuity, spontaneity grounded deeply in tradition, and above all a deep devotion to the patient, basically physical labor of working and reworking the physical reality of language, the temporal, sensual, body-centered materials of the poet’s craft.
This brings us to an interesting question. These techniques of poetry developed before writing, and it is clear that the major motivation was to make it possible to memorize poems; meter and form are ideal memory aids, essential in an oral culture. But then what is their use today? What good are such body-centered poetic skills in a contemporary W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) society, to use the acronym coined by anthropologist Joseph Henrich? Digital cameras and audio recording have opened space for stage-based as opposed to page-based poetry, and reminded us that poetry is originally a performance art, even if the audience is sometimes the solitary self. But when every performance can instantly be recorded and shared, so that memory feels superfluous, is there any reason for poets still to rely on poetic constraints originally devised to aid in memorizing a culture’s myths, legends, and rituals?
One answer was provided recently by a poet speaking about the necessity for constraint in a way that had nothing at all to do with memorizing. At a reading last fall at Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C., Lorraine Graham recounted the process she used to compose a poetic series: “I realized I needed to use constraints to put me into the space of the poem. I was riding the bus every day, and I tended to get motion sickness. So the first constraint I developed was that I had to sit next to someone else to write. Even if there was only one other person on the bus, I’d sit next to them. The second constraint was that I would have to keep writing until I felt nauseous.”
Graham’s compositional tools would fall on the far other end of the continuum from those that structure the Rionnard Tri-nard, but they worked perfectly to bring her into the space of poetic process by performing the work that poetic constraints do. And between these two farflung ends of the poetic spectrum — a tightly knotted, rhymed, repeating, conventionally-shaped ancient traditional form composed in the mind while walking on the one hand, and a free verse text aiming to be one-of-a-kind both in every line and in the poem’s shape as a whole, written in a spiral notebook on a bus, on the other hand— fall every other type of poem that I, at least, can imagine.
Every poem, I would argue, is shaped by constraints — even if the main one is simply a decision to write until you feel nauseous. Constraints don’t have to be visible, audible, palpable, or even perceptible by the reader or listener. And they certainly don’t have to be complex. The simplest, most unassuming contemporary free-verse lyric is constrained, by repeating line-breaks at the end of each line. The idea of constraint is very broad nowadays, since poetic constraints no longer need to serve as a technology for memorization. But constraints still operate in poems, to bridge the left brain/conscious/mental process of thinking/using language and the right brain/unconscious/physical process of doing/repeating/enacting.
As Monaghan and many others have pointed out, poets were treated with deep reverence in ancient times in every culture about which we have knowledge. One reason, obviously, was because poets, before writing, were storehouses of cultural knowledge whose memories held history, genealogy, mythology, thealogy, and literature. But the other reason is that they bridged worlds and brain hemispheres. No wonder poetry holds a revered place in our culture still. Like the structures of ceremonies, spells, prayers, and charms, poetic constraints limit the inhibiting power of our logical minds and can open us to a creative energy that feels larger than ourselves.
After the Rionnard Tri-Nard was finished and I wrote it down, I lay in the darkness and moved my mind into and out of its turns and patterns, feeling as if I were fingering a Celtic brooch. A completeness grew inside my consciousness, like the peace that can come from a challenging meditation. Then I imagined the ancient bards (in Celtic culture, bards were women and men both, like the griots of West Africa), following these same twisting journeys through the long quiet nights, turning these same interlinking poetic patterns over and over:
Rune
Ring of words, each woken
By craft, felt past fearing,
Set to sing clear among
Us here, hung in hearing.
One of the most important recent developments in contemporary poetry is the ingenious and energetic reclamation of poetic form among poets of color. A new resurgence of formal energy has birthed work by poets from a range of aesthetics including Terrance Hayes, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tina Chang, Amanda Johnston, Jessica Piazza, Victoria Chang, Solmaz Sharif, and many others. They join poets who have made form a concern for some time, including Amit Majmudar, Rafael Campo, Alexandra Oliver, Tim Seibles, Alberto Rios, Moira Egan, Rick Barot, Tara Betts, Pat Mora and Afaa Michael Weaver. Influential books such as Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard (Pulitzer Prize, 2007), Tyehimba Jess’s Olio (Pulitzer Prize, 2017), and Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (National Book Award Finalist, 2019) have taken on formal concerns with vigor and made new approaches to form a central part of their poetic goal. As Chen Chen recently tweeted, “writers of color are inventing, subverting, expanding forms all the time. any critic/commentator who thinks formal experimentation — or poetry! — is dead is not reading, is in fact refusing to read. willful, obstinate ignorance. and yes, racist.” Case in point, this villanelle by Duriel E. Harris from my anthology Villanelles, coedited with Marie-Elizabeth Mali:
Villanelle for the Dead White Fathers
Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you:
Don’t need your blessed doctrine to tell me what to write and when.
Behold, God made me funky. There ain’t nothin’ I cain’t do.
I can write frontpocket Beale Street make you sweat and crave the blues,
Dice a hymnal ’til you shout Glory! The Holy Ghost done sent me sin!
Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you:
Signify a sonnet — to the boil of “Bitches Brew.”
Rhyme royal a triolet, weave sestina’s thick through thin.
I said God made me funky. There ain’t nothin’ I cain’t do.
Eeshabbabba a subway station from damnation to upper room.
Lift-swing-hunh chain gang hammer like Alabama’s nigga men.
Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you.
Shish kebab heroic couplets and serve ’em dipped in barbecue,
Slap-bass blank-verse-lines, tunin’ fork tines ’til you think I’m Milton’s kin.
Indeed, God made me funky. There ain’t nothin’ I cain’t do.
You’re poets dead; I’m poet live. Darky choruses belt: Hallelu’.
While you were steppin’ out, someone else was steppin’ in.
Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you:
God sho-nuff sho-nuff made me funky. There ain’t nan thing I cain’t do.
This new widely-felt formal excitement seems to emerge out of the charred battlefield of the “poetry wars” (free verse vs. form, narrative, vs. exploratory, page vs. stage) that dominated U.S. poetics over the past few decades. It does so with the refreshing force of a healing development. Form, with roots in both craft and performance, both accessibility and experimentation, can bring many different kinds of poetries and poets together.
The politicization of poetic form is perhaps inevitable. How could large changes in how poets manifest poems into the world not reflect major social, political, and technological shifts? Milton’s austere use of blank verse elevated Paradise Lost above the rhyming verse of the hoi polloi and helped establish Christianity as a dominant cultural force. The struggle to birth Germanic-influenced, more accentual meters from the French-influenced syllabic regularity of the heroic couplet embodied the triumph of Romanticism and individuality. The free verse “revolution” of a hundred years ago foreshadowed an unprecedented era of industrial capitalism. At some point in the future, how will we view the current resurgence of poetic form? Will we understand it as a reactionary reversion, or as a liberatory development presaging a new level of mutual understanding across borders and backgrounds?
If the idea of poetic form as liberatory seems like a surprising possibility, the likely reason is the assumption that meter and form are unnatural and elitist. This stubborn notion is, to say the least, counterintuitive, given that oral-based and populist forms of poetry (ballad, decima, oral epic, tanka, ghazal, pantoum, and yes, rap, to name just a few) are always formal. And yet the conception that form is academic and bodiless persists as a commonplace in university writing programs and among poets and teachers of poetry.
How did the repeating patterns of verse, the root and basis of the peoples’ poetics around the globe, come to be seen as arcane and oppressive? The process began with the narrowing of metrical diversity in English during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ballads, triple meters, and other folk and oral-based forms practiced among women and people of color were firmly displaced by the hegemonic meter of college-educated white males: iambic pentameter. When Ezra Pound vowed to “break the pentameter” by means of free verse, he was taking on a meter that had already become culturally monolithic.
The ascendency of free verse was completed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through two new inventions: the typewriter and the English Department. The line-break, the defining feature of free verse, is not audible (unlike meter, rhyme, or refrain); free verse needs to be seen on the page to be appreciated. So the typewriter, which allowed poets to control the layout of a poem on the page, led the way for the line-break to develop into a central poetic tool in the early twentieth century. As the century went on, free verse both helped to establish and benefited from the professionalization of poetry in the classroom, since it lends itself to detailed, lengthy analysis and discussion.
As the overwhelming commitment to free verse gathered strength with the growth first of English departments and then of Creative Writing programs, most poets and scholars stopped teaching the skills of listening to and reading aloud in, let alone writing in, meter. By the 1970s, only a tiny handful of poets in universities taught meter at all. Writing in meter is one of those skills that is best passed on in person, like yoga or playing a musical instrument. Without poets equipped to teach it, the lineage of metrical transmission was, essentially, broken. Since meter is the foundation of formal poetry, form in general was largely abandoned as well, and meter and form came to be regarded as irrelevant knowledge. The stage was set for today, when most MFA programs in poetry don’t offer classes in meter or employ faculty who write in it regularly.
Recently, however, as the poetry slam and YouTube video have become preferred arenas for poetry, poetry is moving back into the body. A new energy has been emerging around the return to traditional, oral-based, populist forms. At the same time, exploratory techniques are gaining wider influence, and free verse remains a powerful poetic idiom. As we absorb these varying influences as writers, readers, and listeners of poetry, the language of constraint may help us to reach below the surface differences between poetic schools.
Encompassing compositional tools, the operations of procedural poetry, “traditional” forms and meters, the beat of slam and hip-hop, and the structuring of free verse with repeating line breaks, the continuum of constraint offers a way of thinking about poetry that may help us to appreciate how and why poets, even after a century of complete freedom from traditional types of formal expectation, are continually called to invent, reclaim or rediscover new types of restrictions to structure our words.
This essay first appeared in American Poetry Review, January 2020
Annie Finch is a poet, speaker, writer, teacher, and performer who offers spellbinding readings of poetry infused with magic. Her poetry has appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in Poetry, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dr. Finch earned her Ph.D from Stanford University and traces her descent from Celtic bards, Norse volurs, and accused witches imprisoned in Salem. Author of books and essays on poetry, meter, feminism, abortion, and witchcraft, she speaks and performs widely.
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