Strange Forms
Ancient Hebrew cultures valued poetic word-play, as
did Greek, Roman and early Arab writers. In medieval
China (400–600 AD) the “New Songs from a Jade Terrace"
collection was playful, and the 7th century poet Magha
wrote elaborate Sanskrit. Historians (Barbara Tuchman,
etc) have suggested that in medieval European households
word-games provided an important source of entertainment
somewhere between the poems or stories of troubadours
and games such as cards or chess. Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio used numerology as well as various word-games.
Late 15th century France had its “Grands Rhétoriqueurs".
Such writing was still quite common in the 16th and early
17th centuries even amongst the greatest writers. “Love's
Labor's Lost” pushed word-play so far that G.B. Harrison
(editor of “Shakespeare: The Complete Works") thinks
that critics have tended to “leave the play to those
who are more interested in literary puzzles than in poetry".
Ben Jonson's “The Alchemist” (1610) begins with a 12-line
“Argument” whose initial letters spell out the title,
though elsewhere he also made fun of verbal tricksters – a
portent, because by the 18th century the reaction against
“false wit” was well established. Pope's “Essay on Criticism"
and Joseph Addison (especially in the Spectator Nos.
58–61 of 1711) were influential voices condemning the
prevalent “trick writing” which included poems that intentionally
banished a given letter, rebuses, echo poems, limited-word
exercises, acrostics, anagrams, and chronograms. Addison
blamed English monks with too little talent and too much
spare time for reviving these Latin and Greek tricks.
Further criticism of “false wit” came from Dr. Samuel
Johnson. In his wake, the steamroller of 18th century
neoclassicism and rationalism followed by the Romantic
revolution broke a tradition which has never fully recovered.
Word-play survived in the UK amongst the masses as parlour
games, in advertising, and in the popular “Miscellania”
publications of Victorian times. Freed of the lyrical
imperative, post-modernism revived ludic interest, with
poets like Heather McHugh and Paul Muldoon exploiting
various devices. Word-play and constraints suited the
ego-suppressing aims of some language poets too – Jackson
Mac Low used procedural constraints – but such work remains
steadfastly marginal. The most sustained attempt at developing
forms rather than dabbling in sporadic word-play has
come from the Oulipo (Ourvoir de Littérature Potentialle)
movement. Whereas readers seem prepared to tolerate a
little word-play (finding it acceptably liberating, fissuring
down into the core of language) rigorous Oulipian forms
are all too often granted no value in themselves, being
considered self-imposed handicaps, impediments to truth.
Indeed, they often have a negative value that content
can at best only compensate for. Oulipo writers claim
that free verse is never free – if authors don't define
a constraint, constraints will in turn define their work
for them. Even sonnets are too restrictive for many poets
today, but there are many more challenging forms. Poetic
forms commonly use patterns based on sound (metre, rhyme)
or number (syllabics) or both (iambic pentameter). Graphological
forms (based on spelling) are less popular. Perhaps this
is because
- like syllabics, they work on the page rather than
orally, and the oral tradition still dominates. - being uncommon they're too easily misunderstood
or dismissed as merely playing with words, an opinion
strengthened by their overuse as lesson exercises or
as cures for writers' block. - forms often work by using repetition to establish
an expectation which is then only partially satisfied
– e.g. variation on the meter; strong and weak rhyme,
etc. Forms based on spelling are less able to exploit
such effects – if a word’s misspelt, it’s “wrong",
not “interesting". - suspicions remain that although the challenges of
strict forms may give rise to fracture and compression,
the results appear in poetry magazines under false
pretences. The reason that (e.g.) Abecederians are
in poetry magazines may simply be that venues for short
prose have disappeared. - the technical difficulty of the forms render practitioners
vulnerable to accusations of intellectual or social
elitism despite linguists' claims that word-play is
natural and universal, as common in the Australian
outback and central Africa as in Sorbonne common rooms. - historically, such forms have encouraged a currently
unpopular competitive element, the “degree of difficulty”
of the form mattering as much as the execution.
As exhibit 1, let's take this extract from Two ways
to make it
Oh Eros, the hot
heroes
like you once
rose sore
from bed,
each ache
a proof of love. Now
actors co-star
in divorce
suits –
it's us
they envy.
Anagrams have a long history of use in poetry, and can
augment meaning just as other low-level effects (rhyme,
alliteration, etc) can. As a carver might relish the
feel and grain of wood, so poets can exploit (rather
than gloss over) the raw material of their craft. In
a poem like U.A. Fanthorpe's Word Games crossword
clues are used haphazardly. Here the form is regular
– alternate lines contain anagrams. The form relates
somewhat to the theme, and (except for the line-breaks)
doesn't disrupt the poem. Indeed there's a case for saying
that the form doesn't disrupt the poem enough – readers
might not notice it. An ostentatious form needn't be
advertised, but readers nowadays might need a footnote
if the pattern isn't obvious. More rigorous still is
Bill Turner’s Anagram Homage (published in Iota),
every line of which is an anagram of the same UK poet.
Here’s one stanza
Is a pen neutral? I
peer (Italian sun!)
at plain ruin, see
in alien pasture
a supernal tie-in.
Another carefully titled poem is Lost Letters,
which begins
"Too staid", critics said, “too sad.
Poems shouldn't
mean but be". So must the work of men like
me who
chose Jarrell's hose or Heaney's hoe become
sparse, hard to parse as they disappear up our collective
arse?
Can't they swing and sing as if prose were a sin?
People will notice the internal rhymes but there's a
more regular pattern – each line has a triplet of words
(“staid/said/sad”, for example) where letters are 'lost'.
George Herbert's Paradise uses similar word-play
What open force, or hidden CHARM
Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM
While the enclosure is thine ARM
The following stanza starts a poem that uses a more
radical technique known as “slenderizing”
A poet's double life (draft)
He went gray, too
guilty to stray,
wanting to graze
on beauty without
needing to pray;
If you remove the Rs you get another poem. Here’s another
2-for-the-price-of-1 form – a multi-word pun
Doubled up in pain
He'd long desired her. Twilight restored,
he wondered on the way, doubtful of fate,
still only a boy, far from sure. No ring –
it was finished, a lover gone. No mistake.
He'd longed. He sighed, hurt, while high trees
stalled,
he wandered on the wade out, full of hate,
still lonely, a boy far from shore, knowing
it was finished, all over, gone. No missed ache.
Forms can be borrowed other cultures or eras: multi-word
puns are more popular (and easier) in French; Anglo-Saxons
used regular alliteration; the Chinese had 'magic square'
poems which could be read in various directions. An early
English example of this is
square in verse of a hundred monasillbles only: Describing
the sense of England's happiness, written in
honor of Elizabeth I by Henry Lok. By tracing the patterns
of sub-squares or crosses, several other poems appear
in it. Lewis Carroll relished such challenges, writing
the following
Square poem
I often wondered when I cursed,
often feared where I would be –
wondered where she'd yield her love,
when I yield, so will she.
I would her will be pitied!
Cursed be love! She pitied me …
which is the same whether it's read the usual way or
column by column. Note that the poem rhymes. It’s not
uncommon for these forms to be combined with more conventional
effects. Acrostics, for example, are frequently sonnets
or blank verse. I think it was only 20 years ago that
a near-acrostic was discovered in Act III, Scene I of
“A Midsummer-Night's Dream", spoken by Titania
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou
wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate,
The summer still doth tend upon my
state;
ANd I do love thee. Therefore go with
me.
I'll give thee fairies to attend on
thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from
the deep,
Accidental? Maybe those million monkeys finally got
lucky, but in any case acrostics have a respectable pedigree – even
Dante used them. Here (and in Muldoon's “Capercaillies")
the unit is the line, but word and stanza units are possible.
Several other features can operate on more than one level.
Carroll's square poem worked at the word level, though
in modern periodicals one sometimes chances upon poems
made of a grid of phrases that can be read row-wise or
column-wise to make different poems. Palindromes at the
letter-level struggle to be poetic, but mainstream poets
have used the device at the line level
– "The Back Seat of my Mother's Car" (Julia Copus) is a line-palindrome, and there are two in July 2008's issue of Weyfarers.
All these forms have wide application. As yet, some
have only reached the stage of feasibility studies – potential
literature. In particular there’s scope for exploration
of bespoke, specialist forms. Here are two examples.
8 by 8
"Supercomputer Hydra slays U.K.'s top chess player”
(June 2005).
Making war, young Moguls mated,
men stylized by courtly Moors.
Europe's chequered board helped Bishops,
until the noble game was hacked;
castles fell to hypermoderns –
Marcel Duchampion duchess
played John Cage and mocked past masters:
the king is dead – the Hydra heads.
The lines are alternately iambic and trochaic – the
stressed syllables represent the board’s white squares.
By placing the poem's pieces (the kings, bishops, and
castles) on the squares corresponding to their syllables
(and guessing their colours correctly) a chess puzzle
is created where you can work out what the previous move
must have been, as illustrated on
Here’s a section of Harry Goode’s Against the Jostle
and the Thrust
Soil
makers turn and sift as by
shuffle
and
whirr and veined wing caught
in amber bright
or
coal dark shaft and the
settle and fold.
Tegmina, testa,
bark, bristle and bone,
upright against
pull, support for the push.
Arc guarding
eye, skull, beak, talon and claw.
Skin
soft Africa ape, with
knowing thumb.
Enjambment across
mountains, plains and seas,
stride
far reaching covers
dreams, covers worlds
A white zigzag cuts through these decametre lines. On
each side of the divide are either T and A (e,g. “sift as"),
or C and G (as in “wing caught").
Those letters are used by biochemists to symbolise the
4 bases of DNA, which only combine in the pairs the poem
uses. The zigzag denotes the double-helix.
Most of the forms illustrated here (especially the specialist
ones) support the content and might even be described
as “organic", but not in a way that will satisfy
everyone. To some readers sound has an intrinsic, even
visceral, effect that letter-based patterns can never
replace. But some types of Art deliberately and uncompromisingly assert form or procedure over content. It's a different game, but one with potential. Escher wouldn't compromise, nor in many cases would Cage. It's like the game mathematicians play. It's interesting to see what "beauty" survives or emerges if you keep to the rules, it's almost as if it were a discovered (rather than invented) "truth", something buried or inherent in the form/constraint that has to be "brought out". If you don't share Johan Huizinga's views in
the value of play, or Margaret Boden's on the creative
value of constraints, or if you consider form a lifeless
container, then these poems may be arduous to read let
alone write, but I think there's room in the mainstream
of poetry for many more of these transcultural, hybrid
forms than we're currently using.
References
- “Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: A Restoration of the
Runes", Professor Roy Neil Graves (http://www.utm.edu/staff/ngraves/shakespeare/
– where much of the historical information in this
article came from). - “Oxford Guide to Word Games", Tony Augarde,
OUP, 1984. - “Palindromes and Anagrams", Howard W. Bergerson,
Dover Publications, 1973. - “Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis",
ed. Alistair Fowler. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. - “Pattern Poetry", Dick Higgins, SUNY Press,
1987. - “Oulipo Compendium", edited by Harry Matthews
and Alastair Brotchie, Atlas Press, London, 1998. - “The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics",
Preminger and Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993
(see the Anagrams entry). - “Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics”
(1968- ).
Henry Lok's poem.
Unattributed poems are by the author: the first and
third from Poetry Nottingham, the others unpublished.
Later additions
- Poetry is essentially about words, and these forms establish an unbreakable link from poetry to words
- Organic Form is when the form and the words evolved together - when form's not an afterthought. The later the constraint's applied, the more likelihood there is of strain - like the budding poet who only worries about the rhyme when they're on the 2nd line of a couplet, as if form were taking belated priority over content.
But some types of Art deliberately and uncompromisingly assert form or procedure over content. It's a different game, but one with potential. Escher wouldn't compromise, nor in many cases would Cage. It's like the game mathematicians play. It's interesting to see what "beauty" survives or emerges if you keep to the rules, it's almost as if it were a discovered (rather than invented) "truth", something buried or inherent in the form/constraint that has to be "brought out". I think there's room on the spectrum for such works.- "The Back Seat of my Mother's Car" (Julia Copus) is a line-palindrome
- "Uncouplings" (Craig Arnold) uses anagrams
- "Adventures in Form" by Tom Chivers (ed) (Penned in the Margins, 2012)
- Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse
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