Form

“This is a book for anyone,” Glyn Maxwell declares of On Poetry, his guide to the writing of poetry and a defense of the art. Maxwell’s witty, glib, and profound look at the art of writing poetry provides a wealth of practical advice for understanding why and how poetic technique matters. When Maxwell states, “With rhyme what matters is the distance between rhymes” or “the line-break is punctuation,” he compresses into simple, memorable phrases a great deal of practical wisdom. Here is a look at some of his thoughts on form, because, according to Maxwell, “you master form you master time.”

You master form you master time. I repeat myself, writers write, pages turn, teachers teach. Regarding repetition, there is none in poetry, or at least what looks like repetition isn’t repetition:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Recurrence of words isn’t repetition. Ever. Try saying the above couplet in exactly the same way twice. Not only will you not sound like Robert Frost, you won’t sound normal. The second line is likely to elongate, its last word probably fall in tone. Well let’s exploit science to help us: the two sound-wave diagrams with their spikes and troughs are going to show skylines as different as Mecca’s from Manhattan’s. What’s intervened between the two technically identical lines is the need to say the same again. Either side of that are different worlds. The relation of the two lines to thought is entirely different. One line outran thought, the second walks in step with it.

A line so grave, sublime and unbearable I can’t even stand to contextualise it if you don’t happen to know it –

Never, never, never, never, never
– will show you there is no repetition in poetry.

You master form you don’t master time, but what have you got that gets closer? Poems must be formed in the face of time, as we are. Whatever the whiteness is to you it’s also time. As I said before, to me it’s only time.

It can be time and God, as here in Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the poet’s voice seems held in the arms of the Ineffable that bears it safely to and fro while allowing it to breathe, threading it with rhymes, chimes, alliterations — which sounds to me like a sense of God to a good Christian. By which I mean a good creature who’s a Christian. The shrunken essence of the religious fundamentalist, with his beaming intolerance and immobile heart, is a literary one: he sees only the blackness of the Book, is blind to the whiteness. Hears what’s in it for him and folks like him, is deaf to what surrounds it in time and space. That sounds to me like Pride in its pure form, dangerous, disgracing, and a sin among creatures.

Against which set this poet. See which words Hopkins puts at the edges; these words know they are edges, mortality is sounded:

I am soft sift
In an hourglass — at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells of flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

Time and the ocean, distantly breaking upon the ruminations of Matthew Arnold: ‘Dover Beach’, his most famous poem, was written in 1867, and it’s one of the few poems of Arnold with any formal irregularities, as in these half- and quarter-lines; they simply cannot push further against the sound of the sea — the whiteness — so they break, fall back, and thought’s sad glowing light comes in:

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Or time and grief, as here in Thomas Hardy, with the lines curtailed, hemmed in by silence, the stanzas rubbing their hands together for warmth within but stubbed out by cold and sorrow:

…Leaves freeze to dun; But friends can not turn cold This season as of old
For him with none.
Tempests may scath; But love can not make smart Again this year his heart
Who no heart hath.
Black is night’s cope; But death will not appal One who, past doubtings all,
Waits in unhope.

I use canonical examples because they have shown the strength to outlast time, a power I contemplate with awe. Most of the poets I draw from are called, inanely in my view, ‘formalists’: let’s say they make new forms from old forms, what creature doesn’t? We will know what ‘free’ verse means when we learn if it can survive. Let’s recite some we know by heart, let’s see how it’s getting on. And by ‘free’ verse what I mean is verse that isn’t formal at all, that neither shadows nor echoes it, has no interest in what it has foregone. Verse that on theoretical grounds has refused to engage with any traditional form at all. Which, in case you ask, means I don’t mean Stein or Eliot or Pound or Jones or HD or Rosenberg or Williams or Bunting or Lowell or Plath or Morgan or Hughes. What I do mean is an awful lot of what we’ve got.

The Arnold, Hopkins and Hardy extracts display distinct attitudes to the left margin. The Arnold holds the familiar ‘left-justified’ line, the Hopkins sways symmetrically down the page (that stanza’s from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, which takes place mostly on a thundering sea), the Hardy uses indents to book-end his brief, numb stanzas. It’s not hard to find reasons why those particular poets would shape those particular poems that way, but what I’d extrapolate is this: in most cases the left margin is playing the same part as, say, the fixed string in music, or the still canvas in painting, the concrete immovable against which the creaturely passion sings. Or, if you’ve a mathematical soul, shift a left-justified poem 90o and you have data bobbing from an x-axis. Indents or centre-justification really ought to have some rationale, and I’d extend that to those poems that roam freely about the whiteness.

The poet who takes that journey is assuming control of the whiteness, presuming a considerable amount of power, which also means advancing to the foreground of the poem’s frame. We can see you, be aware of that. When this works — and some contemporary poets achieve it — it works because the poet is so extremely alert to what the blackness and the whiteness represent, what it means apparently to move freely. This level of skill is probably — I don’t know everyone, this is my instinct — probably learned from reading and absorbing poetry considerably more formal. It was for Pound and Eliot. Maybe younger poets have figured out a shortcut.

No. If the poet thinks that unmooring from the margin or destabilising the space is a reward of freedom — and not precisely the opposite, a submission to mortality and the perilous closeness of chaos — the poem not only won’t fly, it won’t walk, it won’t breathe. If you ditch the idea of any fixity — to say the least your heart beating or the top of the breath — without anything to show in its place, you have a sandcastle. It may be flying with twenty stiff flags of your intellect, but it’s a sandcastle. The whiteness will come in like the evening tide upon your thought for the day, and we’ll never know you had it.