My quick opinion is that she is performing a role. her Instagram has a great deal of pictures in it, more than I would have thought necessary if the point is her poetry and not her persona.
I've yet to read Rupi Kaur (as I've yet to read so much and so many)-but thank you for sending me on the road to discover chiasms, it's a fascinating journey.
One can like a post without fully agreeing, or even without mostly agreeing-I don't know enough to argue either, it's just a very fine essay on a subject I'm fiercely passionate about since age two, without knowing much about it academically.
Maybe I specifically didn't want to know about -maybe to me it felt like " алгеброй гармонию поверив", which I didn't want-I did want magic to stay magic.
Now I guess I'm ready-and I found your posts extemely interesting and thought-provoking (as much as I don't particularly like the word "thought-provoking"-I gonna leave it, for the lack of a better one)
So the thing is I do have a bit of a disagreement on the need for more formal and formally rigid poetry, but I am not passionate enough about that disagreement to offer up the sort of analysis and challenge you are seeking. And also there are many contours I agree with, like the paucity of Rupi Kaur to the in-group dynamics of the lit-mag scene. More or less it must be stated that you can't just line-break some prose and call it a day; poetry demands more than that.
The reason I'm not too attached to the formalist modes of poetry is the same reason I'm not attached to figurative vs abstract painting, lyrical vs instrumental or ambient music, narrative vs experimental film; and in fact enjoy post-structural, absurdist, Dadaist, avant-garde, anarchist, and surrealist forms of art including generative, glitch, punk, processing, Fluxus, assemblage, and other embraces of dissonance and randomness. Some types of art are about _breaking_ our relationship to meaning (and hopefully our assumptions, if not wholeheartedly our reliances on certain restrictive modes of thinking), and so many types of non-formal poetry do that with words rather than paint, camera, sound etc.
And to the commenter's point you shared, a lot of the formal poetic forms came out of gatekeeping, elitist mode of production that recognized "fine art" to be of a "higher standard" than the "folk arts" as a mode of cultural production, and for much of our history was the representation of the state and its leadership (often monarchist) and aristocracies. This becomes particularly important when you look into the history of poetry and populist protest.
For better or for worse, capitalism, mass media, and the Industrial Revolution really messed up those hierarchies and we're never going back. But just as it would be ridiculous to insist poetry be formalist for the purposes of standards (which I didn't get you saying, just pushing to the extreme here), on the flip side the access to learning how to write formalist poetry is open and public enough that many poets' lack of acknowledgement of it comes across as maybe lazy or dismissive.
So: yes, it is better that poets know their forms. But on the other side, I just don't mind that most modern poetry is free- or sometimes even anti-formal. As long as it asks something more of ourselves, it's good poetry.
Well put. It feels lazy to me as well; and again, I’ll have to press the point about whether or not any particular poet is truly a student of their craft or only performing the societal role of “poet.” A student / steward ought to be aware of the history of their discipline. Picasso was an excellent draftsman and spent an enormous amount of time in museums copying the paintings he saw there; and he smashed traditional painting to bits. Schoenberg was steeped in tonal compositional theory, as was Philip Glass and many other modernist composers. They chose to take their own art in revolutionary directions because, after they had studied their craft, they felt revolution was the only viable option.
So a poet might, after studying formal verse, decide to write in free verse—and that would be an informed decision. Nothing wrong with that.
That's the real key right there...you have to master form before you can effectively use deviations from form. This is true in music, painting, sculpture, carpentry, etc.
Eliot could write incredibly lyric rhymed verse, as "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" shows. Hence, even in his "free" verse there's a musical nature to it which makes it captivating.
Just a fer instance. I ain't educated about literature but I can separate the wheat and chaff...
"Perhaps the formalist poetry can’t get a foothold because the academy, and not the market, is hostile to anything filled with structure, meter, rhyme, or philosophical import."
I've always believed that it's been a fault of academic and publishing industries, and never society. In the several-thousand-year-old history of poetry, only in the past hundred or so did anyone object to formalism. And even today, though so few read it, it's still very much respected. You don't find formalist poetry in people's hands on the subway, maybe, but you hear it at commencement speeches, eulogies, weddings and retirement parties. We still use it to commemorate our most important occasions.
I think it'd be a bit silly to say academic publications have somehow increased public exposure to poetry. By and large, we've given the keys over to groups who aren't responsible enough to be good custodians. And so yes, poetry has become an echo chamber—only poets read poetry.
That's why I'm not looking to the academic or publishing communities for poetry's future. I think whatever future it might have will lie outside of formal organizations.
It looks like our uncertain disagreement on the purpose of poetry may have to wait for another day (i.e., essay). To be honest, I'll admit that these intra-poetry-school debates dispirit me the instant I consider jumping into them beyond a friendly comment.
Your "Way of the Chiasm" definitely holds promise, as an inherited poetic structure that spurs invention, pleases the reader, and remains flexible for experimentation. This last component is what I find most important in the end, and it's something of a bone I can pick with formal poetry as an assumption: poems need to seek and enact vision. I might call this genius; I know you wouldn't. It's a foggy standard, which is why a shared form can be a helpful starting place. But analyzing structure by technical means can't always depict this kind of poetic skill accurately without reducing it. Again -- a friendly comment in need of flushing out, if I can steel myself to jump in.
Ah, dive on in sir, the water is very murky and cold!
Here is how I see the situation:
—The "instruct and delight" mandate that I proclaimed can take on many forms; poetry is appropriate to many occasions, and perhaps for some poems one is more a requirement than the other—a hymn might be more instructive and a limerick at a bachelor party might be more entertaining. (I just switched "delight" to "entertain" and that is a very significant change; I realize that they are not synonyms and I don't have time to explain their differences here.)
—That being said, I posit that chiasms might be a possible way to satisfy any and all requirements of "instruct" or "delight"; i.e., if the poet wants to instruct or delight, writing chiasms will make their task easier.
—I exhibited a few examples of chiasms, which, to my dismay, no one has bothered to critique. I firmly believe that the proof is in the pudding. Did my examples succeed? I'm not the best judge of that. Does anyone want to do better? If I get my act together I am seriously thinking about doing a chiasm contest with a cash prize.
Not a bad vantage point of where you're at so far. I don't know if I'll take up the "instruct and delight" mandate at all, since the verb "reveal" seems to encapsulate both of them and more (but, again, a tricky mandate itself).
As to your chiastic preaching: there's a base-level literacy most of us will have to learn. One half of the work of a formal poet nowadays, I think.
So I like traditional forms, and particularly poems that rhyme...in fact, I like what many would consider doggerel which is why i call myself a reader (and, if I may be so bold, writer) of verse rather than poetry. But...it occurs to me that there is free verse I like, and that I mimic, and that the best free verse always has certain constant devices that provide a coherence in the way rhyme, meter, and rhythm do for traditional poetry. The ones I notice immediately are repetition, sometimes of a phrase or a refrain (almost like a musical hook); or a recurring image, or internal rhymes from line to line that can enhance the musical quality. The best free verse does all of this. There are probably other things they do as well that I don't notice (or haven' yet). I always think of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as exemplifying these attributes; there's a music in that poem I find captivating.
I dunno...I'd appreciate your thoughts if you'd care to reply.
Oh I fully agree. Eliot is a great example of someone writing free verse while also keeping the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the language in mind. Hopkins is another free-verse poet worth looking into for the same reasons.
I myself write free verse more often that formal verse, although lately I've been really enjoying the iambic pentameter line. I'd love to talk more about this sort of thing as the occasion comes around; and if you want to look into my own poetry (and see if I'm practicing what I preach!) you can find it all here: https://chieflylyrical.substack.com/
Thanks; I've just subscribed! Yes, I've been trying to write a lot in iambic pentameter lately as well...it doesn't seem to come as naturally to me as other rhythms (I think because I started writing song lyrics before writing verse?). I'm not familiar with Hopkins I'll look him up! I posted a longish poem not long ago whose sections explored different meters (including a longish section that was an attempt at iambic pentameter), and I wrote a sort of traditional sonnet scheduled to drop in November; I'm trying to improve my fundamentals so what you have to say is very interesting and helpful to me!
'why are the works of Rupi Kaur and her ilk so popular?'
the thing is, kaur and her ilk don't actually write poems - they make memes. literally!
My quick opinion is that she is performing a role. her Instagram has a great deal of pictures in it, more than I would have thought necessary if the point is her poetry and not her persona.
I've yet to read Rupi Kaur (as I've yet to read so much and so many)-but thank you for sending me on the road to discover chiasms, it's a fascinating journey.
One can like a post without fully agreeing, or even without mostly agreeing-I don't know enough to argue either, it's just a very fine essay on a subject I'm fiercely passionate about since age two, without knowing much about it academically.
Maybe I specifically didn't want to know about -maybe to me it felt like " алгеброй гармонию поверив", which I didn't want-I did want magic to stay magic.
Now I guess I'm ready-and I found your posts extemely interesting and thought-provoking (as much as I don't particularly like the word "thought-provoking"-I gonna leave it, for the lack of a better one)
Thank you again
Wow! Important article on chiastics written as chiastic to articulate importance of chiastics. How to laud?
So the thing is I do have a bit of a disagreement on the need for more formal and formally rigid poetry, but I am not passionate enough about that disagreement to offer up the sort of analysis and challenge you are seeking. And also there are many contours I agree with, like the paucity of Rupi Kaur to the in-group dynamics of the lit-mag scene. More or less it must be stated that you can't just line-break some prose and call it a day; poetry demands more than that.
The reason I'm not too attached to the formalist modes of poetry is the same reason I'm not attached to figurative vs abstract painting, lyrical vs instrumental or ambient music, narrative vs experimental film; and in fact enjoy post-structural, absurdist, Dadaist, avant-garde, anarchist, and surrealist forms of art including generative, glitch, punk, processing, Fluxus, assemblage, and other embraces of dissonance and randomness. Some types of art are about _breaking_ our relationship to meaning (and hopefully our assumptions, if not wholeheartedly our reliances on certain restrictive modes of thinking), and so many types of non-formal poetry do that with words rather than paint, camera, sound etc.
And to the commenter's point you shared, a lot of the formal poetic forms came out of gatekeeping, elitist mode of production that recognized "fine art" to be of a "higher standard" than the "folk arts" as a mode of cultural production, and for much of our history was the representation of the state and its leadership (often monarchist) and aristocracies. This becomes particularly important when you look into the history of poetry and populist protest.
For better or for worse, capitalism, mass media, and the Industrial Revolution really messed up those hierarchies and we're never going back. But just as it would be ridiculous to insist poetry be formalist for the purposes of standards (which I didn't get you saying, just pushing to the extreme here), on the flip side the access to learning how to write formalist poetry is open and public enough that many poets' lack of acknowledgement of it comes across as maybe lazy or dismissive.
So: yes, it is better that poets know their forms. But on the other side, I just don't mind that most modern poetry is free- or sometimes even anti-formal. As long as it asks something more of ourselves, it's good poetry.
Well put. It feels lazy to me as well; and again, I’ll have to press the point about whether or not any particular poet is truly a student of their craft or only performing the societal role of “poet.” A student / steward ought to be aware of the history of their discipline. Picasso was an excellent draftsman and spent an enormous amount of time in museums copying the paintings he saw there; and he smashed traditional painting to bits. Schoenberg was steeped in tonal compositional theory, as was Philip Glass and many other modernist composers. They chose to take their own art in revolutionary directions because, after they had studied their craft, they felt revolution was the only viable option.
So a poet might, after studying formal verse, decide to write in free verse—and that would be an informed decision. Nothing wrong with that.
That's the real key right there...you have to master form before you can effectively use deviations from form. This is true in music, painting, sculpture, carpentry, etc.
Eliot could write incredibly lyric rhymed verse, as "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" shows. Hence, even in his "free" verse there's a musical nature to it which makes it captivating.
Just a fer instance. I ain't educated about literature but I can separate the wheat and chaff...
"Perhaps the formalist poetry can’t get a foothold because the academy, and not the market, is hostile to anything filled with structure, meter, rhyme, or philosophical import."
I've always believed that it's been a fault of academic and publishing industries, and never society. In the several-thousand-year-old history of poetry, only in the past hundred or so did anyone object to formalism. And even today, though so few read it, it's still very much respected. You don't find formalist poetry in people's hands on the subway, maybe, but you hear it at commencement speeches, eulogies, weddings and retirement parties. We still use it to commemorate our most important occasions.
I think it'd be a bit silly to say academic publications have somehow increased public exposure to poetry. By and large, we've given the keys over to groups who aren't responsible enough to be good custodians. And so yes, poetry has become an echo chamber—only poets read poetry.
That's why I'm not looking to the academic or publishing communities for poetry's future. I think whatever future it might have will lie outside of formal organizations.
It looks like our uncertain disagreement on the purpose of poetry may have to wait for another day (i.e., essay). To be honest, I'll admit that these intra-poetry-school debates dispirit me the instant I consider jumping into them beyond a friendly comment.
Your "Way of the Chiasm" definitely holds promise, as an inherited poetic structure that spurs invention, pleases the reader, and remains flexible for experimentation. This last component is what I find most important in the end, and it's something of a bone I can pick with formal poetry as an assumption: poems need to seek and enact vision. I might call this genius; I know you wouldn't. It's a foggy standard, which is why a shared form can be a helpful starting place. But analyzing structure by technical means can't always depict this kind of poetic skill accurately without reducing it. Again -- a friendly comment in need of flushing out, if I can steel myself to jump in.
Ah, dive on in sir, the water is very murky and cold!
Here is how I see the situation:
—The "instruct and delight" mandate that I proclaimed can take on many forms; poetry is appropriate to many occasions, and perhaps for some poems one is more a requirement than the other—a hymn might be more instructive and a limerick at a bachelor party might be more entertaining. (I just switched "delight" to "entertain" and that is a very significant change; I realize that they are not synonyms and I don't have time to explain their differences here.)
—That being said, I posit that chiasms might be a possible way to satisfy any and all requirements of "instruct" or "delight"; i.e., if the poet wants to instruct or delight, writing chiasms will make their task easier.
—I exhibited a few examples of chiasms, which, to my dismay, no one has bothered to critique. I firmly believe that the proof is in the pudding. Did my examples succeed? I'm not the best judge of that. Does anyone want to do better? If I get my act together I am seriously thinking about doing a chiasm contest with a cash prize.
Not a bad vantage point of where you're at so far. I don't know if I'll take up the "instruct and delight" mandate at all, since the verb "reveal" seems to encapsulate both of them and more (but, again, a tricky mandate itself).
As to your chiastic preaching: there's a base-level literacy most of us will have to learn. One half of the work of a formal poet nowadays, I think.
So I like traditional forms, and particularly poems that rhyme...in fact, I like what many would consider doggerel which is why i call myself a reader (and, if I may be so bold, writer) of verse rather than poetry. But...it occurs to me that there is free verse I like, and that I mimic, and that the best free verse always has certain constant devices that provide a coherence in the way rhyme, meter, and rhythm do for traditional poetry. The ones I notice immediately are repetition, sometimes of a phrase or a refrain (almost like a musical hook); or a recurring image, or internal rhymes from line to line that can enhance the musical quality. The best free verse does all of this. There are probably other things they do as well that I don't notice (or haven' yet). I always think of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as exemplifying these attributes; there's a music in that poem I find captivating.
I dunno...I'd appreciate your thoughts if you'd care to reply.
Oh I fully agree. Eliot is a great example of someone writing free verse while also keeping the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the language in mind. Hopkins is another free-verse poet worth looking into for the same reasons.
I myself write free verse more often that formal verse, although lately I've been really enjoying the iambic pentameter line. I'd love to talk more about this sort of thing as the occasion comes around; and if you want to look into my own poetry (and see if I'm practicing what I preach!) you can find it all here: https://chieflylyrical.substack.com/
Thanks; I've just subscribed! Yes, I've been trying to write a lot in iambic pentameter lately as well...it doesn't seem to come as naturally to me as other rhythms (I think because I started writing song lyrics before writing verse?). I'm not familiar with Hopkins I'll look him up! I posted a longish poem not long ago whose sections explored different meters (including a longish section that was an attempt at iambic pentameter), and I wrote a sort of traditional sonnet scheduled to drop in November; I'm trying to improve my fundamentals so what you have to say is very interesting and helpful to me!