Poetry's return to form

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Consider with me, if you will,

Nik Hoffmann

’s poem from last year, “Ought Dragons be Slain?” I will quote it in full, and then we’ll talk about it.

To those who say that dragons not be slain,
A word of warning should suffice,
Beware the tempt of dragon’s gold,
You may just trade the gain at price of life.
The rubies made of blood and soul
Will keep your blackened heart aflame.
To work with serpents! Watch the sky!
And swooping snapping jaws will make you prey.

Behold the righteous man will hoist his blade,
He takes his banner up the charge
To slice the snake across the eyes;
He braves the burns of its infernal char.
Mailed fist crashes through dragon lies,
Inner strength surges and displays
Where purifying heat resides:
In blistered knights and twisting corpses slayed.

First, notice the poem’s larger structure. The two stanzas are of identical length. The first, fourth, and eighth lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter; the rest of the lines are in iambic tetrameter. These longer lines correspond to rhetorical and emotional high points in the poem’s argument. Note also that the stanza break occurs at the place where the poem shifts from a negative description (“watch out; this might happen”) to a positive prescription (“here’s what to do about it”). Thus the larger points of the poem’s construction are justified by the poem’s content; Hoffmann’s choices serve to reinforce his poem’s meaning.

I said earlier that the poem is in iambic meter. There are some important exceptions—notice the fifth and sixth lines of the second stanza, which can be scanned thusly:

    /         /         /    x          x           /      x     /
Mailed fist | crashes | through dra | gon lies,
/     x         /           /       x   /         x     /
Inner | strength sur | ges and | displays,

The first two feet of these lines don’t correspond to the pattern of iambs which holds, with exact regularity, throughout the rest of the poem. In line 5, there are three heavy accents in a row to reflect the mailed fist crashing through the lies of the dragon. In line 6, the same pattern of heavy accents is repeated (with a quick unaccented syllable squeezed in between). Again, Hoffmann’s choice here amplifies the poem’s meaning: the crashing fist, the surging strength, are reflected in the lines’ construction.

Finally, let’s look at the rhyming in the poem. The first stanza had this rhyme scheme: ABCBCABA—the second, this: ADBDBABA. The poem recycles a good number of its rhymes, providing internal cohesion, but differentiates the two stanzas with the C and D rhymes (“gold” / “soul” and “charge” / “char”). Additionally, Stanza 1 is heavy on the /eɪ/ vowel (“say”) used internally five times as well as at the end of lines thrice. Stanza two also includes this vowel throughout but is correspondingly heavy with the /aɪ/ vowel (“slice”). These sets of vowels help to differentiate the poem’s two stanzas.

Let’s look at the larger structure again and ask: why is the poem in two stanzas? By dividing his poems so, Hoffmann is teasing out some of the implications of his metaphor: Ought dragons be slain? Ought sins and temptations be resisted?

The first stanza presents a via negativa, a cautionary treatment if the question: “watch out or this might happen if you don’t slay the dragon.” It is more abstract despite its vivid imagery of gold and blood; more universal. It ends on a heavy, definite pause—”and that’s all there is to say about that.” In contrast the second stanza presents the flip side of the first stanza’s argument. It’s bad to let dragons go unslain; here’s how to do the slaying. Stanza 1 argues us up to the point of accepting we must fight the dragon, and stanza 2 tells us how (and also reveals definitively that this is not a literal dragon but a metaphorical one in the use of the words “righteous,” “infernal,” and “purifying”). The last line, with its image of a wounded but victorious warrior, panting and singed but surrounded by the beast he has vanquished, is not a hard end like stanza 1 but more of an indefinitely-extended pause (indefinitely, that is, until the next dragon shows up).

This is a very rich poem for its small size; good small poems are always rich like this. Another recent poem which rewards this kind of scrutiny is

Mark Rico

’s Requiem in Defiance, recently published in

The Clayjar Review

.

Beneath the garden, stardust sown to ground
in state he lies. So stripped of pride these bones
are, so transcribed from fleshly palette to
this empty slate, in latent power crowned
a king though circumscribed and ironbound,
a thrown down throneless sovereign overgrown
by time. What ancient rhyme will liven true
ascent, awaken daybreak to confound
the twilight’s turn to night? Though death pursue
with greedy bands its might must fail. Late
the grave retains its prey and holds its sway
but oh, these bones will reign! A cyclone waits
to blow this eager throne-bound stardust through
new Eden’s gaping gates at break of day.

First, note two things: the poem is in very strict iambic pentameter throughout (with two exceptions, which we’ll discuss) and is in fourteen lines. Any student of English poetry will remember that fourteen is the number of lines in a sonnet—and Rico’s poem can be read as a sort of pseudo-sonnet, with the arrangement of its concepts corresponding loosely to the traditional rhetorical structure of the sonnet (although not to its rhyme scheme). There is a subtle rising of the tension as the poem progresses, a gradual building of the weight of image and metaphor: first we are shown a grave, then we are told it is the grave of a king. In a traditional sonnet the “turn” happens in the last two lines, but here Rico uses the last three to wipe away the gloom of advancing time and proclaim that the body of this king will be resurrected and will reign again.

As the poem progresses the /aɪ/ vowel increases in prominence; notice also the repeated words which form a web of relation: “stardust” twice; the stunning transmutation of “bound” from restraint and stricture in line 5 to a destination in line 13 by way of the concept of “throne.” This is another poem full of vivid imagery and rich metaphor, and Rico plays with the language to coax out the allusive power of his imagery. In lines 6 and 9 occur the only departures from his iambic meter: in each line one iamb is replaced by a spondee—

x      /           /            /         x          /     x      /      x      /
a thrown | down throne | less sove | reign o | vergrown

and

   x      /    /          /         x    /               x          /           x    /
the twi | light’s turn | to night? | Though death | pursue

—both signifying the growing struggle between the forces which would keep this thronebound king from his destiny. It’s a subtle effect—not forceful like Hoffmann’s crashing fist—but it indicates the more-than-metaphorical violence inflicted by fate on anyone who, like this king, awaits the resurrection promise.

One more, one more—this kind of analysis is so much fun: “Consoling Light” by

Joseph Teti

, which was featured in

Silver Door

last May.

Consoling light, who whispers in my heart,
this architecture offers little space
for colors to resound. I soon distort
the image you imparted of your face,
and soon I fear your word inside me dims—
thinking beneath this bridge your music fades.

I look inside myself to find some wind
with which to mutter structures or sing shades,
but darkness mutes that brushstroke-melody:
with feeble hands I synthesize your rays,
and with hoarse throat I croak pale rhapsody.
These spaces I have made became a maze—

LORD, you can raze these temples, and build praise whole
in tiny silences within my soul.

This poem is an absolute jewel: its riches abound and are worth extended study. The poem is an amalgam of three interrelated metaphors: light, sound, and architecture. Architecture symbolizes outward appearances and is always presented in a less-than-favorable way: “this architecture offers little space”; “beneath this bridge your music fades”; “you can raze these temples.” Light, in contrast, symbolizes God, and is always presented as good: “Consoling light,” “your rays,” “the image you imparted”—and in a few places, the absence of light is bad: “dims” in line 5, “darkness” which mutes God’s handiwork in line 9. The last metaphor, sound, stands for communication or transmission of knowledge, and is neutral: communication is either good or bad. These three metaphors are thoroughly mixed in the poem to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable: colors resound, structures are muttered, brushstrokes are melodies. All in all, it’s a fine summation of the entirety of the human attempt to please God on our own, with our arts, apart from grace.

The poem’s first stanza ramps up to a fearful panic which yet feels like it could be resolved by the poem’s speaker alone: a kind of worry (but remember, worry is just another form of pride). After a breather, stanza 2 builds to a humble and cautious attempt at graceless praise—the “pale rhapsody”—which, it seems, the speaker doesn’t really believe in; line 12 shows the speaker at a nadir: “No, I can’t do it on my own—see what happens? I need your help.” This poem is also in fourteen lines, like a sonnet, and the famous “turn” happens between lines 12 and 13—note how the structure of this poems reinforces its rhetorical argument. The last two lines are highly complex and depart greatly from the poem’s underlying meter and indeed from the meter of all sonnets before. I scan them like this:

   /          /       x     /           x      /          x    x        /            /           /
LORD, you | can raze | these tem | ples, and build | praise whole
x    /     x  /     x    /       x    /        x    /
in ti | ny si | lences | within | my soul.

The second-to-last line of the poem contains several important substitutions: The stressed syllable corresponding to the name of God; the anapest followed by the spondee at the end, accumulating greater stress and power with each syllable to correspond to the “building” sense of the words; the extra syllable which adds extra time and weight to the line—notice the anapest doesn’t read like a skip or a rush, but instead keeps the same pace, making the line actually take more time to say. The last line returns, mostly, to the iambic bedrock of the poem, although the last foot strongly wants to be read as another spondee. It’s a powerful and very effective trick, this rhythmic variation, heightening the contrasting effect this pair of lines has with the rest of the poem.

All three of these poems are recent but this kind of analysis is not, because for centuries poets have been crafting their poems with a similarly high degree of skill. The best poems continue to reward readers who are willing to use the tools of poetic analysis. An example: recently

Grace Hamman

looked closely at George Herbert’s “Paradise” from 1633, dwelling fondly on Herbert’s use of the metaphor of an enclosed garden to describe Christian life and growth. Herbert’s poem uses a rather ostentatiously playful kind of wordplay as a unifying element; this might strike some readers as a distraction, but Hamman sees it as proof of “Herbert’s evident joy in the play and pleasure of language.” For Herbert, the writing of poetry—even didactic poetry—was not an occasion for sober gloominess: Hamman calls his poetics a “serious joy.” I can imagine Herbert singing along with Roger McGuinn on the Byrds’ “The Christian Life.” As poetry, his work is immaculate; as a poet, he fulfills poetry’s highest calling: to instruct and to delight.

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But it’s rare for a contemporary poem to be discussed like this. When I look into the poetry magazines I don’t see much discussion of meter, structure, form, or anything like that. What happened? We’ll get to that question in a moment, but for now I want to make clear that I’m not the only one who sees the situation this way.

We can easily find reviews of poetry collections, but what about reviews of poetry journals? That is the question

Victoria

Moul asks in a recent edition of her newsletter Horace & friends. So she decided to answer it herself by writing a review of The Poetry Review, the official organ of the UK Poetry Society and one of England’s leading poetry journals. From her perspective the situation is . . . rather mixed.

She finds the recent issue of The Poetry Review to have an overall cliquish, closed, chummy feel to it, one which is at considerable risk of alienating readers who are new to poetry. She critically examines the poems themselves, the editorial apparatus, the review section, and even the kinds of authors represented in the interviews—and in almost every aspect she discerns this off-putting quality. The poets, reviewers, interviewees, and even the journal’s editor all seem, to her, to be assuming a great deal of prior familiarity with the personages and celebrities of the current poetry scene, so much so that a naive and curious reader, new to poetry, would likely feel quite excluded and ignored. If this is what is happening in England’s most prominent poetry magazine, what hope does the casual reader have of being able to involve themselves in the world of poetry?

An elaborate discussion unfolded in the comments section of her newsletter once she published her findings; it was instructive to note how many of her readers expressed frustration and exasperation at the same points she asserts. One commenter mentioned “the lack of consensus about what is good and bad in contemporary poetry”; another remarked on the feeling of puzzling over a poem’s meaning “in a way that leaves me feeling mostly stupid”; another remarks that “it does seem a shame that a body with such an explicit mission to promote the totality of poetry elevates so strongly forms that have cut ties with essentially all English verse prior to about 1920 and much of what comes after.”

Do you discern a common thread here? Readers feel excluded by stale, dry, academic, pretentious, complicated (but not complex) verse . . . they are simply tired of it, and they want something better. It is extremely telling that no one in Victoria Moul’s comment section was saying “that’s why I’ve given up on poetry, that’s why I only listen to music instead” or whatever . . . these were all people who longed for good poetry, who still had a love and a hope for it, and who fervently desired it to have a place in culture corresponding to what it once had.

The average person doesn’t engage with poetry on a regular basis anymore. It wasn’t always this way. Milton’s Paradise Lost was on bedside tables across the anglosphere; Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays were staples of homes across America. Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson . . . all these were household names, discussed the way we talk about rappers now. Is the truth simply that we have more options these days, and we don’t give poetry the same attention as before because there are so many other arts to choose from? Or have the poets damaged their own discipline by being fixated more on allusion and feeling than structure or depth of argument, and on a discussion of their craft instead of service to their culture? Have poets themselves been less-than-faithful stewards of the highest forms and aspirations of their craft?

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A question: what is distinct about poetry, anyway? Why write a poem and not prose? Or maybe this would be a better question: where is the ART in poetry? Recently I read someone’s description of poetry as “the right words in the right places.” I wish I could remember who said that; it’s a very good quick short description. I would humbly submit that these days the two halves of that equation have been divided, and the contemporary academic / establishment poetry scene is dominated by poets who are perfecting the idea of “the right words” to the detriment of “the right place.” Contemporary poetry is full of poems which exhibit an astonishing density of obscure and esoteric words; I’ve encountered many poems which required a trip to the dictionary at least once every line. The words of poems are full of dense layers of meaning and metaphor, allusion and suggestion. That’s all very fine to a degree but the average reader feels lost in a poem like that. The average reader wants to read a poem which can be comprehended at a basic level fairly quickly (yet which divulges more of itself with subsequent readings); poems which present as unintelligible gobbledygook, which require strained puzzling before their basic sense is known, are not what the average reader wants.

But there’s something else at play here. I’ve spoken to people who tell me that they don’t understand modern free-verse poetry at all; if there isn’t any meter or rhyme, they say, why is it called poetry? Why isn’t it presented as prose? This sentiment is probably quite widespread and might go a long way towards explaining the ambivalence toward poetry which characterizes the twenty-first century. The truth is this: no matter how vivid a poem’s imagery, no matter how clever its metaphors or how unique its vocabulary, what really makes poetry “work” is its structure—the formal element: the “right place” side of our poetic equation from earlier. For the last hundred years the formal element has been dismissed by many of our most prominent poets; hence the readers, who don’t want to chew on gristle and just want a good lyric to memorize, aren’t fond of modern poetry. They are voting with their attention, and poetry has been kicked out of favor. But that might be in the process of changing.

Consider the three poets whose work I discussed at the start of this essay. They are all writing online and publishing their own poetry on their own blogs and in small online poetry reviews. They aren’t the only ones; there is in fact an impressive number of poets who have decided to turn away from the academic scene and the major poetry journals and who take great pleasure in publishing their work through small presses or on their own . . . and they seem to be trending toward a renaissance of explicitly formalist poetry. They aren’t doing so from a mere desire to play with formal structures, fun as they may be; no, it really seems to me that the new crop of poets are doing so because they believe formalist poetry is the right thing to do, the correct way to be a poet in the world—

Dare I say, perhaps, the only way for a poet to properly reclaim the high position which poetry once commanded in our culture.¹

Conveniently, these poets are quite often theorists, very willing to share their opinions on their craft. Here is

Nathan Woods

, poet and editor of The Silver Door, expressing it thusly in The Substack Poetry Manifesto—

From the beginning, poets received their laurels because they could instruct and delight their audience. They were honored because to do just one of these was difficult. Homer was not just a fancy talker, he had a command of disparate fields of knowledge that encompassed the whole of his civilization. Obviously we live in a radically different reality than that of Mr. Homer and a poet today couldn’t possibly hope to have a firm command of all fields of knowledge. Still, poets will regain an esteemed place in culture only so far as they are able to reclaim their role as individuals who delight and instruct.

But what is the purpose of poetry? What are the responsibilities of poets? The role of “poet” is one with a storied history in our culture and poets commonly stand in for artists in general in the same way painters do; but there’s something different, something special about poets, which painters are not suspected of sharing. The poet is seen as some sort of prophet, some sort of anti-jester; the poet is expected to tell us the truth of how we are doing but to do it with gravity—and even when a poet is being silly (as in Anthony Hecht’s “Dover Bitch” or Billy Collins’ “Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”) the silliness is in service to a higher gravity. When the wise old patriarch tells a joke the ensuing laughter has awe mixed into it. This is what poets command—their place is that of artistic ambassador to the universe, and from the universe to humanity. Is this role deserved? I don’t know—but it is what our culture has decided to give to poets. There is a reason why the Biblical works of prophecy are often presented in verse: poetry has the ability to express meaning with a power and concision that even the best prose doesn’t achieve.

About a hundred years or so ago, however . . . maybe a bit earlier, maybe it was in the last half of the nineteenth century . . . something happened. Something snapped in the minds of poets, and they started looking inward, to their own art and to themselves, rather than outward to the rest of culture. Walt Whitman probably started this trend; he was more interested in talking about himself than about the things the rest of the world was concerned about. Things really started to change in the decades immediately after the turn of the century. The same thing started happening to poetry that was happening in the rest of the arts: there was a near-universal movement of practitioners of all the fine arts becoming fixated on the precise nature of their chosen art and spending all their time analyzing it, taking it apart and trying to put it back together again. In painting we saw it earliest—the impressionists scrutinized the bedrock of their discipline, the cubists followed them, and then the doors were flung open to all the philosophies, movements, and isms that have afflicted painting to the present day. In music it started with Schoenberg and his disciples and gradually encompassed nearly the entirety of western art music, culminating with John Cage’s stochastic pieces and musical vacuities. In poetry, it really got going with Eliot and Cummings. All of this complicated puzzling about the nature of art found its way to the universities, which offered the artists a devil’s deal: you can spend all your time thinking about your own art for as long as you want but you will never be able to minister to the culture again. Well . . . the artists took it. Now who listens to the music of the academy anymore? Who reads academic poetry journals? Who pays attention to whatever the academic painters are doing? . . . only the insiders. Only people who are part of the art world, the poetry scene. The artistic avant-garde have divorced themselves from any kind of relevance to the broader culture, and the average art lover—the person who just wants a pretty picture for the wall, a good tune to hum, and a nice sonnet to memorize and recite to a friend or lover—has been shut out.

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The celebrated poetry of our day is stupid, asinine, humiliating, sterile, laborious, ugly, treacherous, posturing, insulting, worthless, destructive, licentious, false and an all around affront to decency and greatness. And when it is not busy being a grotesque monstrosity, it addresses us as naked propaganda, not even having the courtesy of making itself comely.

Thus Nik Hoffman (Author of “Ought Dragons Be Slain” above) states what he sees as the fundamental problem near the beginning of his remarkable throw-down-the-gauntlet essay series called “Poetry and Posterity.” Hoffmann’s densely considered lament for the state of the poetic art bristles with repressed rage at the fallen state of contemporary verse. He unwraps the problem layer by layer like an onion: poems today are often stupid and boring because poets are satisfied to write inane drivel; they don’t know how to communicate the eternal truths with their audience because readers aren’t taught how to understand the ideas within another person’s mind; readers can catch the sense of a sentence but they can’t understand the self, the other human being, behind that sense. Therefore the modern poets are condemned to being trapped within their own minds, unable to effectively communicate ideas.

Not that there were any ideas to communicate; the real villain in Hoffmann’s story is the poets themselves, who have settled for a mere expression of personal feelings and not been willing to grasp the tradition of poetry, one which has tasked poets with tackling the great ideas throughout the ages. “Mere form is not very constructive,” he says; “it’s only appearance—façade. The conservative seems to think that skeleton needs no heart, that a vein needs no blood.” For Hoffmann, a rejection of free verse and a return to formal and structured poetry is still only a means to an end. Beauty will not save the world; only truth can do that. And if poets sincerely want to reestablish themselves as stewards of their discipline and servants to the broader culture, they must abandon the desire to write poems about their own personal feelings and private impressions; they must seek to tackle the great questions—what Hoffmann calls “the permanent things” as opposed to “Today I was sad: The Poem.”

Whether you agree with Hoffmann’s ideas or not, it must be acknowledged that he and his type of critique / analysis of the current scene in poetry is one which is gaining more and more traction in online spaces. The comment sections of these small newsletters and blogs exhibit a robust degree of support and encouragement from fellow poets and from the average readers who feel excluded from the kind of discourse that Victoria Moul critiques. People are getting passionate about poetry; can this be anything but a good development?

His is a representative voice of a rising generation of poets and readers of poetry—and it must be admitted that, positioned as they are in the online space centered around Substack, these voices find themselves in a unique cultural and temporal position, able to pass on the traditions of the poetic craft into the digital age, and to transmit these traditions to a generation which the academy has failed spectacularly at engaging and which the small presses simply don’t have the scope to reach. What will become of this movement? I don’t know; but I can truthfully say that it is, probably for the first time in decades, an exciting time to be a poet.

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What is a poet to do, then? We’ve already discussed how an obsession with purely technical concerns led poetry into the academy and away from the common reader. Poets, compelled by the internal necessity that all artists know, yet constrained by their culture and unable to communicate, find themselves wishing for annihilation through their art. Thus says Nik Hoffman. He remarks on the uncanny amount of white space on the page in contemporary poetry collections. In a wonderful bit of hyperbole (which actually isn’t too far from the truth), he considers the blank book like this: “the empty space represents limitless possibility. The perfect expression of contemporary taste would be the totally blank book.” This coincides dangerously with some themes in the visual arts of the twentieth century, from Malevich’s white paintings to Koons’ “readymade” vacuums—all examples of artists obsessed with a metadiscussion of the limits of their art.

Limitless possibility—perhaps poets want to inhabit the pose of POET without incurring the associated risks, hence the blank space, the symbol of poetry without the substance; after all, it is quite a risky thing to write a poem, especially one that advances an idea. People might not agree with you. Better to write “dummy poems” which signal one’s status as poet but which don’t risk anything. If you do, at least you’ll be in good company—there is a long tradition of such poems, stretching from Rupi Kaur’s untitled Instagram poetry (here’s an example):

the right one does not
stand in your way
they make space for you
to step forward

To William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

To Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—poems which are quite relentlessly performative of “poetry”; but they cannot be analyzed with the traditional tools of poetic criticism; and they barely say anything at all.

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1. There are, of course, many poets who do not subscribe to a formalist model; they are quite contented with the liberty afforded by free verse and they would probably bristle at the suggestion that formal structures are the only way for a poet to achieve greatness. It occurs to me, though, that the is a way for form to be included in free verse: the way of the chiasm. Chiasm is one of the most important organizing principles of ancient Hebrew poetry, which had no system of meter or stresses corresponding to that of English poetry. Chiastic structures abound in the Bible and are also present in a number of other poetic works, from Paradise Lost to the Dutch national anthem. It is indeed possible for a poet to write in free verse and use strict chiastic structures to organize their argument. Chiasms reward close reading and can be nested fractally; there is no limit to the formal acrobatics that a determined poet could achieve using chiasms to structure their poems. And I must say, the “aha!” moment felt when discovering a chiasm is one of the greatest pleasures that a reader can experience. Why, then, are chiasms not encountered more often in English poetry? I can’t answer that. But if there are any poets out there who are reading this and are inspired to write their verse in chiasms, I sincerely and humbly ask that they share their work with me: I would be greatly honored to be able to see the results.