I remember clearly though it’s more than fifteen years past a graduate-school colleague standing up in the apartment of a friend, several hours of workshop conversation behind us, and declaring that he wanted to be remembered as a craftsman, a maker of poems, as if he’d just stepped out of the cabinet-maker’s shop and turned to another medium. This was meant to be a declaration of honesty and way of focusing on the language-work of making poems. Of course, what was meant to be honest masked some other things—like the important conversations about ethics and representations and the histories of our language traditions—but his move to center our discussion on matters of syntax and phrase was also an important corrective or balance to the over-theorizing that happens in almost any environment rich with graduate students.
All to say, the series of craft notes that will officially begin Monday is both about some nuts-and-bolts problems and also about the ideas, the readings, the considerations that enable us to create something that is more play, more human, than machine.
To speak of writing as a game—or as play—is so commonplace it feels at times like a cliché, perhaps because such words are often used in passing and not explained, or because those who use them most don’t seem to be having very much fun, or because the games we play when we do good work aren’t like the games we spend most of our time watching or thinking about as games. Writing poetry is not like basketball, though sportcasters use the phrase “poetry in motion” to describe a inspiring play: though there are rules in both basketball and in poetry, in writing, the lines, the referees, the other players, the hoop, even the ball itself may not even exist. And the rules that end the game may not be the same as the ones that began it.
Genres provide sets of rules or, more properly, they create arenas in which we might play the game that will create a poem. We can define a sonnet fairly specifically as a poem of fourteen lines, using a recognizable rhythmic principle in each line (meter) and a recognizable rhyme scheme that helps divide the poem into distinct regions or parts that create an argument or a progression, typically with a romantic concern. These rules or characteristics can focus our work, give us things to think about to the exclusion of e-mail or the power bill and therefore push us further into a poem—and when we come to a new poetic genre we will naturally be interested in a lot of tool-oriented exploration: what do I need to know how to do to write this poem? But the real energy and excitement comes, I think, not in achieving some basic dexterity (however satisfying that may be) but in visualizing a new possibility, say, a 13-line sonnet or a sonnet that’s about war instead of love. One sees a chance to make a more interesting, a more individual poem, so one changes the rules—instead of tossing the ball into the basket, going up for dunk, or instead of running the football making a forward pass (can you believe they played football for years without passing?).
So, the series that Tarfia Faizullah and I will begin on Monday will be looking at some of the nuts-and-bolts business but also working toward the place where we can see the form as an opportunity to make something new happen—in a way a reader might be able to understand how the game has changed.
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A footnote, from The Art of Poetry #35: John Hollander:
INTERVIEWER
It can’t be coincidental that all the teachers you name are moralists. You say that Auden “changed” you. What was it in his work exactly that fired you?
HOLLANDER
It was the relation between seriousness and play. It was the voice of a kindly intelligent grown-up who never forgot what it was like to be a child. It was the wonderful improvisational relation to stances and forms and literary modes. The idea of a poet who could write at anything and have it all be part of the poetic oeuvre. A poet who could at once contain and indulge that basic impulse to play with words—an impulse I’d always had and which, at first, I’d only found an outlet for in joking.