Poetry and Form

Our theme today is poetic form, but I’d like to get started with an
observation on the ‘form’ our discussion of literature takes, here in a
university setting. We’ve all been in boring seminars, haven’t we,
tumbleweed seminars where the terrible teacher, let’s say me for
argument’s sake, comes out with something, no one replies, you sneak a
look at your watch and notice there’s still twenty minutes to go, and ask
yourself if it isn’t too late to think about switching to mediaeval history or
marine biology instead. Yes, we’ve all been there. But speaking from my
side of the desk, let me share a little trade secret with you. There are
many different ways to approach a text. When I teach the Controversial
Classics module, I often go into the seminar and ask people what the
book has to say about questions of sex, gender, race, religion, and
politics. Sometimes the answer is, awkward and controversial things,
which can make the discussion that follows a little tricky. But in my
experience there is no question more calculated to stop a seminar
discussion dead in its tracks than, Does anyone know what an acatalectic
tetrameter is? Or, what do you think of Dryden’s use of the spondee and
the anapaest versus Swift’s handling of the trochee and the amphibrach?
Why should that be, I wonder. We’re talking about literary form and the
building blocks from which it is assembled, so in theory it should be the
thing we find easiest to discuss. But for some reason many of us today
relate to writing first and last in terms of themes and issues, rather than
those building blocks without which there would be no text at all.

So what I want to talk about today is how writers give form to their
writing, and what the advantages are of engaging with that vocabulary of
tetrameter, trochees and tercets. Even if you don’t engage with that
vocabulary, it doesn’t mean you’re not using these forms anyway,
whether consciously or not. There is a character in a Moliere play who
asks what the definition of prose is. Prose is the opposite of poetry, he is
told. This thrills him, since it means he has been walking around talking
prose his whole life, without knowing it – what an achievement! So let’s
not get hung up on questions of terminology. Let’s also not get hung up
on questions of rules. Even if you don’t know what an acatalectic
tetrameter is, you may have been using it all your life without realizing.
The American poet Ezra Pound said that there is fluid as well as solid
form, and that some poems may have a fluid form like water poured into
a vase, and others solid form like a tree. There are many levels to that,
when you think about it, since the tree is solid but no two trees are alike,
whereas the vase is more standardized, but the water it contains remains
free-form and able to disperse and take up alternative shapes without

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being tied to the shape of the vase. It’s a question of symbiosis, of
interaction between form and material. What it isn’t is a passive process
of following the rules. If that was all poetic form was, no one would ever
do anything new and shocking new inventions like the sonnet would have
been strangled at birth.

On this subject, though, here’s a word of warning for you before we

start looking in closer detail at poetic form. There are lots of people out
there who don’t read and can’t stand contemporary poetry, and when
asked about this will say, why can’t it rhyme and scan and make sense
like it used to. Steven Fry has written a book along these lines called The
Ode Less Travelled, in which he announces that modern free verse is all
so much ‘arse-dribble’. If I try to be fair to Steven Fry, I might suggest
that what he likes is not so much poetry as verse, mechanically produced
compositions that follows the rules but don’t do much or anything beyond
that. In my experience though, people who go on about how terrible
modern free verse is aren’t much interested in old-fashioned verse either.
They just don’t like poetry, any kind of poetry, and fancy an excuse to
bellyache about it. This mechanical, pseudo-traditional understanding of
poetic form is not what we are talking about today. Poetic form is a way
of encountering the world, of learning how to say things in language you
didn’t know you could. Let me compare it to the sense of touch. Touch is
unique among the senses in being two-way – you can’t touch something
without it touching you back. The bad understanding of form is like
walking round in a suit of armour, in an inflexible form that will stop you
having any interactions with your surroundings. Whereas what I’m
recommending to you is something closer like to a passage in Coleridge
where he compares form to a blind man running his hands over a child’s
face, conjuring a startling reality into being through his touch.

Here’s a big statement to get us started then. I mentioned how

some people find it easier to talk about writing in terms of issues and
themes than literary form. You can always talk about issues in the
abstract, but there is no way of talking about literary form in the
abstract. There is no such thing as ‘the sonnet’ or ‘the sestina’, only
individual sonnets and sestinas. I will now illustrate this for you with an
opening example from by far the most exuberant and inventive
contemporary poet where the use of strict or not so strict forms is
concerned, Paul Muldoon. I say ‘not so strict’ because in the case of one
of his most daring poems, ‘Yarrow’, the rhyme scheme is both devilishly
clever and almost invisible. The poem is in a series of short fragments,
but takes up more than a hundred pages. The first page rhymes with the
last page, the second page rhymes with the second-last page, and so on,

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all the way to the middle, like a Rorschach ink blot folding into itself.
How ingenious and pointless is that, you might think. But without wading
into that particular poem, let me talk you through two other Muldoon
examples to illustrate for you just what the rewards are of such smart-
aleckry. The first example is called ‘Milkweed and Monarch’. It’s a
villanelle, a form whose rules are as follows. A villanelle is a nineteen-line
poem written in six stanzas, the first five of which have three lines with
the sixth and last sprouting one extra. Under the rhyme scheme, the first
and third lines of these tercets – groups of three lines – rhyme, and
continue to do so, with the same rhyme, all the way through. The middle
or b line also rhymes, with the middle lines of all the other tercets. But
the repetition goes a bit further again. There are two repeated lines or
refrains. Lines one and three are repeated, alternatingly, at the end of
each tercet all the way through the poem. In the final stanza they form
the second-last and last lines of the poem. Among the best-known
villanelles in modern poetry is Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into
that Good Night’, whose final stanza is

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thomas uses lovely, chiming full rhymes. Originally the villanelle

was an Italian form, and Italian too is gifted with a multitude of full
rhymes. The Muldoon example I’ve chosen is slightly more elliptical than
that. Muldoon has been described as a man who could rhyme ‘knife’ and
‘fork’ or ‘cat’ and ‘dog’, and with many of his poems just reading down
the right-hand margin is a mini-masterclass in inventiveness and wit.
Look out for the rhymes as I read you Muldoon’s ‘Milkweed and
Monarch’, but look out for everything else too, principally an answer to
the question: what is Muldoon using the villanelle form to say here? How
different or reduced would this poem be if it was in free verse? Why does
it have to be in this and no other form?

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father

the taste of dill, or tarragon –
he could barely tell one from the other –

filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.

Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,

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 but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-
he could barely tell one from the other –

and why should he now savour

the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

He looked about. He remembered her palaver

on how both earth and sky would darken –
‘You could barely tell one from the other’ –

while the Monarch butterflies passed over

in their milkweed-hunger: ‘A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher

with the force of a hurricane.’
Then: ‘Milkweed and Monarch ‘invented’ each other.’

He looked about. Cow’s-parsley in a samovar.

He’d mistaken his mother’s name, ‘Regan, ‘for Anger’;
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

The first thing I might point out is that Muldoon has crashed his
line-limit, putting in an extra tercet. That’s naughty of him. But while a
strict form necessarily imposes some kind of control on proceedings, this
is also very much a poem about randomness and loss of control. The
opening scene is the grave of the poet’s parents. The poet is experiencing
some difficulty mustering the necessary grief for such a sad spot. He uses
the phrase ‘mother and father’ in one of his repeated lines, but the
repetitions don’t come in the context of him telling us more and more
about his parents. On the contrary, they come in the midst of multiple
digressions. He can’t seem to keep his eye on the subject at all. I
mentioned refrains there, but if you look more closely you’ll see that here
again Muldoon has broken the rules. He is meant to repeat whole lines
by way of a refrain, but doesn’t. Instead he takes two elements, or half-
lines, ‘mother and father’ and ‘one from the other’, and repeats them
instead. Again, very naughty of him. But let me return to my short-
attention span theme that I was developing. In stanzas three and four he
remembers a female friend with whom he has had some manner of
romantic dalliance. It gets quite kinky in fact, when he rhymes ‘Portland,

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Orgeon’, with ‘her little pickled gherkin’, by which he appears to mean
an item of her anatomy. How strange, you might think, not because you
don’t enjoy weird sex metaphors in poems, but because, you know,
wasn’t this meant to be about the poet’s dead parents? So where did that
come from? Perhaps the answer is in the reference that follows to
monarch butterflies. If you’re familiar with chaos theory, you may know
the frequently-used example of a butterfly beating its wings outside the
window and causing an earthquake in China. Everything is connected, in
other words, in ways we can’t begin to understand. So perhaps the
woman in Portland, Oregon is in fact connected to the dead parents, and
perhaps the butterfly infestation in the cemetery is about to whip up a
storm. And in fact, that’s just what happens. Look at the last four lines of
the poem again:

He looked about. Cow’s-parsley in a samovar.

He’d mistaken his mother’s name, ‘Regan, ‘for Anger’;
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

If you follow the blueprint, you will know that Muldoon has made a
mistake here. In the second line, the rhyme word should be ‘regan’
(rhyming with ‘gherkin’, ‘hurricane’, etc), not ‘anger’. He’s got them the
wrong way round. But he has a very good excuse. Looking at his mother’s
maiden name on her gravestone – Regan, like King Lear’s daughter – he
sees the anagram word ‘anger’ instead, and has his moment of
realisation. The reason why he hasn’t been able to grieve properly for his
parents is because he is still too angry with them, as the last three lines
brilliantly express with their ambiguous punctuation, leaving it open
whether it is the ‘mother and father’ or ‘Regan, “for Anger”’ he can’t tell
apart, or possibly both. So sharp is the shock that it throws the poem off
balance and derails the rhyme scheme. There is no way, with a writer as
clever and knowing as Muldoon, that this is an accident. But somehow
the ‘mistake’ is even more impressive than getting it right. This is a really
superb example of a poet using a strict form, not in a passive or dutiful
way, not just going through the motions, but bending it to his will and
making it surrender unexpected patterns of meaning. It’s also a powerful
response to the problems of grief and its legacy, of emotional repression
and how art can function as an escape valve for our pent-up feelings.

The second Muldoon example I wanted to discuss with you is in the

even stricter form known as a sestina. I notice that it too has a sexual
sub-theme, and I wonder whether the heavy use of repetition in these
poems isn’t akin, perhaps, to the words reproducing with themselves.

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Maybe. I’ll leave you to be the judge of that, but first, the rules of the
sestina. It comes in six stanzas of six lines, with a shorter stanza of three
lines tacked on at the end. Take the end words from stanza one – let’s
call them 123456 – and rearrange them as follows: 615243. The last then
the first, then the second-last then the second, then the third-last, then
the third. Then do that to stanza two, generating the new end-word order
for stanza three. This means that by the end of the poem every word will
have appeared in each of the six possible end-word positions. All six
words are also crammed, two each, into the last three lines. That’s a very
dry description of the form, and the form itself might sound very dry or
unchanging, but on the contrary – a good sestina works a transformative
magic on its end-words and imbues them with a principle of growth,
development and drama there before your eyes. Since this is Muldoon
we’re talking about, there will be some cheating here, but here is his
sestina ‘Cauliflowers’, which comes with an epigraph from the American
supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer.

Plants that grow in the dark have been developed

through gene-splicing, in which light-producing
bacteria from the mouths of fish are introduced to
cabbage, carrots and potatoes.
-The National Enquirer

More often than not he stops at the headrig to light

his pipe
and try to regain
his composure. The price of cauliflowers
has gone down
two weeks in a row on the Belfast market.

From here we can just make out

a platoon of Light
Infantry going down
the road to the accompaniment of a pipe-
band. The sun glints on their silver-
buttoned jerkins.

My uncle, Patrick Regan,

has been leaning against the mud-guard
of the lorry. He levers
open the bonnet and tinkers with a light

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 wrench at the hose-pipe
that's always going down.

Then he himself goes down

to bleed oil into a jerry-can.
My father slips the pipe
into his scorch-marked
breast pocket and again makes light
of the trepanned cauliflowers.

All this as I listened to two lovers

repeatedly going down
on each other in the next room . . . ‘light
of my life . . . ’ in a motel in Oregon.
All this. Magritte's
pipe

and the pipe-

bomb. White Annetts. Gillyflowers.
Margaret,
are you grieving? My father going down
the primrose path with Patrick Regan.
All gone out of the world of light.

All gone down

the original pipe. And the cauliflowers
in an unmarked pit, that were harvested by their own light.

First, let’s see where Muldoon has broken the rules here. It’s in the
repeating words. What he has done is keep three the same throughout,
‘pipe’, ‘down’ and ‘light’, but morph the other three into rhyme-words
instead. Thus, ‘cauliflowers’ becomes ‘levers’ and ‘lovers’, ‘regain’
becomes ‘Regan’ and ‘Oregon’ (note the overlap with the other Muldoon
poem), and ‘market’ becomes ‘Margaret’ becomes ‘Magritte’, the Belgian
surrealist painter. We’re talking about cauliflowers here, which the
poet’s father farms and sells in Belfast. The innocence of pastoral life is
juxtaposed with something more threatening, as Muldoon senior watches
an army regiment march down the road, using clever line-breaks to fit
‘Light /Infantry’ and ‘pipe-/band’ into his repeating word scheme. In
stanza three, his uncle fiddles with a lorry that is always ‘going down’,
before Muldoon senior gets down to the business of fixing it. We had a
strangely unexpected sex reference in ‘Milkweed and Monarch’, and with
all this talk of ‘going down’ you can probably guess what’s coming next –

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Muldoon is remembering all this, he says, as he listens to two lovers
‘repeatedly going down’ on each other in an adjoining hotel room in
Oregon. I’m puzzled, I confess. What is it about two strangers having sex
that reminds him of his uncle fixing a lorry? Also, sorry but how exactly
does he know what sex acts the hotel guests are performing? Are they
shouting out a running commentary? It’s more than a little peculiar. But
the strangeness is the point, I think. This is a poem about the power of
memory and the passage of time. When you think of being emotionally
affected by a memory from the past, I don’t think it happens because you
make an appointment with yourself to sit in your armchair with a brandy
and a cigar and wait to be visited by a memory of how nice Auntie Mabel
was. It’s unplanned, and that’s what makes memory such a powerful
force in good writing. So there Muldoon is in his hotel room thinking of
types of cauliflower and an elegy by Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘Margaret,
are you grieving?’), when he throws in a lament for his father and uncle
too, who are now ‘gone out of the world of light’, ‘All gone down /the
original pipe’, along with the cauliflowers that were ‘harvested by their
own light’. It’s a wonderful touch, the way he changes tone right at the
end, moving from the seriousness of the dead father back to the
cauliflowers, via an absurd story about cauliflowers that glow in the dark.
He’s pulling your leg, but making a serious point here too. The poem is
all about light and dark, and the light disappearing into the dark. We try
to impose structure and meaning on the senselessness of death, but do
we succeed? Do our poems shine a light in the darkness? How much
easier it would be if dead people, like National Enquirer cauliflowers,
gave off their own glow. But, in their own way, Muldoon’s father and
uncle do precisely that in this poem. The poem is like a hallucinated
presence, locating the disappeared past in the middle of the present. It
achieves this through the repetitive back-and-forth effects of the sestina
form. I mentioned that Muldoon takes some liberties, by changing some
of the words, but even the words he doesn’t change undergo that
transformation I hinted at earlier, especially the poem’s last word ‘light’.
The flicker of a match as Muldoon senior lights his pipe becomes the
light of redemption, or redemption of a kind, at the end, as the dead man
is restored to us. It’s a hugely effective and moving piece of writing.

I’ve tried to suggest here that using a strict form can enact a
conflict between profit and loss: you can return to a painful experience of
loss from the past and harvest it into the safety of a strict form. But it’s
not as simple as the negative becoming positive, and all the pain of loss
draining away. In the best examples of formal poetry, the form can
become a reflection of the experience of loss, preserving the pain and
grief without sugar-coating them into something artificial. My next

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example brings us back to the villanelle form, as explored by the
American poet Elizabeth Bishop in her poem ‘One Art’.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Something perverse appears to be going on here, as the poet

practises the art of losing, the way you might practise the trombone or
doing press-ups. You’d think the art of losing is something you’d master
by stopping doing it, but here it is more like shell-shock, with the poet
returning to an action that she finds painful the better to bring it under
control and break the spell of its harmful effects. Hence her starting with
small daily acts of loss, like losing her keys. Notice as we go along the
skilful way in which Bishop overlays everyday conversational rhythms on
the formal skeleton of the poem, mixing end-stopped and run-on lines.
Sometimes the sentence or unit of meaning ends at the line, in other
words, and sometimes not. Also, she uses subtle half-rhymes such as
‘gesture’ and ‘master’, ‘fluster’, ‘faster’ and ‘last, or’ to avoid
obviousness, which is always a good thing when we’re using a strict
form. As the poem moves towards its conclusion it’s obvious that the loss
on Bishop’s plate goes a bit beyond not being able to find the novel she
was reading. How do you lose ‘two cities’, anyway? She is hinting at
large upheavals in her private life without ever spelling them out, but no
matter what they were she is adamant they weren’t a(nother rhyme

9
word) ‘a disaster’. Then the poem comes to grief, literally, on the final
loss of the person addressed in the closing lines. Who is this person? All
we learn about her is a reference in brackets to her joking voice. It’s all
very mysterious, and then we get one last insistent hammering home of
the refrain that none of this is a disaster. Except by now it’s obvious that
the poet doesn’t believe it anymore. She is in open revolt against her own
poem, and has to force herself to fill in the pattern: ‘though it may look
like (Write it!) like disaster’. It’s a brilliant example of a poem saying two
contradictory things at once: the pattern says one thing, but the poem
obviously believes the opposite. But if the poet gave in to the disaster,
then she might just collapse in a blubbering alcoholic heap on the floor
and do nothing. So here too the formal discipline of the poem is a help, in
making her rise to the challenge and give a form to her pain. For those of
you wondering what the story behind the poem is, Elizabeth Bishop had a
sad life of displacement and loss, and is responding here to the suicide of
her lover in Brazil, after which she moved back to the United States and
went into an alcoholic decline. That’s not strictly necessary information,
but I think you can see its shadow falling over the poem. But the success
of the poem – and it is a brilliant poem – lies in not having to spell things
out like this. It’s not that the form conveys this message by putting the
poem on autopilot. No, it does it by setting up a tension between
necessity and freedom, self-expression and what the form of the poem
dictates you have to say. Someone once said the difference between
sarcasm and irony is that, while both involve saying two things at once,
in irony there is something of value on both sides of the divide. In
Bishop’s poem there is merit in believing that a poem can help us
overcome an emotional disaster, because if we didn’t believe that, then
we might never recover from bad things, ever. But there is also merit in
the screaming voice inside our heads that says no, you can’t get over
these things, and you never will, because that’s true as well, true to how
we feel in these situations. But as ‘One Art’ shows, it’s not a question of
having to choose here, when the poem allows you to dramatize and have
both.

But here is maybe the strangest thing of all about ‘One Art’. Having
written such a brilliant villanelle, Bishop then said, ‘And for my next
trick, I will write a book-length sequence comprised entirely of
villanelles’. Or rather, no she didn’t. She never published another
villanelle. I said earlier that the version of poetic form I wanted to talk
about today was the opposite of a mechanical formula, and I think Bishop
bears out this truth perfectly. Every poem is a one-off thing, even if you
do go and write not one but loads of villanelles. Each one should be an
event, a reimagining of the form from scratch.

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 There are so many different poetic forms for you to explore, and
I’m conscious here of introducing you to a very limited few. I once
examined a PhD on the mediaeval poet Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, who is
better known in English as St Ronald of Orkney. He was canonized for
building St Magnus Cathedral on Orkney, but in between his acts of
sainthood, he also found time to invent something like eighty new
metrical forms, because – to return to my earlier hobbyhorse – back in
that day, people related to poetry not in terms of self-expression or
themes and issues, but the minutiae of how many stresses go where and
when and where you use alliteration. So if St Ronald could do it, you too
should relate to poetic form in terms of freedom and opportunity. My
next example involves an invented form. It comes from the English poet
Peter Reading, who wrote a very funny book with the long-winded title
5x5x5x5x5. The book comes in five sections, each of which has five sub-
section, each of which has five verses, each of which has five lines, each
of which contains five syllables. It’s totally arbitrary. There are also five
characters: a wife-hating lab technician, a retired ventriloquist, a very
overweight and unhealthy bin man, an obnoxious rugby-playing student,
and a pretentious professor of philosophy. All five seem to spend most of
their time down the pub getting smashed. Earlier I used a comparison
from Ezra Pound about pouring water into a vase. Peter Reading simply
pours his characters’ thought processes into the arbitrary form he has
chosen. The results might therefore seem a bit stilted and artificial. On
the contrary, they come marvellously to life with the sheer vigour of the
characters’ thought processes and recorded speech. Here is Jock the
rugby player on a boozy evening out:

Jock does Combined Arts.

He’s a Second Year
and plays in defence
for the Poly team.
God!, he makes you laugh.

He’s just sunk six pints

of Low C Draught Pils
and he needs a wee –
calls it ‘Shaking Hands
with the Unemployed.’

After being sick

in the bog, he writes,
in green felt-tip on

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 a machine that sells
contraceptives, quips:

THIS MACHINE DEGRADES

WOMEN SO DO I
THESE BALLOONS DON’T WORK
GUARANTEED 9 MONTHS
BUY ME AND STOP ONE

(Ho ho what a jape.)

Thus we do our things,
rugger, liquor, ink,
it’s a proper lark
until closing time.

When we looked at Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ I suggested the

richness and variety of the interplay between the form, the poetic line,
and the sentences she drapes over this form. Here too we have a subtle
interplay between his very eccentric form and the speech rhythms of our
character – a character who, as you can see, is neither very subtle nor
particularly eloquent. The jokes he scrawls on a condom vending
machine are fairly brainless stuff, but the artfulness of the poem is in the
distance Reading sets up between the patterning of the stanzas and the
throwaway nature of much everyday conversation. Sometimes the gap
between the two becomes so extreme as to be farcical, as when a group
of violent skinheads enters the pub and the professor of philosophy
attempts to engage them in conversation. This does not go well. You
can’t say a lot in five syllables, yet coincidentally or not, the skinheads’
thought processes fit very comfortably indeed within a five-line unit. The
sheer tum-te-tum walloping quality of their thoughts is reminiscent of
Anglo-Saxon poetry, which must be the reason, I think, Reading puts a
gap in the middle of the lines in this section, to imitate the visual layout
of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

get him in the bogs

shove his head in it
rub his face in shit
piss all over him
get them matches out

butt him in the face

knee him in the crotch
kick him in the head

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 smash his fuckin legs
stick one in his nuts

posh puff clever shite

la-de- fuckin-da
bastard brainy git
bleedin college prat
we hate puffy snobs

boot his friggin guts

slash him in the face
slice him down the neck
get blood in his eyes
knife his nose across

set his coat alight

squash his other eye
looks like cherry jam
that should learn the twat
Bad Skins Rule OK

The violence of these lines is so extreme, though, that you would

have to be completely desensitized not to... burst out laughing, which I
notice a few of you did. Why do we react this way? Because the form
creates a tension in the poem, between the discipline of counting the
syllables and the horrifying content the form is being used to relay. The
combination of intricacy and random violence is a bizarre contradiction,
which leaves the reader unsure how to react, with nervous laughter the
best bet. The formality of the poem seems inappropriate, and somehow
disrespectful to the victim. But then the poem makes us think about the
ways that formal or polite forms of discourse normally gloss over
violence, and spare us the horror of conflict and war. If you’re trying to
convey the awfulness of someone being assaulted by a skinhead, which is
more important – getting your message across, or meeting the
requirements of the poetic form you have chosen? Reading shows us how
wrong we are if we think the first option excludes the second, as if
sincerity, just telling it like it is, doesn’t involve tests of form and
technique as well, or as if form and technique somehow get in the way of
you telling it like it is. At this point let me remind you of that line by Ezra
Pound, as featured in an earlier lecture, when he said ‘I believe in
technique as the test of a man’s sincerity’. You have something just
heartbreaking to write about, so how do you best express it – by crying
buckets of tears, or by counting the syllables in the arcane verse form

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you have chosen, or working on the rhymes in the villanelle? Sadly or
paradoxically, the answer is the latter. In pushing the importance of
technique on you, once again, I’m not suggesting you don’t express your
feelings or give a voice to the worst emotional disasters you can
imagines. Not at all, but I am saying that unless you approach these as
problems of poetic form, as problems of shared expression, then the
feelings will fall stillborn from the page and won’t rise to the condition of
art. Yes, it’s strange that a poem by Peter Reading about skinheads
beating someone up in a pub toilet should remind us so forcefully of this
point, but such is the paradoxical nature of art. Technique, not our so-
called feelings, is the truest test of our sincerity as writers.

When I was explaining the sestina to you, your eyes may have
glazed over as I explained which words go where from one stanza to
another. That’s what I thought I might use as my last example a brilliant
sestina by the contemporary American poet A. E. Stallings that cuts
through all that with the simple precaution of using the same word at the
end of every single line. The word in question, and the title of the poem,
is that internet-ubiquitous monosyllable ‘Like’. Just look though at how
the repetitions of the word here, and the variations she rings on it, do
such a good job of making us think about the fate of language in our
mass-media age, the pressures language comes under, and how language
manages to hang on to its humanity amid the wholesale idiocy of our
times:

Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,

A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality-TV star look-alike,
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn’t like
There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”

Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like

Is something you can quantify: each “like”
You gather’s almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. “Please like
This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like
To end hunger and climate change alike,

But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like

Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,
So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE

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 Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ”
Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike
Flounder, agape, gesticulating like
A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like
Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike
With other crutches, um, when we use “like,”

We’re not just buying time on credit: Like

Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,
Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like”
If you’re against extinction!) Like is like
Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike

Redundant fast food franchises, each like

(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like”
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,

How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.

The first thing I’d say about this poem is how much I like it: if it
was on facebook, even though I hate reading poems on facebook, I would
definitely ‘click like’. But she doesn’t really want us to click like, does
she, because as she points out there is no dislike button on facebook, and
there is something coercive and reductive about the whole business of
‘liking’ things on the internet these days, isn’t there. You tell facebook
you’re stuffing your face with a falafel wrap on your lunch break and
somebody you last saw at school ten years ago and who currently lives in
Outer Mongolia ‘likes’ it. Brilliant: thanks for that, you might think. I
suggested earlier that it was almost like the rhyme words in Paul
Muldoon’s poems were performing a kind of courtship dance with each
other, in their adventurous couplings, but this poem is more like when
the characters in Friends used to look out the window and see the person
they called ‘ugly naked guy’ across the way. It’s all about too much
information and over-sharing, and how words have unpleasant designs on
us, like spam emails or junk mail in the post. We brush them off but back
they come, time after time. And it’s awful, but of course that’s what this
poem is doing too, with its thirty-nine times plus repetition of the word
‘like’.

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 This poem conforms to a rule I like to peddle in my poetry
workshops: namely that the material for art is all round us, even in the
most banal and degraded forms of experience and language. And in fact,
the material can be just under your nose but your actual nose itself.
There is a wonderful French poet called Francis Ponge, who wrote a book
called Le parti pris des choses, or Siding With Things in English. One of
his prose poems is a meditation on a hermit crab’s shell, in which he
praises the crab for finding a form so perfectly proportioned to its body,
and says he best likes artists whose work gives the same sense of
matching the human body, its needs, pleasures and abilities, its eyes,
ears, mouth and nose. To anyone trying to write poems of your own, I
suggest you apply the same standard to your own work, as you approach
the question of form. Poetic form is a bodily experience, and is implicitly
a vindication of the writer’s bodily experience. But now then, here are my
ten summing-up statements on poetic form:

1) Poetic form is not conservative or avant-garde. It is both. If you are

a boring conservative poet, your formal poems will be boring and
conservative, and if you are avant-garde and think form is somehow
beneath you are not writing poems you are blowing bubbles, which
is always a pleasurable activity, but not one that is going to leave
much of a trace in its wake.
2) Form is the question of what you want that trace to look like. A
you-shaped trace, preferably. I didn’t bring my Princeton
Encyclopaedia of Poetics in to show you today, mainly because it’s
the size of an old-fashioned phone book. It contains thousands of
poetic forms for you to choose from. It’s not just villanelles or
sestinas, though if you do like villanelles or sestinas you could write
a hundred of each and never repeat yourself.
3) Some styles go in and out of fashion over periods of centuries. The
eighteenth century thought that sonnets sucked, for some reason.
But today they have never been more alive. There is no such thing
as a dead form.
4) Invent your own forms. I can’t really say much more about that,
since you’re the one who has to invent them, not me, but if they’re
any good I’ll happily chip in and start writing them myself.
5) Don’t think of form as a thing in itself, separate from the story you
might want a poem to tell or the images you might want it to carry.
If they are the blood you want circulating round your poem, then
the form is its veins and arteries. It all hangs together.
6) The essence of form is discovery – discovering things as you go
along. Rhyme is a big part of that, I think, as we saw in my
examples today.

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7) As Muldoon shows, humour too is very important to the intelligent
use of form. Make the reader laugh – make the poem laugh.
8) Don Paterson has said that a poem is a little machine for
remembering itself. Make your poem drum itself into your head as
you write it. Find the form that answers best to that memorability.
9) Find the form that goes beyond form – the villanelle with the extra
verse, the sestina with seven lines per stanza instead of six, the
cat’s paw with the extra toes. They’re out there, if you know where
to find them.
10) And finally, form is about freedom. Form is no more
constricting than the human body is. It is the blueprint for
everything a poem can do and deliver – movement, expression,
music, pleasure.

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