Forming a Formalist, a Memoir with Verse Asides
I grew up in the Midlands of England with a father who was both a classicist and a thwarted thespian--he could have gone to the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts, but opted instead to read History at Bristol University, where, of course, he met my mother. The stage's loss was our gain. Conversations with my father turned into an impromptu performance whenever he spied the opportunity to insert one of the many Shakespearean soliloquies he knew by heart, or stanzas of verses by poets whose works he admired: Tennyson, Browning, Pope, Kipling. Meter was something I heard every day, and sounded as natural to me as breathing.
Even when I was at school-a Church of England Primary School intimately associated with the fourteenth-century church across the road-I was being inculcated with that most English of meters, common measure(Quatrains where lines of iambic tetrameter alternate with trimeter,) in which so many of the hymns I sang daily were composed.
In a small blue book, which I still possess, I began to write my own poems. The first poem is constructed in iambic tetrameter quatrains, although I would not have known to call them that. I was eleven years old.
As I slid into the torturous puberty typical of sensitive, bookish children, however, I discovered Sylvia Plath's Ariel. She became my heroine; to imitate her I abandoned my rhyming verses as childish, and began writing fashionably free verse like everyone else. But meter and rhyme kept creeping back into my work; I recently unearthed my first chapbook, Mobius Strip (circa 1996) and was fascinated to find a long poem written in rhyming couplets, with roughly iambic lines, and another in tetrameter quatrains. I was groping toward prosody in the same way that poets such as Chaucer had in the middle ages, during the transition away from the Anglo Saxon poetics of alliteration. Like them, I was genuinely unconscious of what I was doing.
My poetic development was arrested when my first child was born, in 1997. and I advanced no further until around 2002, when my second child went to pre-school. We had moved to the U.S. in 2001, and so I started to submit poetry to American literary journals. When my submissions came back promptly, and accompanied by form rejections, I realized there was much I had yet to learn. I began, for the first time, to actively study the craft of poetry.
Prosody was a revelation. I had simply never before realized that there was a system for achieving the rhythmic effects I admired so much in the classic poems of English literature as recited by my father, and for which I strived in my own rhyming poems. I had always just read my lines aloud to see if they "sounded" right. It is worth emphasizing that this is not at all a bad way to approach the subject. Poets who begin with the theory first, risk the monotony of over- regularity. In other words, once you learn that iambic pentameter consists of five feet, each comprising a two-syllable iamb (weak stress followed by strong stress,) you may be tempted to make every line pattern daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM. Because I began writing lines that had many natural substitutions but "sounded" right, that has never been a problem for me.
As my first deliberate attempt at metrical regularity I determined to write a sonnet. I loved "The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke, and modeled my own sonnet on that. Hence my first effort was an Elizabethan sonnet-fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Although it took me many, many drafts before I was happy with it, this work-unlike several other early sonnets I discarded-was eventually published by the Evansville Review.
The Child from Two Doors Down The child is back, come scuttling down the path between her part-time home and our back door. Her hair's a scarecrow snarl; she needs a bath how can they let her out alone? She's four, although she acts fourteen; designer names emboss her jeans and jacket. Shoes untied, she kicks the grass and will not join the games my children play. Instead she slinks inside to trail me round the kitchen as I cook; she takes in any unexpected crumbs of love, but still throws me this hungry look. I did not bear this child. Each time she comes her mouth gapes wider; she's the starving guest I dare not feed, poor cuckoo in my nest.
My growing knowledge of prosody enabled me to rationalize decisions I had made innately-in line two above, for example, the last two feet consist of a pyrrhic(unstressed two syllable foot,) "and our", followed by a spondee(double stressed two syllable foot,) "back door." Such a construction is known as a double iamband is entirely valid. I was gratified to learn this because it had always sounded right!
I adored writing sonnets, and still do. In fact, at this point I have accumulated over fifty published sonnets, and I've twice been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov sonnet award. However, my studies opened to me a whole raft of metrical (and other) forms that I yearned to try.
As a lover of mathematical configurations and word puzzles I found the repeating forms both particularly attractive, and a challenge to do well. The trick with any form that has a repetend is that the repetend must increase in intensity every time it appears, and preferably, vary in some way so that it does not become boring or expected. After various unsuccessful experiments with villanelles and sestinas, in early 2004 I was thrilled when the Formalist, then the most prestigious journal of formal and metrical poetry in the U.S., accepted my rondeau "Tea Ceremonies."
Tea Ceremonies We drink our tea and leave unsaid the hungry words which once misled our friendship. Nowadays we weigh each phrase's power to betray; you tell me of a book you've read. Your lips press kisses in my head; your fingers tremble as you shred the crumpled tag from your Earl Grey; we drink our tea. I want to slake our thirsts in bed, be steeped in you; I break the thread of what I'd been about to say. We lock eyes over china, sway an instant in silk sheets; instead we drink our tea.
Rondeaus are relatively easy in the hierarchy of formal difficulty, because in a fifteen-line poem the repetend phrase only appears three times. Villanelles, on the other hand, are villainously difficult: two repetend lines, each appearing four times, plus a complex rhyme scheme. Of course, the process is easier if the poet permits herself a certain amount of flexibility in the repetend line. Here is "Simple Vision", which was first published by the online journal, the New Formalist.
Simple Vision Let's take a simple object like this chair I'm sitting on. You see it every night; I doubt you could describe it though, from there. Our dog can tell by odor who sat where. She only sees the room in black and white, but, from my perfume, knows this is my chair. Your voice hums down the phone: "I do not care about this chair, unless it shows up right in front of me." I guess you have me, there. I swat away an insect it's unfair a thing so stupid can see UV light, when you can't see my point about this chair. You say you work too hard to be aware of shadows, how they shift outside the bright focus of your desk. Though I'm not there, I can detail your smile, your face and hair, your breath hot on my cheek, as if you might pull me toward you like an easy chair, as if you loved me, as if I were there.
One of the key tools in writing successful villanelles is enjambment, the term given when a line is broken not at an obvious pause, such as a comma or period, known as a caesura, but in the midst of a syntactic phrase. This happens several times in "Simple Vision", perhaps most noticeably between "bright" and "focus", a moment made even more emphatic by the substitution of a trochee (strong syllable followed by weak syllable i.e. "focus," for the normal iamb of the first foot.
Enjambment has a way of enabling even the most artificial of constructions to appear effortlessly natural, something which is of huge benefit to the pantoum, a complicated form adapted from the Malaysian in which the second and fourth line of each stanza become the first and third line of the next stanza. (The first and third line of the first stanza bring the poem full circle by becoming the second and fourth line of the final stanza.) In my pantoum, "Marriage, Sunset", first published by U.S. 1 Worksheets, the title is actually part of the first line of the poem.
Marriage, Sunset Nothing holds forever. We bring the seedlings in before the storm. Always is a lie we live together, a lie our mouths instinctively perform. We bring the seedlings in before the storm; your lips meet mine and all we taste is rust, the lie our mouths instinctively perform. If only love could requisition lust. Your lips meet mine despite the taste of rust. We lean on what we know, a peaceful life. If only love could requisition lust this tests our mettle now as man and wife. We lean on what we know. A peaceful life: for this we huddle round a fire burned low. This tests our mettle now as man and wife: we swore to stay but instinct bids us go. For this we huddle round a fire burned low: always is a lie we live together. We swore to stay but instinct bids us go. Marriage, sunset: nothing holds.
In my physical life I have never gone further than swimming and a bit of field hockey, but I like to think of myself as an Extreme Sportswoman of the formal/metrical poetry world. I never met a form I didn't want to try, and I never tried a form I couldn't do. This is perhaps why my second love after the sonnet turned out to be the triolet, an insane idea for a poetic form, which (naturally) came from the French. The triolet has just eight lines (typically tetrameter,) one of which repeats three times, and one twice. Here is "The Mistress", published in the Barefoot Muse, my own online journal for metrical/formal poetry. "Criss Cross", a modified triolet, is elsewhere in this journal.
The Mistress He can't leave work; I let it go. He buys me golden chains. My life is fine. I have the house. I know he can't leave work; I let it go. I sit through one more TV show, forget to eat. He's with his wife; he can't leave. Work? I let it go. He buys me. Gold enchains my life.
I confess I am totally addicted to the adrenaline rush of "forming." But the wonderful thing about writing this kind of poem is that with a little (perhaps a bit more than that) practice it can be done anywhere, with the minimum of equipment. There are reasons that rhyme, meter and repetition played such a central role in the poetry of our ancestors, after all: poetry used to be an aural, not a visual art form. Homer's Odyssey and Iliad were recited, not read; meter and anaphora (repetition) evolved as aids to memory. I compose poems on journeys, waiting for appointments or my children, and in checkout lines. Then I keep them in my head until I can find a way to write them down. Anyone who has ever attempted to memorize a poem will be aware that it is much easier to memorize a rhyming, metrical poem than it is to memorize free verse.
All of which takes me back thirty years to my parents' kitchen, where I sat spellbound on an old oak stool listening to my father, who had found some pretext to break from stirring the stew he was concocting in order to declaim one of the many poems his actor's brain had imprinted and would contain forever, Tennyson's blank verse piece Ulysses.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Thanks, Dad.