Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium :
Poems, mostly metrical, and rants and raves on poetry and the po-biz.
Updated: 1/24/06; 10:09:50 PM.

 

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Monday, March 22, 2004

Still crazy busy, so I'll just be lazy and add some links to the email I wrote to Tim Yu.

Thank you for that thoughtful post in reply to my rant. It's strange how we can say almost the same words and mean something so different.

Your reading of the Warren poem, for instance, is wonderful and a near-twin of my own, except that I wouldn't call it "post-rhetorical" at all (sorry I wasn't clearer about that) but rather a little gem of rhetorical technique—the very techniques you notice and praise.

When I complained that you and Josh and Jonathan "refuse to read a contemporary sonnet in the same way they would read a sonnet written even 50 years ago" it wasn't because I believe that nothing has changed which might affect the reading, but that you seem to believe that free verse and modernism and their children have made meter and form problematic in and of themselves, instead of just in that modernist tradition. Contemporary formalism largely rejects modernism because it was modernism that rejected history and fundamentally misunderstood human nature. In or about December, 1910, human character didn't change at all.

I actually think that formalists today face a task very similar to the one Wordsworth set for himself—to write about the actual world and to do it, except for the meter, in the language of good prose, and thereby reclaim poetry from the errors of excess of the dominant style.

It's what Pound and Ford and Eliot wanted to do, too, but I think they made deep and disastrous errors. Tim Steele's Missing Measures gives a thorough and well-documented account of those errors and of other sources of meter's decline in the last century, so I'll just note here that Pound's famous statement about the metronome really just shows that he understood neither music nor meter.


Blogged from webmail, so there's no title.


Update: There is far too much variety in both poems and poets to justify my statement above that "Contemporary formalism largely rejects modernism." I should have said "Some contemporary formalists reject modernism." Rejecting it doesn't mean pretending it didn't happen.

But I'm done with this debate for now: when otherwise intelligent people claim that writing sonnets today is like trying to write music like Chopin, there's nothing left of this horse to flog. I'll just keep writing in meter, and pointing out other poets who do the same and do it well.


Sneaking in a title and another update: Henry Gould has more sense than the pack of us: here, here, and here


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