David Yezzi, a fine poet, a pretty fair flatpicker, and to my knowledge the only person mentioned both in this blog and in Entertainment Weekly, has written in The New Criterion on "The fortunes of formalism":
Columbia University's graduate writing division, for example, recently dropped its requirement for the study of versification, and I am told that one can navigate the poetry program there without ever scanning a line.
Well, fair enough. Columbia instructs aspiring professionals. And one can become a successful and even a prominent poet in America today with no grasp of traditional verse forms.
Well, that's right. It's probably an understatement. Yezzi quotes Allen Tate to the effect that it can be traced to Pound and Eliot, "two young men who were convinced that the language of Shakespeare was not merely good enough for them, but far too good." The result of that pair's superb marketing campaign is that, after 2500 years of metrical poetry and only 100 to 150 years of free verse, very few people, even few poets, understand traditional form. Yezzi says, and I agree, that "first-rate poems continue to be written today, in both meter and free verse." But I also agree, and lament, that in the case of poetry it's "as if our culture gave up study of the violin or artists no longer learned to draw."
Many good poets (including a few po-bloggers), on discovering that I write sonnets and triolets and other unfashionable things, have attempted to show me they could write a sonnet if they wanted to. The near-uniform result is barely metrical rhyming tripe with syntactical inversions they think demonstrate the inability of the form to handle the complexities or whatever of this ever-changing world in which we live in.
That, of course, is hogwash. The most complex element of human life is other humans, and we haven't changed at all in the last 150 years. There are other complexities, but we don't have to deal with the mathematics of turbulent airflow when we board a jetliner — nor do we have to know anything about how to find food and avoid being killed by big cats. The nonhuman world, for most of us, is vastly simpler than anything experienced by our ancestors. In that light, Tate's characterization of Pound and Eliot seems singularly appropriate.
4:08:14 PM 
|
|
