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Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In 2006, Bud Koenemund, then a student poet, asked me to contribute a foreword to a book of his verse. Despite his gentle mocking of old conventions, and despite the occasional confession that he inclines toward gushing in the “Lake of Goo” (to borrow a phrase from my colleague, the poet Dan Masterson), Bud and several other student poets with whom I’ve since worked remain unabashedly devoted to traditional versification. The sonnet as a form, for example, seems yet to linger on the To Do Lists of not a few emerging poets. Perhaps it’s the fact that the first ghost of a writerly spirit flutters down to so many young poets in traditional garb, and, once ensconced in a nearby rocker, must assist them somehow in ordering an otherwise chaotic engagement with the universe.

How does this happen? Over the gum-chomping ninnies and swaggering jocks in their junior high, these boys and girls hear a hard-done-by teacher risking it all to read aloud:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary …

or

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won …

And off they go. They’re going to be writers. They swoon over stanzas in their Trapper Keepers. I get it. I remember Annabel Lee. I was all about the Tyger once, the Pussy-Cat, and the Owl. But isn’t one supposed to mature past such fluffy stuff? Shouldn’t a poet hone chops more subtle than the Lamb?

Not long ago, the Hungarian-born British poet George Szirtes summarized my objections about strict form in average hands, using words like conservatism, closure, decoration, and cliché. Surely structure enslaves innovation. Trapped in your scheme, you force the words to serve the rhyme or meter—then you’re lost. You’re stranded in a form that no one’s taken seriously in at least a century and maybe two or five.

Well, later, while their lessers are so indolent as to rely on gravity to dispense beer out of batting hats at frat parties, these certain souls, the hopeful poets, pass their nights with noses in the laurel bush:

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide …

That’s more like it. But O Rare! How improbable, how precarious for any young poet bar The Lady of Cambridge himself – that prodigious “freak of erudition” – to reach such heights on so squat a ladder.

I’m not alone in my trepidation about the prescribed forms. A few weeks ago, Raymond Hammond, the editor of the venerable and venerated New York Quarterly, invited some First Inkling student associate editors to participate in a “screening” of the mighty slush pile over at the NYQ. To prep them for the adventure, Hammond shared his list of qualities that NYQ has sought in its poetry since the days when the great William Packard ran the show, giving Auden, Plath, Ginsberg, and Kunitz, et al., a stage. Sure enough, “No ‘Lo’s’ nor ‘O’s’ or ‘O’er’s’” made his list, around number four. “No one talks that way anymore. So why should anyone write like that?” By instinct, it seems to me the vast majority of my fellow postmodernist editors and writing professors agree.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place, as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Surprisingly, Szirtes, riding on some walrus and/or carpenter, attempts to disabuse us of our misapprehensions, concluding, “… the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: … they are in fact the chief producers of imagination.”

Hmm. So Bud and the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford or Whomever (and Milton) would concur. Fidelity to form requires poetic purity unnecessary in other pursuits requiring the quill. Formalism and purity make allies through propinquity, they’d argue. Consider Edith Wharton’s admittedly wondrous ode to the sonnet:

PURE form, that like some chalice of old time
Contain’st the liquid of the poet’s thought
Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought
With interwoven traceries of rhyme,
While o’er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,
What thing am I, that undismayed have sought
To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught
Into a shape so small yet so sublime?
Because perfection haunts the hearts of men,
Because thy sacred chalice gathered up
The wine of Petrarch, Shakspere, Shelley—then
Receive these tears of failure as they drop
(Sole vintage of my life), since I am fain
To pour them in a consecrated cup.

There it is. The midnight disease and creative qualms, the young poet’s greatest joy and tragic flaw recounted in but 14 lines. Some writers nuzzle whiskey, disappear in doubt. But other youthful zealots—they’re gonna agonize over the awful, existential question, with a pen: “What thing am I, that undismayed have sought / To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught …?” What thing? You’re a poet! I’ll forgive the form if you make your poem sing. “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.”

“Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.”

So he vanished from my sight,

And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

Such traditional poetic modes correspond to an analogously (political) conservative account by Edmund Burke, of “that chastity of honor … which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil …” To read traditional verse – when it’s well-wrought, as by Coleridge, Blake, and Whitman – is to find oneself ennobled for a moment. To be sure. Or not to be. Just don’t make chastity a belt per se.

Do I prefer my poems rendered in a freer verse? Hell, yes. In general, the sonnet and her sisters are a curse … But it’s true, Ms. Wharton, perfection haunts the hearts of men. And, sometimes, if we’re industrious (and lucky), those tears of the poet’s imperfection drop into that consecrated cup, and, O, we all may drink.

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