An Earnest Attempt at New Formalism

Speaking of Scales

September enters softly; see my soul

Is seeking new depths, taking lighter steps.

Trees of myrtle give leaves to the hungry ground,

Where this season’s first red and gold are found;

They trace proof of blood, and rage, heroes loaned.

O Muse how I hunger, o how I groan!

For a heav’n: where Verse not Venus alone

Sits upon her Queen’s green triumphal throne.

Oh, take lovely Verse; she rises from the tome,

From kitchens, britches, classic ovens cleansed.

Crones fight the rapture, subdue Venus’ own;

To capture beauty for all poets’ covens.

As evening falls, my skin turns into stone

Becoming all the women love has known.

Reading the critical scholarship for this week, I realized in the course of my poetic practice and education that I fall quite easily into the camp of what Dana Gioia describes is a writer of “pseudo-formal” verse. I primarily write free-verse poems, and I’m happy doing so; it’s what feels natural for me, but I also recognize this as, at least in part, a product of my formal education. In almost all the courses I’ve taken that have dealt with poetry, free verse is the dominating form being read and taught. Most of what I’ve learned about the formal conventions of poetry has been referential: quickly reviewing the Petrarchan sonnet or elegiac constructions on the assumption that we’d already learned about them in previous courses. Most of us had not! And of course, it’s true too, that (in my experience) there is far less of an emphasis on the aural qualities of poetry that make identifying meter an easier task. 

For my response to the “New Formalists” I decided it would do me well to attempt a formal creative response. I selected the form of a sonnet, as I am wont to write about love and all its whims and celebrations and disasters. But also because, while I knew it would be a challenge, a sonnet for me is what Beach calls a “relative safety” of working in fixed forms. I felt comforted too, in a sense, by Sonia Sanchez who wrote “I am a poet who has from the very beginning written in free verse, but there have been times in my life when I have retreated to form.” I found this frame of mind incredibly useful in setting out to write a formal poem. Form, it seems, is only a constraint if you let it be so. 

I tried to emulate an English, or Shakespearean sonnet. It’s what I’ve read the most of, and iambic pentameter is one of the only meters I feel that I have at least an elementary handle on. Even still, I found this exercise incredibly challenging! I’m not a huge fan of the poem it resulted in, BUT it absolutely made me slow down, for one, and two, consider every word—not just its syntactical meaning, but also its spoken quality. The stresses stress me out! Honestly, I think I did an okay job at shaping this into a form more formal than pseudo, though some of the stresses are admittedly a little dubious in fitting with the form. Content wise, I was thinking so much of what Sanchez had written about retreat. The past month of my life has been tough for both my physical body and my mental state, and I’ve taken great influence from what I’ve been reading in my courses this semester in both the classics and contemporary poetry. The poem included here is something I’ve written in response to competing historical visions of love and women’s roles as writers, wrestling with domestic occupations, and the value of outward appearances.