Although books outnumber chapbooks on my shelves by at least two dozen to one, the chapbook has always struck me as a format most germane to poetry: the intensity of the form lends itself to short draughts. Looking at all the unfinished collections on my shelves, as well as all those I have read in full to which I might return to reread a handful, I could easily say that in every full-length book of poetry, I find a chapbook I could call my own.
Eric Folsom's Northeastern Anti-Ghazals is a chap I picked up at the last League of Poets' AGM in Edmonton. I read the poems with great interest a couple of months ago, and now am rereading them and enjoying them all the more. Especially arresting is the diamond-like particularity of many of those couplets, i.e. observations like:
Inside where I stand, one cobweb on the ceiling
Delicately twists when the furnace comes to life.
or the suggestiveness of
Labouring with love for love, the wedding ring
On the spice shelves while I do the dishes.
... and the frequently mysterious leaps between those couplets.
The Ghazal, according to my Dictionary of Poetic Terms, is a Near Eastern verse form, celebrating love and drinking, composed of 5 to 12 couplets, the last of which contains the author's name. One feature of them is a spirit of intensity and compression that brings to mind the haiku; according to Kate Braid & Sandy Shreve's In Fine Form, traditional ghazal couplets are never enjambed; and in fact were so independent of each other that their order could be changed without damaging the poem.
Eric tells me (we corresponded by e-mail) that the “Anti” part in the title "is a nod to Phyllis Webb, who first used the term to acknowledge that she was really writing a highly westernized version of the ghazal, not recognizable to most Arabic poets, and one might presume Persian, Urdu, or Hindi." (Possibly English haikus could be called an anti-haikus for the same reason.) His poems tend to take the form of understated, sharp observations: drinking is not a primary feature of them, although definitely love figures prominently, in a restrained sort of way; I see no enjambment between couplets, however, and although none of the poems includes his name, many of the poems end with a first-person self-reference.
Speaking of those leaps between couplets, I am reminded of a passage by one Idis Parry quoted in Alan Watt's The Book:
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts and events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods.
In a number of the poems, one is left guessing about why the various couplets are sewn together. In others, a multiplicity of connections is possible. In their cryptic construction, ambiguities abound. Clearly, this is a form that takes risks, but can also bring great rewards. In the following poem, for instance, the reader is forced to shift gears emotionally as well as logistically with the shifts in points of view. It is the mind’s hunger for context that finds an implied narrative in the juxtapositions:
THE WISE
She wore a scent like blue light bulbs,
Wore her coat the way trees wear hills.
After the bloodiest campaign in years,
His heart smouldered like an old cigar.
His eyes put down roots for the first time,
The light of crows in his hair.
Every influence caught her off-guard:
A vaginal infection, the phone calls.
He courted his own grief,
He thought she would be his second wife.
No angry objects on this table,
No jack-in-the-box anger from your lips.
I love your failure to communicate,
I love your naked back facing me.
Each of these couplets, of course, could be a separate epigram: a hallmark of the form. The second one, for instance, could be about Donald Rumsfeld. But considering that the first five couplets shift between a man and a woman, a very intense war between the sexes is set up. The second last couplet is a particularly brilliant one: it can be taken as both a climax of the implied narrative, and negation of the tension, depending on whether one takes it as a command or an observation. Considering the intensity of the previous couplets, and of that image of “jack-in-the-box anger” that quite literally shoots out from the page, it commands attention, in any case; even when one says “there is no anger”, presence of anger is invoked. Similarly the title, “The Wise”: is it ironic? Does it suggest the process these characters must go through to become wise? The denouement is a lovely one, a celebration of beauty, and yet an unresolved tension: it could be taken as playfully tender, or deeply ironic, all at once.
Googling Eric and ghazals, I found this link, where you can read articles by Eric and others about the form, as well as a couple of other poems from the collection, including a personal favourite, "Just Another Yuppie Raising Children".
North-Eastern Anti-Ghazals is (on the surface of it) a plain production on ordinary paper comprising 15 poems; it is, as with all chapbooks, one of those instant rarities. Published by above/ground press in Ottawa, it can be obtained here.
Showing posts with label In Fine Form. Show all posts
Showing posts with label In Fine Form. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
In Fine Form
Getting back to Edmonton -- I had a good time at Canadian League of Poets' AGM, meeting friendly and intelligent poets, launching Undressing the Night at the city hall, attending seminars, participating in council meetings where I learned of the travails -- in all their Byzantine intricacies -- of running an arts service organization in these funding-tight times.
The most memorable seminar I attended was one on form poetry. It is significant that at least two-thirds of the poets present -- and there were about 75 or 80 in all, by my guestimate -- attended this seminar, rather than one scheduled at the same time on the Poem Made Visual, about video poems, concrete poems, etc. Panelists included Kate Braid, one of the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; poet Ted Blodgett, who writes consistently in form, and Steven Michael Berzensky (aka Mick Burrs), who has written dozens of what he calls "liberated sonnets". All of them commented on the paradox of how constraints generate creativity, how student work so often shines within the strictest frameworks, how accomplished poets enter unknown regions under the mysterious momentum generated by these schemata. Kate started compiling In Fine Form when, asked to teach a course on writing poetry in form, she couldn't find an an anthology with Canadian content. She and Sandy Shreve came up with the idea of creating one of their own. They imagined they might compile a small book to show off high calibre Canadian work -- but surprised themselves to find, upon scouring the Canadian poetry section of the Vancouver Public Library, 1400-plus poems dating from the 1800s to the present worthy of setting aside for possible inclusion. A limited call for submissions lead to 1,000 more of what they considered to be high-quality form poems. Then the difficulty would be, as all editors find, selecting a manageable number from this astonishing superabundance.
Clearly a strong interest in form poetry is abiding, and probably resurgent after nearly a century of free verse predominance. (Actually, poetry in strict form -- rhymes, repetitions, incantations -- has been around since the dawn of humanity, and still is in the popular mind what largely constitutes "poetry"; it is free verse that is the upstart.) What these panelists found was that among Canadian poets, there has not been been such strong contention vis-a-vis form vs. free verse as in the US; many Canadian free-forms people, including some of our most flamboyant personalities (Irving Layton, Milton Acorn and BP Nichol come to mind), delve frequently into fixed form with more than creditable results; fixed form is largely viewed as simply another way to create poetry. In the States, polarized camps have come quite literally to demonize each other -- the "Post Avant" vs. the SoQ (to borrow Silliman's terminology), the Language poets vs. the New Formalists.
In Fine Form is well worth buying, by the way. I also have The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Stand and Eavan Boland -- a volume in which, despite Norton's compendious reputation, comparatively few of hundreds of possible forms are covered: just the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, and the Stanza along with what they call Shaping Forms, viz. the Elegy, The Pastoral, and the Ode. An additional chapter brings together examples of so-called "Open Forms" without much explanation. In In Fine Form, not only are these categories explained and amply exemplified but also Blues, the Couplet, the Epigram, the Fugue (a term the editors came up with after Robyn Sarah's poem "Fugue"), the Madrigal, the Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, the Incantation, Palindrome, the Rondeau family, Syllabics, Triolet, plus definitions and examples of other forms or modes such as Acrostic, Anglo Saxon, Limerick, Lipogram and Visual. (Funny: they didn't include the Liposuction or the Implant.) The Norton Anthology brings together the most stellar examplars in the language: it's pretty hard to beat Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, and Theodore Roethke's The Waking as far as villanelles are concerned. For a poet, though, these can be downright intimidating acts to follow. The Canadian anthology is a more varied and approachable: the quality ranges from excellent (some of these selections give those in the Norton a good run for their money) to, well, serviceable. Much of the work by is comparative unknowns; a fair number of the poems by living, breathing peers in the CanPo scene. Thus as a living, breathing, unknown myself, I feel, hey, I can do that too and writing in form becomes a wholly natural, accessible option.
The most memorable seminar I attended was one on form poetry. It is significant that at least two-thirds of the poets present -- and there were about 75 or 80 in all, by my guestimate -- attended this seminar, rather than one scheduled at the same time on the Poem Made Visual, about video poems, concrete poems, etc. Panelists included Kate Braid, one of the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry; poet Ted Blodgett, who writes consistently in form, and Steven Michael Berzensky (aka Mick Burrs), who has written dozens of what he calls "liberated sonnets". All of them commented on the paradox of how constraints generate creativity, how student work so often shines within the strictest frameworks, how accomplished poets enter unknown regions under the mysterious momentum generated by these schemata. Kate started compiling In Fine Form when, asked to teach a course on writing poetry in form, she couldn't find an an anthology with Canadian content. She and Sandy Shreve came up with the idea of creating one of their own. They imagined they might compile a small book to show off high calibre Canadian work -- but surprised themselves to find, upon scouring the Canadian poetry section of the Vancouver Public Library, 1400-plus poems dating from the 1800s to the present worthy of setting aside for possible inclusion. A limited call for submissions lead to 1,000 more of what they considered to be high-quality form poems. Then the difficulty would be, as all editors find, selecting a manageable number from this astonishing superabundance.
Clearly a strong interest in form poetry is abiding, and probably resurgent after nearly a century of free verse predominance. (Actually, poetry in strict form -- rhymes, repetitions, incantations -- has been around since the dawn of humanity, and still is in the popular mind what largely constitutes "poetry"; it is free verse that is the upstart.) What these panelists found was that among Canadian poets, there has not been been such strong contention vis-a-vis form vs. free verse as in the US; many Canadian free-forms people, including some of our most flamboyant personalities (Irving Layton, Milton Acorn and BP Nichol come to mind), delve frequently into fixed form with more than creditable results; fixed form is largely viewed as simply another way to create poetry. In the States, polarized camps have come quite literally to demonize each other -- the "Post Avant" vs. the SoQ (to borrow Silliman's terminology), the Language poets vs. the New Formalists.
In Fine Form is well worth buying, by the way. I also have The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Stand and Eavan Boland -- a volume in which, despite Norton's compendious reputation, comparatively few of hundreds of possible forms are covered: just the Villanelle, the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Sonnet, the Ballad, Blank Verse, the Heroic Couplet, and the Stanza along with what they call Shaping Forms, viz. the Elegy, The Pastoral, and the Ode. An additional chapter brings together examples of so-called "Open Forms" without much explanation. In In Fine Form, not only are these categories explained and amply exemplified but also Blues, the Couplet, the Epigram, the Fugue (a term the editors came up with after Robyn Sarah's poem "Fugue"), the Madrigal, the Glosa, Haiku and other Japanese forms, the Incantation, Palindrome, the Rondeau family, Syllabics, Triolet, plus definitions and examples of other forms or modes such as Acrostic, Anglo Saxon, Limerick, Lipogram and Visual. (Funny: they didn't include the Liposuction or the Implant.) The Norton Anthology brings together the most stellar examplars in the language: it's pretty hard to beat Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, and Theodore Roethke's The Waking as far as villanelles are concerned. For a poet, though, these can be downright intimidating acts to follow. The Canadian anthology is a more varied and approachable: the quality ranges from excellent (some of these selections give those in the Norton a good run for their money) to, well, serviceable. Much of the work by is comparative unknowns; a fair number of the poems by living, breathing peers in the CanPo scene. Thus as a living, breathing, unknown myself, I feel, hey, I can do that too and writing in form becomes a wholly natural, accessible option.
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