Form Poems: Some questions are posed
Before I pose my questions, you must remember the premise of No Teeth. No Teeth is a journal that hopes to reinvigorate the accessibility of poetry to a normal reader. While we do except some high concept work, readers of this journal can expect work that is from a set of working class poets. “Poetry that is not like pulling teeth” is the basic definition.
When a young poet first starts writing, one of their greatest challenges is how to incorporate what they’ve learned from all the old masters into their own work. I do not speak of short poems like the haiku. This type of poetry has experienced a renaissance over the last few years. I speak of poems like the sestina, the age-old sonnet, the canzone, the villanelle and a host of other types of poetry that stick to a specific, agreed upon form.
In the 1980s, a movement called “New Formalism” began; it included poets like Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht. This movement is still happening, along with the almost opposite Spoken Word movement. But, New Formalism is what the young poet is greeted with when they begin writing and studying poetry in earnest.
With this in mind, the question has become for No Teeth, do form poems matter any more to an everyday reader? Or, would an audience even know what they are reading without proper training? And if not, how do we as poets take this form poetry, and make it accessible to all? Is it worth it?
By all means, please respond!
The first poems I ever got, and the reason to this day that I cite as to why I started writing is Henry Rollins. His poems/prose are short, direct, intense and even though they might be whiney or self indulgent it's impossible to have been a teenage boy and not relate to them. The second writer I got into was Ginsberg. I think I was 16 when I started reading Ginsberg and all his poems mean something different to me now than they did then. He's a little bit more challenging than Henry Rollins.
ReplyDeleteI think if you try to box someone in right off the bat you're gonna impede their creativity. It might be easier to say "Write whatever you want, it's all poetry! We'll clean it up later and talk about meaning and how you can do it a certain way when your brain is ready". Like the old zen masters (and Donovan) said "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is"
I don't know how important form poems are. If you wanna get a people into something to day it needs to grab them by the balls right off the bat or else they're gonna check to see if they got a new text message before they finish the first few lines. I think people will learn to appreciate things more, but as far as connecting with new readers... I think poems need to feel like a punch in the gut for them.
To this day when I hear about poetry readings I think of people in all black snapping their fingers and someone playing bongos... And hell, I'm the one reading sometimes!