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For those
lovers of poetry who feel that most contemporary authors
merely rearrange prose on paper, what some are calling the
Expansive Poetry or the New Formalist movement should
provide a welcome alternative. This movement's
practitioners—like Timothy Steele, Dana Gioia, Mary Jo
Salter, Wiatt Prunty, Emily Grosholz, Rachel Hadas,
Frederick Turner, Frederick Feirstein, Mark Jarman, Dick
Allen, Robert McDowell, and Charles Martin—have, for some
twenty years, sought to restore the art by using meter,
rhyme and stanza, and by putting narrative at the heart of
poetry, whether in dramatic monologues, novels in verse,
pure narratives, or science fiction epics.
This
movement did not come about by accident but through the
willingness of a few editors to publish poetry written in
meter instead of prose, as well as stories in poetic form of
a breadth far beyond the confessional. One was X. J.
Kennedy, a widely published poet who could no longer get
editors to consider his work. Dismayed by their contempt for
meter and form, he founded Counter/Measures, where he put
some of his starving poems along with those written by
others. The magazine didn't last, for love alone is a poor
financier; yet it provided proof that its contributors
weren't martyrs in the wilderness but grouped in a common
cause. While the martyr's pose may offer pleasure for some,
and in certain circles is qualification for a grant,
suffering is not a motivation for Expansive Poets. Instead,
they enliven poetry with techniques abandoned by such
modernists as Pound and Eliot, and barred since the 1960s by
their disciples.
"What words float up in another's thoughts
surface as soon in mine, unfolding there
like paper flowers in a water glass. . ."
So wrote
Richard Wilbur in "The Mind Reader" (1976). And it is true
that a serendipitous meeting of minds was indeed occurring
around the country at about that time. As editor of The
Kenyon Review in the 1970s, Frederick Turner became one
of the first in decades, besides Ted Weiss at Quarterly
Review of Literature, to accept narratives.
The
re-introduction to poetry of wider contexts for narratives
is a central issue of Expansive poetry. In a recent
discussion, Dick Allen said: "With contemporary confessional
poetry, it's difficult to tell what century it was written
in. We want to write from the context of our times."
Reflectively, he added: "We love the art of poetry; we like
its content to be comprised of significant things of our
time; and we like its sound."
The
movement is not monolithic. Intentions vary, but there are
common themes: "Over the past two decades the only kind of
[long] poem taken seriously… was the sequence: a series of
lyrics thematically rather than dramatically organized… The
narrative and dramatic poem, with developed plot and
character, was discarded… in the same way that Aristotelian
drama was shoved aside for Theater of the Absurd…" Frederick
Feirstein wrote in The Kenyon Review in 1983 ("The
Other Long Poem"). Feirstein also said that "it's impossible
to develop a book-length narrative without meter and call it
poetry rather than prose fiction. The conflict of opposites
between the metrical line and the prose rhythm of natural
speech sustains and poetically mirrors the tension in the
dramatic structure itself…"
In
Expansive poetry there is no prohibition against rough
stories, but there is an effort to show something beyond the
immediate, whether a spiritual search or the fulfillment of
a dream. And as well, there is an emphasis on approaching
narrative as what unfolds, step-by-step, not to be hidden in
fragmentation and unidentified voices. With a background in
science, Frederick Turner suggests that poets ought to look
at what neurological science reveals as common threads of
expectation, perception and expression. Meter, line and
stanza may have been developed to fit the ranges of human
hearing and perception; to write with them may be the only
way to communicate in verse.
Dana
Gioia agrees that poetry's authors must restore old
techniques and tell stories again to give it both life and
an audience, but feels that the capture of the poet by most
creative writing programs strangled the art—Gioia is now
occasionally teaching himself to help correct this
situation. He eschews the grand design of epic poetry,
however, preferring to work Robert Frost's path in shorter
poems with detailed events and well-drawn characters, an
approach as familiar to American poetry before 1950 as to
paintings by Edward Hopper. He has no wish for philosopher
kings, but he does convey through poetic means those stories
rarely told. "Speaking of Love" ends with the following:
And so at last we speak again of love,
Now that there is nothing left unsaid,
Surrendering our voices to the past,
Which has betrayed us. Each of us alone,
Obsessed by memory, befriended by desire,
With no words left to summon back our love.
—from “Speaking of Love,” Gods of Winter
Dana Gioia (Graywolf, 1993)
To use
poetic means to tell stories of both joy and tragedy lies at
the heart of Expansive Poetry, whose writers insist that
stories be told with intelligible means, and preferably out
loud. These poets employ meter, line, stanza, and rhyme, not
for decoration but to convey meaning in performance. With
clear diction, their views unobstructed by the glass of
rigid ideology, they risk telling stories again, and by that
to revive an art whose power to allow individuals the
experience of a common heritage has always been its greatest
gift. They are getting an audience at readings throughout
the country, and spreading the word through conferences as
well, including the Sewanee Writers' Conference and "Form
and the New Narrative" held annually at West Chester
University. To find their work, as well as that of other
poets returning to traditional poetic forms imbued with
contemporary content, start with the journals Hudson
Review, Sparrow, The Formalist*, The
Lyric, Edge City Review, Blue Unicorn, and
Hellas, or, from England, Orbis, and from
Scotland, Dark Horse. Two notable book publishers
supporting this movement are Story Line Press and the Poetry
Series from Johns Hopkins University Press. Well known
senior poets who have provided inspiration and have acted as
models are Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Wilbur, Donald
Justice, Anthony Hecht and Mona Van Duyn. While the future
of poetry is always in doubt, for conveying our time and
place using time honored poetic forms, it is heartening to
know that so many contemporary poets are reaching to the
past for established Western art forms in order to expand
those forms into a positive future for the art.
Arthur
Mortensen is a poet, who has been published in Sparrow, Edge
City Review, The Lyric and others. He is the publisher of
Somers Rock Press, of the journal Pivot and the Web magazine
"Expansive Poetry & Music Online."
Copyright
© Arther Mortensen, all rights reserved |