She has an amusing anecdote about content
and form, derived from her own early practice. Finding that all her poems were
‘about’ her mother, she decided to embrace collage, only to find that the poems
produced by such a formal process still seemed to be about her mother. She quotes Tristan Tzara’s teasingly
enigmatic conclusion to his instructions for making a Dada cut-up poem: ‘The
poem will resemble you.’ (D, 173) She interpreted this inevitable thematic
resemblance as permission for operational freedom: ‘This frees us to work on
form, which is what one can work on.’ (D, 211) Content is either unavoidable,
as unavoidable as a mother, or it emerges from formal manipulation and
experimental processes.
She is clear about this in her poetics, but
form often appears as a minor chord in her theoretical voicings, as though
perhaps the argument had already been fought and won or that it is, in some
sense, obvious. Yet it is still axiomatic. In her sceptical, self-questioning
contribution to a colloquium on the ‘politics of form’ her tenth ‘thesis’
reads: ‘The poem will not work through its content, not through a message,
which in any case would speak only to the already converted, but through its
form.’ (173) It is not surprising
that the ‘excursion’ that follows this ‘thesis’ quotes both Brecht on
alienation techniques and defamiliarisation and Adorno on art’s formal separation
from reality. (Note also that she is experimenting with the forms of poetics as
she develops her poetics of form to keep it speculative and conjectural via
‘theses’ that are questioned or complicated by ‘excursions’.)
More surprising, are the literary exemplars
displayed in her second ‘excursion’ to thesis 10, for she quotes a passage by
Reznikoff from Testimony and (less
surprisingly) Heissenbüttel’s ‘Final Solution’, a text that (other than its
title) doesn’t offer its theme, reflecting, in Waldrop’s interpretation,
post-War West Germany’s quiestist ignoring of the horrors of the Holocaust. The
content works through its form: ‘Its power lies in the fact that the text does
not state what it was “they”’ – the poem uses this pronoun for the unspeakable
Nazis which implies the false division with ‘us’ – ‘thought of what it was they
could get the people to be against’, i.e., the absent Jews. (D, 177) Perhaps to
avoid an obsessiveness of theme, she does not use Reznikoff’s Holocaust is her Reznikoff exhibit,
where the dry language of reportage is arranged, lineated and offered as an
aesthetic text. She instead refers to Testimony,
Reznikoff’s earlier work that adopts the same approach to documentary texts
about the violence of nineteenth century America
In ‘Form and Discontent’ Waldrop comments
both on ‘form’ as we’ve traced it thus far and on ‘forms’, i.e., particularly
usages. (I make much of this distinction in my on-going work on form, as you
will see.) She speaks of ‘wild forms’ as an antidote to ‘organic’ form, and of contemporary
formally investigative poetry ‘reversing’ the movement towards the organic. (D,
199) She traces a Romantic interest in form, much as my work elsewhere sketches
out a history, though she prefers to concentrate on Goethe, say, rather than
Schiller, and argues that in that broad aestheticist tradition ‘the form of the
work’ came to be seen as ‘determined by its conception, is an “inner” form,
which lies behind the surface of the actual work and must be felt rather than
measured.’ (D, 199) For Waldrop, ‘form’ is suspect as a term because allied to
such organicism, suggesting some power growing and hidden in the work. I have
some sympathy with this caution but prefer to ally conceptions of ‘form’ with
identifications of actual ‘forms’, wild or otherwise, to maintain a sense of
the materiality of the text, while still being able to work with a more
generalised notion of form. While I think she is wrong to believe that the
notion that ‘The cluster of conception/ content/ meaning became primary and determined
the form, the expression’ was as universal as she claims (D, 199), of course,
the similar notorious remark, ‘Form is never more than an extension of content’
was central to mid-century New American Poetics (and 1960-70s British open
field writing). It carried the joint imprimatur of Robert Creeley and Charles
Olson, exponents of accelerated free verse. They were definitely thinking of
improvisatory composition, perhaps in analogy with music or art where it might
be appropriate to say that form is what results from activity during a
performance or mark-making event, though the ‘translation’ into literary
application adds a semantic element that relieves such a formulation of its
radicality. The most coherent expression of ‘organic form’ as a free verse
poetics is contained in Denise Levertov’s essay of that title, though Waldrop
doesn’t tackle it head on (which I might at some point).
For Waldrop the worst aspects of this version
of ‘organic’ form involve the elevation of metaphor as ‘the dominant rhetorical
device’ (which I do not see as necessarily essential to an emphasis upon form,
but then I do not take the ‘organic’ very seriously and never have). (D, 199)
‘Wild forms’ are her counter-examples to this tradition, since they ‘stress …
the horizontal, the axis of composition’ rather than the metaphorical. (D, 196)
She lists contemporary wild forms: an emphasis on the visual, as in Susan
Howe’s work; an emphasis upon the mathematical, as in Jacques Roubaud’s
Oulipean work; and an emphasis upon ‘discontinuity, leaps on the level of
syntax, of logic, of grammar,’ as in writers as varied as Carla Harryman and
Mei-mei Bersenbrugge. (D, 197) And, of course, in her own work. But ‘wild
forms’ still involve formal (if transformational) manipulations, if only in
their rejection of (development beyond) free verse.
Waldrop’s (and others’) attraction to prose
forms involves a move away from organic form, this time not in terms of its
content dictating form, or even of its supposed drive towards rhetorics of
metaphor, but due to its dissociation with ‘voice’: ‘When “free verse” took a step
away from meter, it was a step away from the oral’, she says (in contradiction
to the ‘organic’ theories that tied it to voice). ‘The prose poem moves yet
farther in this direction. Its sound and rhythm are subtler, less immediate,
less “memorable”. If it counts, it counts words or sentences rather than
stresses or syllables.’ (D, 264)
Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance (if you are interested). Tuscalosa: The University of Alabama
Work Recommended
See all the links to The Meaning of Form here.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
