Hey there, The Journal blog readers. Today we have a guest blog post by The Journal issue 36.3 contributor Michael Shea, about a recent kerfuffle in the poetry world. Speaking of poetry, did you know that OSU Press and The Journal are putting on a poetry contest? Did you know that the winner of the contest gets the $3,000 Wheeler Prize? Well, as Bill Nye the Science Guy used to say, now you know. The contest deadline is October 1^st, and you can find more info here. Get your submission on.

Is there something about election years that encourages poets to cast wide-angle narratives on the state of our craft? It seems these pieces are in abundance recently, the latest offering coming from Willard Spiegelman in the spring issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Though on a fundamental level I disagreed with some of his points, Spiegelman’s essay was everything you could reasonably want from a critic (or a politician, for that matter): measured, informed, well-structured, humble and transparent in its biases—which is why it’s such a shame that VQR decided to follow-up on that article with the alarmist response from William Childress, entitled “Is Free Verse Killing Poetry?” The basic argument in Childress’ article, which is not even entirely coherent, is that the preponderance of free verse has restricted not only our understanding of the craft and the possibility for “memorable poetry” but the appeal of poetry in general. The question for us, then, becomes which absurd claim to address first.

Childress goes to, well, very few lengths to show that free verse has none of the power of formal poetry, citing four lines of Howl (which he reads with more than a little latent homophobia) and one poem by Asturo Riley in support of his claim that free verse’s record of important work is “spotty,” before moving on to the same tired critiques of slam (which he calls a “circus”) and academic poetry that have been repeated ad nauseum, the former coming with a hefty dose of condescension that feels utterly classist. Even leaving aside the fact that he’s (purposefully) vague with regards to what constitutes this not-free-verse—does he want meter? rhyme? form? some confluence of the three?—and correspondingly, what we can rightly claim to free verse’s credit (as gray areas abound), we have to take issue with an argument that ignores free verse’s ability to interrogate natural rhythms of speech, especially one that sees Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Ashbery, O’Hara, and countless others (and this is just the list of old white men)—in short, some of the most widely-read poets in English—as forgettable.

In fact, I’m not even sure there are sufficient grounds for his central objection—that the barbaric, anarchist Free-versers are stifling the good people of Formaltown. Perhaps most telling is that midway through the essay, Childress himself admits that he doesn’t “read much modern poetry.” That’s painfully obvious. Because if he were reading, he’d know that Annie Finch and Maurice Manning (who grabbed a Pulitzer nomination a few years back) write most of their poems with strict metrical or formal regularity. That contemporary poets—and good poets—like Ben Lerner and Sandra Simonds are writing sonnets—true sonnets, to not even mention people like Nick Demske and K. Silem Mohammad, whose work constitutes a new investigation of the form. Formal poetry may not have the hegemonic grasp it used to, but given its continued relevance, Childress’ complaints sound like those of the Religious Right, crying oppression just because their monopoly has eroded (to which experimental poets have to reply, “You think you got it bad?” This is, truly, no country for Charles Olson). Moreover, his allegations that poets are not engaged with current events or that formal poetry is not taught anymore are downright laughable. To the former, we need only to look to the hundreds of readings given in the wake of the 2010 Gulf oil spill; as for the latter, I’m not so far removed from high school that I can’t remember the poetry unit consisting of the usual suspects—Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Donne. And to the claim that the supposed disappearance of formal poetry somehow relates to poetry’s declining readership, while I see a lot of value in formal poems, I find it hard to believe a regression to 19^th Century language patterns will inspire any new readers from a generation raised on Twitter and absurdist comedies—or, to quote one of my students: “What we learned in high school was boring.”

But my circle-the-wagons rhetoric aside, and with no real disrespect implied to the great formal poetry of history nor its current practitioners, what’s truly important is what the article fundamentally overlooks: that the decision between writing free verse and writing in any kind of prescribed form is not a question of laziness, lack of education, or self-obsessed narcissism. It’s one of ideology, which is not to say that specific meters or forms endorse specific ideologies (a ridiculous claim, given how different a Frost sonnet is from a Demske sonnet, on so many levels), but to suggest that the presence of a regulating artifice—whether that be meter, rhyme, villanelle—carries with it a loose ideological backdrop about language and how it orients the speaker to the world by suggesting a sort of overarching order or the possibility of developing and maintaining such an order through language, even if that order is posited simply to be rejected. And this is important not because I wish to cast formal poets as fascist arbiters or out-of-touch conservatives—they’re not, or at least, if they are, it’s not because of their poetics—but because the decision to adopt or abandon this sort of ideological baggage is a central part of a writer’s vision. Okay, so perhaps not everyone writing free verse sees it in those terms—surely my undergraduate workshops don’t focus on the rhetorical underpinnings of iambic pentameter—but the contemporary poets worth reading (and in my idiosyncratic view I count among them Joyelle McSweeney, John Taggart, Cathy Wagner, and Tim Earley, just to name a few) are hyper-aware of the ways in which their formal choices (that is, to mostly reject prescribed forms) bear on their work. It is this inability to conceive of free verse as a distinct formal choice, and the corresponding willful ignorance about the implications of form beyond the fact that it makes a poem look and sound nice, that marks the deepest failing in Childress’ piece.

Despite all this, I think Childress is right about a few things. For example, we may well be living in a one-poetry nation. I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that we could use an injection of new life into our culture of slavish devotion to mimesis and metaphor, one that’s constructed hagiographies around poets of immense talent but perhaps limited or now-tired vision (Levine and Plath come to mind). I think a greater celebration of rhetoric, of sound, of irreverence, of non-discursive elements, of found text, of a specific refusal of perfection—some of which might involve a greater discussion of meter and form—would be welcome, at least for me. Nor do I begrudge Childress his self-appointed status as a malcontent—poetry desperately needs those people. But it also needs them to know what they’re talking about.