No laws govern taste. Tastes are disturbingly anarchic – thus, the prevalence of bad taste. Taste is democratic; art is not. Art without laws, without formal strictures, is often but not always bad art. Often but not always, my taste runs to the formal. I relish the definition of novel writing given me by William Gaddis: “problem-solving.” Much of my favorite art says little or nothing (or little or nothing that can be extracted and remain viable, like DNA) and makes no pronouncements but goes about the business of solving problems – formal problems.
J.V. Cunningham’s poetry and prose, with a concision that enhances intent, always embody form, while his life span (1911-1985) coincided with the breakdown and general repudiation of form. His definitive statement of this theme comes in his essay “Several Kinds of Short Poems” (1964):
“I do not, for example, ordinarily think of poetry as vision, although I know it sometimes is, and so I have no vision. I have no intuition into the heart of things; I have no special way of seeing. I think of poetry as a way of speaking, a special way of speaking. As a poet I speak in meter, and sometimes in rhyme; I speak in lines. It follows naturally that I am a formalist and that anything that can be said in metrical lines is subject for poetry, even vision, and that anything worth saying should sometime be said. This last adds a principle of value, the principle of what is worth saying as distinguished from what is not. And to this, formalism adds another principle of value, for the aim of the formal is the definitive. A poem, then, on this view is metrical speech, and a good poem is the definitive statement in meter of something worth saying.”
William Blake and Allen Ginsberg have “vision.” Cunningham has craft and something to say. His poems are good, sometimes great – “the definitive statement in meter of something worth saying.” By my count, that places four constraints on the writing of first-rate verse – exacting standards for a craft frequently practiced by drudges and dilettantes. Consider the second verse in Poems and Epigrams (1960):
“Illusion and delusion are that real
We segregate from real reality;
But cause and consequence locate the real:
What is not is also reality.”
And the fifth verse in the same sequence, titled “Towards Tucson”:
“In this attractive desolation,
A world’s debris framed by a fence,
Drink is my only medication
And loneliness is my defence.”
For variety’s sake, here’s a lovely exercise in metrical variation and, incidentally, a celebration of existence, by the largely forgotten John Hall Wheelock. This is from “Anima,” collected in his 1961 volume The Gardener:
“The silence there
Had a certain thing to say could not be said
By harp or oboe, flute or violoncello
Or by the lesser strings; it could not be said
By the human voice; but in sea-sounds you heard it
Perhaps, or in the water-dripping jargon
Of summer birds: endless reiteration
Of chat or vireo, the woodcock’s call,
Chirrup and squeegee, larrup, squirt and trill
Of liquid syrinxes – bright drops of song
Spangling the silence.”
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One could argue, by contrast, that vision in poetry is all about breaking the existing rules and finding new ways of expressing the inexpressible. That such attempts might or might not succeed as poems can be a matter of individual taste far more often than it is a matter of objective merit.
The problem may not lie in form vs. vision, structure vs. anarchy. That's a way poetic formalists often structure their arguments against free verse, I've noticed: that without fixed and familiar form, it's just not Poetry. The problem with that argument, though, is that form in poetry is a tool of expression, a means, rather than an end. There are great poems, and visionary poems, in all styles, using all kinds of means of execution.
Free verse has laws, and always has. Vers libre even more so. It's a bit of a cop-out to dismiss such means as anarchic when in fact they just use different sets of poetic laws, but nonetheless do use poetic laws. The dismissal is a matter of personal taste, more likely, therefore.
Or maybe it's simply that some poets don't find anarchy as disturbing as do some others.
Perhaps visionary poetry can be seen as the always-challenging attempt to shoehorn sublime vision into the limits of poets. And poetry does have severe limits from the mystic's viewpoint—as does prose. All words fail the vision, at some point. It strikes me that dismissing vision in poetry is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because the visionary experience is one of the key roots of the poetic impulse, and has been since human beings evolved sapience.
The only poetic form I find myself readily able to write in without feeling self-conscious is haiku. I think the best haiku by the haiku masters contain a huge amount of vision.
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