“The Rhapsodic Fallacy” and Maurice Manning’s “Snakedoctor”

“The ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ was never meant as a free pass, an anything goes, for to succumb to it does, in fact, leave us standing in a well-intentioned mush.”

Is contemporary poetry in a period of renaissance, or is it in crisis? Over the past three years, I have read approximately 150 volumes of new poetry, and from book to book, my answer changes. The easy response is to say that it depends on the individual practitioner, and that conclusion surely bears limited truth. At the same time, one notices tendencies, which then makes the matter aesthetic-cultural-social.

The advent of so-called free verse (for no verse is ultimately free) did poetic practice a mixed favor, carrying out Ezra Pound’s marching orders to “break the pentameter” and “make it new.” His challenge ignited a beautiful quarrel that carried all the way to the 1990s hard-nosed face-off between New Formalism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Both forward-looking camps looked backward, one to Petrarch and the troubadours, the other to those infamous itinerant rhapsodes, the Greek sophists. For no matter how radical the proposition, we can never outrun our forebears. The question then becomes, who and what are we renewing? One side celebrated beauty in measured words, the other immoderately invoked semiotics to unjoin the word from the thing it described. We currently exist in a “post” period, similar to the necessary alliances after a World War, when nation-states drop their categorical allegiances and nervously make new-old friends, without the luxury of clear imperatives and dogma, dreaming of a Third Way not tied to the desire for world dominance.

It is a healthy space in which to create, not having everything so clearly defined by manifestos. Sometimes the fertile lull is, in fact, the renaissance. However, the result is sometimes one winds up ecumenical; others, one gets mush, as was often the case with the genre of “world music,” which frequently managed to turn the exotic into anodyne elevator tunes. Publishers these days seem to privilege specific types of sociocultural content, many poets leading with clear, urgent messages written on the dismayed or angry heart, with predictably resultant didactic obviousness. Yet beneath that momentary trend, acknowledged or not, always lies the burning, and too often neglected, question of form. In the end, whatever your politics, it is ultimately more about how you say it, than what you say. Poiesis.