“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
The mid-20th century poet Denise Levertov argued that in modern writing, a genuine poem is organic, “a method of apperception,” i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake—essentially arguing that each poem is an entity original unto itself. Can this meditative method, this “revelation of content” be practiced? Surely, in exceptional cases, talent will out as one gropes her way by intuition.
Yet however intriguing the idea of writing as revelation, derived from Levertov’s work with the Black Mountain Poets, its premise implies that there is a potential infinity of sui generis poems, none conforming to the other. This fanciful notion is put to the test by actual literary tradition, by the established cultural insistence of literary forms, a reality that some poets (and some literary movements, claiming absolute freedom, try to ignore, as if doing away with rhyme or strict meter, for instance, would by itself solve the problem of governance. But even the most self-expressive writer, such as those who take refuge in the prose poem, or practice concrete poetry and other healthy avant-garde breakaways—in the end these radical departures feel like recombinant variations on an established set of forms. They cannot outwit the combination of centuries of poetic refinement, including those experimenters who strive the hardest to abolish that tradition, and in doing so, in knocking the rust off poetic tendencies that have become mannered and stale, unwittingly renew its vital force. For one way or another, each of us poets, however assertively individualistic, is—to borrow a catchy phrase from singer Grace Jones—slave to the rhythm.
The highly nonconformist and inventive Mina Loy, singular even among the historical avant-garde, cannot help but catch a rhythm in “Café du Néant” (Nothing Café).
Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire
Those popping and insistent trochees instantly create the pulse of the café and its habitues. You could dance to them if you liked. Nor can we ignore that these lines are strategically draped with l’s, like tablecloths draped over those coffin tables as patrons wait for the band to count off. We hear them before we see them.
The vexed twin questions of form and meter—if, when, how much, under what circumstances, to what degree—will always be with us, whether comforting us or bedeviling us. Resistance is good, as it stretches the fabric, keeps it from getting all bunched up. May Heaven forfend against rigid agreement in the enlivening debate between, for instance “free verse” (whatever exactly that means) and New Formalism. It is worth noting that in this ongoing dust-up, meter and overall form are often argued for or against separately, though the two in essence go together, given that meter maybe be considered an aspect of form, the same as rhyme, metaphor, and other elements of prosody such as stanzaic structure, management of the line, and sound patterning. This last fact is important in demonstrating that strictly speaking, it is difficult for the poetic mind to escape such patterning, even when we wish to do so. For that is the nature of poetic speech: to drop several s’s into a line to reinforce an emotion; to find stanzas that even as “paragraphs” are the right expressive length for what is intended; to break off a line at a thoughtfully unexpected place, like butter brickle, surprising us by enjambment. Poetic logic is fated to depend on patterning, without which it falls off into ordinary speech depending to be something else. Even “exploded poems” scattered across the page, asking to be read in more than one direction, are often simply making more explicit the tacit reading expectations of a more conventional poem.
With respect to overall modes, we may find ourselves, in unbridled potential freedom, waxing elegiac, thus availing our mood of the elegy; or, when feeling worshipful toward someone or something, tending toward the ode. Or perhaps when writing of love or recording a tragic or just troublesome event from the past, leaning on the ballad (the overwhelming favorite of popular song writers). Those forms came about because somebody had to impose order on their chaotic mind or swarming feelings in order to communicate them to others in the form of aesthetic objects. Even when the intent is to shock or make uncomfortable, we the readers must understand, however obliquely, what sort of outrage or fertile resistance the poet wishes to stimulate in us. That is why we speak of poetic conventions rather than poetic rules. The long-running enterprise survives by consensus, thus may evolve and retrench according to individual and collective tastes, preferences, and needs. To that extent, Levertov’s interest in organic writing holds intrigue. It is just that consciously or not, unless the poet is an untutored hack or a prodigious natural genius, there is bound to have been plenty of reading in “the tradition” (and/or counter-traditions) prior to any lasting poetic composition. Literary history and its concomitant conventions do not only go one way, and its gains are not necessarily always permanent.
T.S. Eliot, speaking of the classically radical Eza Pound, observed that:
the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse…the ghost of some simple meter should lurk behind the arras in even the “freest” verse…there is no escape from meter; there is only mastery.
If Eliot overstates the case, it is not by much. At a minimum, he gives a persuasive account of the continued force of iambic pentameter in English, and how hard one must work to outwit it productively. Pound helped “break the pentameter,” as he vowed to do, but only for a long while and in relative terms. He did a good deed by showing an alternate way to think about the rhythmic progression of writing across and down a page. With the advent of modernism, strictly formal verse was banished to the shadows, where its practitioners, out of favor for much of the 20th century, continued to labor. Yet no amount of axiom-breaking has finally dispensed with meter as such, which, as has often been observed, inheres in language. However many times and ways a deck gets shuffled, it does not cease to be a deck, even if the cards get scattered willy-nilly across a table. The iambic, its name sounding so much like a geological era, sits patiently at the bottom of the deepest crevasse full of broken ice from avalanches, waiting for a ray of sun to discover its bedrock.
Nest of Matches, the ingenious and savvy new book by Amie Whittemore, out from Autumn House Press, is full of such negotiations. As a mere reader unacquainted with this superb poet, I cannot say what she had in mind as she wrote—and maybe she cannot either, in terms of meter. These poems feel warmly spontaneous, yet in their own way, contented slaves to the rhythm. She seems to work by feel in “free verse” that, on closer inspection, turns out not to be so free after all.
From “Hunter’s Moon”:
Walking below your near fullness, the fullness
of life overtakes me—the streetlights
wink off as if masking up.
Note how she begins with a series of dactyls—WALKing be/LOW your near/FULLness the/FULLness (of)
Adroitly, she carries the third dactylic foot over to the next couplet. Is that “against the rules” that we may only count feet only within a single integral line? May a syllable jump the barrier? Perhaps it can. I would argue that when it comes to meter, what the ear hears trumps what the eye sees. We could even call this instance a small innovation: metrical enjambment. This little move calls into question what we think about lines, enjambment, and metrical feet. Then, just as remarkably, Whittemore offers five more straight dactyls.
LIFE over/TAKES me the/STREETlights wink/OFF as if/MASKing up.
My close reading is for a purpose. Relatively few critics take the time to break down the metrical component of “free verse.” They often astonishingly assume that meter does not matter to such poets: that they have simply abandoned any thought of it. But the best poets are always writing by ear, the unconscious poetic mind entering into a rhythmic compact with the material. Lest one think I am forcing the issue, I offer more lines from this poem:
Moon, I have wanted most
and
I don’t know what kind of/animal
and
maybe/my hands can be true as your stone.
More dactyls. Essentially, the poem is governed by dactyls that practically oblige us to hear the trochees as truncations of the former. In this metrical push and pull, we feel, rather than merely get told about, the tidal pull of the moon on the speaker’s emotional state, as she is “overtaken” by its call to hunt for love and possibly be rebuffed. Meter and meaning go hand in glove, as seamlessly as in any Shakespearean sonnet.
Whittemore thinks about form in itself in a fresh manner. The elegy gets renewed in “Future Elegy for My Grandmother.” The grandmother still lives; therefore, the speaker casts forward, rather than offering a retrospective lament. Another “rule” violated in the grand tradition! And, in fact, there is precious little lament, which Milton might judge a no-no. What about the tears, the grief to be overcome, the rending of clothes? Not a whit. Unapologetically, the poet focuses on her still-living grandmother’s saucy ways.
In the austere hallways of her days,
her husband’s been dead decades,
not two years; she flirts with men
in memory care. They say her name
like it’s pear and anise. She arrives,
sometimes, in my dreams.
“Austere” and “memory care” tactfully remind us that the grandmother is in what appears to be at least the beginning of the end stage of life. Or is this an enchanted garden, where memory care rhymes with “pear”? And days/decades/name/dreams offer a descending cluster of euphonious, chiming off-rhymes. The grandmother flirts with men who may not remember her discreet advances an hour later. But she manifests, as if saying “I’m not dead yet!”
In this way, a poet may both be in touch with tradition and quietly flout its comparative regularity. Yet Whittemore is ultimately orderly, enamored in particular of tercets, which seems to be the stanza ideally fitted to the motion of her mind.
“Self-Portrait on the Cusp”:
I didn’t wear shoes
as I walked across the lawn
on my father’s arm.
“The Squid”:
My mother and I watched
from the steps
of my childhood home.
“The Problem of Being Good”
I thought being a good wife and a good daughter
were synonyms. I thought being good
was a synonym for being good.
Individually or in the aggregate, it is as if Whittemore were working through logical syllogisms about different aspects of emotional and ethical life. This latter poem is an exemplary instance of listening to her reason out what formerly was neurotic self-perception.
I did not think that good sex for one person
could be bad sex for the other if it was
consensual, particularly if it was in my control.
I understood afterward how you could become
a homonym of yourself and begin to live there.
I thought when I got divorced my parents
would not disown me, but would despair
and judge me as fickle and unworthy
of grand gestures and pretty dresses forever.
My therapist kept saying, do you see, do you
hear how this doesn’t make sense?
And I nodded through my weeping.
The control of tone, poised between self-knowledge and abandon, is masterful. Yet it is shored up by the tough decorum lent by the use of tercets to manage the flow of self-divulgation. Like the therapist, the poem itself asks the speaker to take the matter by parts. My chief complaint with any number of contemporary writers is that they do not think enough about what a given stanza is for, simply throwing down a default one (usually the couplet, which has rampantly become the lazy poet’s stanza of choice, often void of aphorism, snappy surmises or wit, which the couplet was made for). Whittemore seems more conscious than is usually the case of the advantages of the tercet, and she pushes them. Otherwise, why bother? The most insufferable stanza going today is the poem that consists of a single long, shapeless stanza—or worse, several. (See my earlier essay on Maurice Manning for more on this phenomenon).
Most poetry collections have a pièce de resistance, or if lucky a couple. Whittemore’s has a quartet with similar titles that are scattered throughout the collection. They are “Another Queer Pastoral that isn’t a Time Machine”; “Another Queer Love Poem that Fails to Change Anything” (appearing twice as entirely different poems with the same title); and “Another Queer Pastoral that Fails to Address White Supremacy.” They consist of, respectively and ironically—you guessed it—two poems of couplets, and two each comprised of a single long stanza. In her case, they are correct choices.
Before I examine two of those, let me state how much I appreciate Whittemore’s self-deprecating (but not self-negating) wit regarding queerness. While I applaud the absolute renascence of contemporary queer, BIPOC, and other formerly underrepresented poets, too often such collections are used as a staging ground for dogmatic disquisitions, worthy of a temperance league, often of an explicitly ideological nature, which causes them to fail as examples of lyric poetry. Many such are simply a series of statements broken into lines that tell and tell without showing us, perceptually, anything that we have not seen or surmised already. They ask for agreement rather than offering an experience. They are content to hector and preach, long on suffering and short on rapture. For Whittemore, in Nest of Matches, queerness is an accepted part of her manifold, subtle being. It matters, but not to the exclusion of the rest of her. Rather than doggedly teaching us something she assumes we do not understand, she explores the myriad aspects of herself in a frank fashion.
These poems in fact tweak the trends I am referring to, issuing a witty disclaimer about the poems’ ability to instigate social action. But back to stanzas. Whittemore shows herself thoughtful in the use of couplets, with the observant economy one appreciates in Japanese poetry.
From “Another Queer Love Poem that Fails to Change Anything”:
The air tastes like smoke;
I am far from home.
A blue bunting flits by.
On the window ledge
of this rented house,
two peaches from a poet’s tree.
And my love, this love—
with whom I’ve had only
a sliver of days, whom I
just left yesterday,
is a swath of lavender.
This poem forms an offset waterfall in which each shelf of stone reveals a facet of the speaker’s lonely longing, her tentativeness, her quiet ecstasy, and surveys the landscape, the rental house featuring a “poet’s tree” with exactly two peaches: same number as she and her lover; same number as each of the two lines in each of the couplets. The sixteen couplets are a miniaturist portrait of two women in love. Its specificity is precisely what makes it universal, self-engrossed while touching the feelings of any reader of any persuasion who has ever experienced love. That is the essence of lyric poetry. It is radiant.
Whittemore has a keen sense of beauty and its uses. “Another Queer Pastoral that Fails to Address White Supremacy” offers a personal exploration of the speaker’s relationship with her partner. The title is perhaps punking us. But I would rather describe her as relieving herself, with an initial burst of humor, of having to live up to someone else’s idea of her duty as a queer poet, thus freeing herself to write what’s in her mind and heart.
Being with catalpa, maybe.
Maybe honeysuckle, the neighbor’s lilies
feeding the morning air.
Use the mother finch
who never flinches
when I sit beneath her nest.
Go to the gravel, the woods,
the farm where we kiss.
her lean hand in mine,
the green scent of her like basil
and strawberries; her hair,
a cinnamon mess beneath her hat.
Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them. Yet, in the end, Whittemore uses the long stanza to tread where none of those men trod. The poem surprises us, after its disavowal, by indeed returning to the announced theme of white privilege, touching on the matter with delicacy, quickening with import as it explores what is in effect a nearly impossible subject to ruminate on without waxing dogmatic. Except she is not.
If I’m honest, I’ll want to turn
this poem away from my privilege,
away from the white children
screaming nearby, their laughter
as they play with goats in the sun.
Away from the free beer I sip
while we stand in the CSA line,
as if buying local deserves reward—
is there a metaphor
sharp enough to show
separating these gifts
from my guilt is it impossible
as growing blackberries without thorns?
The turn is never complete,
never not-awkward—not even
in a strawberry field
where two women kiss for the first time.
This second half of the poem redeems the long stanzaic form by offering a sonnet-worthy, structuring “turn,” an awakening of conscience among the placid perfection that proves to be a partially false Eden. She and her beloved are not ejected from this garden. Rather, she takes in her surroundings, with a white guilt that is more calmly reflective than uselessly disturbed. The self-questioning mind must become contemplative, not rushing for easy solutions, simply raising the questions— “Is there a metaphor/sharp enough to show/separating these gifts/from my guilt is it impossible/as growing blackberries without thorns?” This turn is brilliantly accomplished. She does not rebuke others, nor does she really rebuke herself directly. To succumb to the stated guilt would be to throw over her own verse. As a true poet, Whittemore pushes on, never abandoning lyric mode; rather, searching for the right metaphor, which is what poets do. And she finds it in blackberries and strawberries.
Whittemore here does a service to all poets with a social conscience (all of us, I hope) by presenting the question, wrestling with it, and refusing to offer an easy or placating answer. Poetry’s job is to leave us in the illuminated mystery by summoning the extensive linguistic and imagistic resources proper to its genre. In the strawberry field (forever) where two women kiss—there, if indeed an answer exists, is where it lies.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
