Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”

“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.