Don’t read further until what you’ve figured out what’s going on above. Can’t figure it out? Here’s a hint, it has something to do with this :
This is an unusual month — polls, pols and so on. But this is an unusual paragraph too. How quickly can you find out what is so uncommon about it? It looks so ordinary that you may think nothing is odd about it, until you actually match it against most paragraphs this long. If you put your mind to it and study it hard, you will find out — but nobody may assist you — do it without any coaching. Go to work and try your skill at figuring it out. Par on it is about half an hour. Good luck — and don’t blow your cool.
As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, the paragraph with which I started this post is lipogrammatic , a particularly harsh kind of formal constraint brought to you by the good folks at Oulipo . I’m disappointed though . . . Helen told me I’d get some aesthetic bliss out of reading this kind of thing, and I’m just getting cranky.
He dragged out the last line exactly like a wounded snake dragging its slow length along, and I realized in a flash that this moment of aesthetic bliss was brought to you by Formal Structure and Tradition.
Or consider, if you will, this poem . I’ll excerpt the first few lines for those of you too lazy to click through:
Poe, E.
Near a Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".
Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning’s outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting . . . nevermore.
. . .
The constraint on this one is much less obvious, though you should be able to get it pretty quickly. The first hint is to remember the field that the author of this post studies. The second hint is that you should go measure some circles.
I apologize for belaboring the point, but I had to bring up the second example to keep myself honest. You see, it’s very easy for me to dismiss the lipogrammatic paragraph, but the mathematical poem really tugs at my heartstrings. Sadly, however, "Near a Raven" fails to satisfy me for the same reason that "Unusual Month" does — and that reason should tell us something about tradition, postmodernity, and how they relate to Helen’s post.
My sole point of dissatisfaction with Helen’s argument is that in opposition to a sonnet she gives us . . . free verse? Is e.e. cummings supposed to be the standard bearer for formlessness? I have a hard time believing that given the already extraordinarily rigid constraints imposed by human linguistic structures, subject-verb agreement, agreed-upon spellings of words, finitude, &c., &c.; the additional requirement that I make the terminal word of each line rhyme in a particular way adds that much form-wise. As Douglas Hofstadter tells us, everything is already encoded. The idea of content simply "existing" is incoherent. The very way in which words sound as we read them to ourselves affects our perceptions of them. Heidegger understood this.
What makes the additional form imposed by the Petrarchan sonnet special, then? Just this, the form of the sonnet is a thing of which we are aware . Our awareness allows us to shape our content such that it plays with the form — moreover, every time we write a sonnet we are responding or replying in some way to every sonnet that has ever been written. In this sense, we are almost required to wink at the structure, at the convention. There is an irony that lies in the interplay of form and content, and this irony gives rise to a kind of meaning that cannot be described save by the sonnet itself.
Of course, none of this guarantess an experience of aesthetic bliss, but I’d argue that it’s a necessary precondition. The trouble with so much free verse poetry is that it muddles along unaware of the fact that it is enmeshed in form. The form is there, it is always there, but it is unacknowledged.
Sometimes, the form exists and is played with, but the result gives us only intellectual rather than aesthetic pleasure. Such is the case with "Unusual Month" and a great deal of modern classical music.
"Near a Raven" fails along a different axis. Here, we have a poem that manages to recapture much of the moodiness and dread of Poe’s original, and within the form of a Pi Poem no less. The trouble is that within the poem itself the form is not acknowledged. There is no practice of Pi Poems to which it can refer, no conventions at which it can wink.
So, call this an extremely rudimentary attempt at answering one of Freddie’s many questions for PoMoCons . Freddie is correct, we cannot choose to be premodern. What we can choose to do, however, is to be aware of the fact that none of us exists in an existential void; that we live and love within inescapable frameworks; and that the rejection of frameworks does not free us from frameworks. The free verse poets have not liberated themselves from form, they have merely cast away that form of which they are aware, and in the process they have rendered themselves oblivious to the form which continues to surround them.
One of the more exciting prospects of postmodernity is the emergence of traditions which are self-reflexive and self-aware. More on this later.
