Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.
This conjecture guides the theoretical accounts of form and the readings of (mainly British) contemporary poetry that follow. The pun upon âmeansâ is intended to enact the supposition that if poetry does anything, it does it chiefly through its formal power and less through its content, though it also carries the further suggestion that form is a modality of meaning in its own right. If we use the term âformally investigativeâ of this poetry, we are also suggesting that the investigation of reality and the investigation of, experimentation with, form and forms are coterminous, equivalent, perhaps not, in the final analysis, to be determined apart. It should be clearâmy slip from âformâ to âformsâ above hints as muchâthat I am not only thinking about particular poetic forms (sonnet, villanelle) which impose their formal patterning upon semantic movement, although the sonnet will be scrutinized in the third chapter and re-visited in the fourth. Yet neither is this simply an argument for free verse, whose long tradition is well-assimilated into the poetry I shall be examining; Robert Creeleyâs aphorism, quoted by Charles Olson, that âform is never more than an extension of contentâ oddly underplays form (Hoover 1994: 614), whereas Denise Levertovâs re-phrasing of this as âForm is never more than a revelation of contentâ recasts the distinction in terms of post-Coleridgean organicism, but still maintains the separation of content and form (Hoover 1994: 632). Fixed form or free formâopen or closedâis not the issue here, and much of the poetics of contemporary poetry, even I have to admit as a scholar of its forms, is of little help on this specific point, although Charles Bernsteinâs affirmation that âpoetry is aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new formsâ comes close (Bernstein 1992: 2), and Clark Coolidgeâs declaration, âI donât want to use the word form, I want to use the word forms. The word is pluralâ, may be inadvertently prescient for my argument (Coolidge 1978: 147). What is at stake is the agency of form: how it extends, reveals orâin my termsâenacts, enfolds, and becomes content.
Before moving forward onto new theoretical ground, it is worth considering the academicârather than the literaryâcontext of this critical perspective. âSince the era of high theory in the 1980sâ, writes Peter Barry summarily,
My previous studies have demonstrated these various turns, though not I hope in any programmatic wayâthe linguistic turn of Far Language (1999b); the ethical turn of The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950â2000 (2005); and the historical turn of When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (2011a)âthough throughout there has been a concern for poetics as a speculative writerly discourse. 1 Yet at another level, I see these works forming a unity in terms of my larger project of the study of the forms and poetics of British (and associated) writing of an avant-garde persuasion.we have seen various âturnsâ, including the âturnâ to history ⊠the turn to ethics, and the turn to aesthetics. Of course, all these âturnsâ are really returns, and in particular they are returns of what was repressed by the two revolutions in twentieth-century English Studies (the Cambridge-led textual revolution of the 1920s, and the Paris-led theory revolution of the 1970s). (Barry 2003: 196)
The aesthetic turn was announced by books such as Isobel Armstrongâs The Radical Aesthetic (2000) and Joughinâs and Malpasâ edited collection The New Aestheticism (2003). But even as recently as 2013, Derek Attridge, in the volume Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry, was expressing cautious optimism about the future: âIt is perhaps too early to tell whether the current hints of a revived interest in formal matters are harbingers of a major shift, but it seems a distinct possibilityâ (Attridge 2013: 21â22). This turn accompanied a return to âformâ in its broadest sense, as a corrective to readings of literature that privilege âcontentâ: âinstrumental readingsâ Attridge calls them, and they derive in part from what Barry calls the second revolution, and partly from the demand for ârelevantâ or socially comprehensible literature in schools and the academy (Attridge 2004a: 6â10). 2 The danger of such theory-driven instrumental reading whose âsignatureâ is âreading-as-paraphraseâ is its prejudicial nature and the lack of (aesthetic) surprise in reading, as Ellen Rooney says: âOur arguments are familiar before they are even developed, yet they remain unpersuasive to the skeptical ⊠because they fail to uncover formal features not known in advanceâ (Wolfson and Brown 2006: 39). The text is âreadâ before it is encountered, meshed in a grid of extra-literary concepts, and the quality of attention and nature of the aesthetic encounter remain unconsidered.
My own work (as poet-critic, as pedagogue of creative writing) has always foregrounded âformâ, and as such I have some right to feel ironic toward crusading rhetoric or hushed reverent murmurings in favor of what has been second nature to my thinking for some years. 3 As Attridge puts it: âPoets, of course, have never ceased to be interested in formâ (Attridge 2013: 19). I have always concurred (or have since I first publicly professed literary beliefs) with the Russian Formalists, in the definition of defamiliarization offered by Shklovsky, that âthe technique of art is to make objects âunfamiliarâ, to make forms difficultâ, where the former relies upon the latter for the purpose of âimpart(ing) the sensation of things as they are perceivedâ (Shklovsky 1965: 12). 4 Two of the earliest influences upon my critical thinking (and poetics) were formalist in derivation. The first was Herbert Marcuseâs The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), with its insistence that âin its autonomy art both protestsâ prevailing social realities, âand at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousnessâ (Marcuse 1978: 25). More epigrammatically: âThe autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative: things must changeâ (Marcuse 1978: 13). Later, through this, I accessed Adornoâs monumental negative version of the imperative, in Aesthetic Theory (1970), in which the spirit of aesthetic form carries a tortured utopian critique, even if the matter of a particular artwork is tainted by historyâs evils and societyâs inequities, and even if it is not. âThe unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of formâ, as Adorno says (Adorno 2002: 6), although he is careful to state that âformal elements are not facilely interpretable in political termsâ, that is as direct content (Adorno 2002: 255). He expresses a belief in the irreducibility of form: âForm repudiates the view that artworks are immediately givenâ (Adorno 2002: 144). In accordance with my general argument here, Adorno maintains that âformalismâ fundamentally asserts the condition of âart being artâ (Adorno 2002: 144). The chapter âForm and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeneyâs Sin Signsâ returns to this theoretical monolith to pick up on the unresolved antagonisms of theory.
The second influence is re-visited in detail in the chapter âVeronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practiceâ, on Forrest-Thomsonâs Poetic Artifice (1978), which also repudiates the non-mediated view of art. She valorizes what she calls the non-meaningful devices of poetry, which she arranges as levels of artifice; meaning can be read only as torqued by artifice in defiance of a method of reading called ânaturalisationâ, which she defines as the âattempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic organisation by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice appear naturalâ (Forrest-Thomson 1978: xi). Our best reading occurs when this process is resisted almost successfully and artifice shines most artificially. In the chapter, Forrest-Thomsonâs schema of levels of artifice is supplemented by another neglected book of the 1970s, Yuri Lotmanâs Analysis of the Poetic Text (1976), whose multi-systemic modeling of the literary work, rather than its semiology, seems both a fitting extension of the work of the Russian Formalists and a way of suggesting that the mutual interference, rather than the blending or cooperation, of levels, is what creates formal complexity in a poetic text.
The axiomatic sense that an unexamined form is not worth reading opposes instrumental readings that temper textuality with social naturalizations. Writing about what is sometimes called âlinguistically innovativeâ poetry that works by defamiliarization, undecidability, or through structural and linguistic complexity, and radical poetic artifice, means that I take form to be unavoidable as an issue, though it seems not to be in other areas of literary (or cultural) studies, though even to say so should seem odd, particularly with Rooneyâs minatory words ringing in our ears. My critical and poetic commitment to the discourse of writerly poetics also necessarily focuses upon form.
I turn to the aesthetic âturnâ, particularly its re-evaluations of the supremely rich pickings of Romantic poetry, with recognition, but also with perplexity at the vehemence of the position-taking by some of its proponents. The main target for their attacks are the New Historicist critics; the accusation is, bluntly put, that New Historicism plays fast and loose with historical data and contextual information, and forces this to (pre-) determine interpretation, often ideologically constructed, whatever the formal evidence of the text. Alan Rawes offers a nuanced but critical summary: âKey to each of these readings ⊠is the idea of reading silences about social and political realities and issues, and reading into those silences deliberate acts of ideologically motivated exclusionâor, to use McGannâs now famous word, âdisplacementââ (Rawes 2007: 96). The greatest antagonist in some versions of this affront is indeed Jerome McGann, but I find his comments about reading Shelley, in The Romantic Ideology (1983), salutary: âPoetryâs critical gift to every future ageâ is âthat alienated vantageâ afforded by the speaker in a poem being âremoved from us in the set of his mindâ, which paradoxically âpermits us a brief objective glimpse at our world and our selvesâ (McGann 1983: 66). While baulking perhaps at âcriticalâ and âobjectiveâ, this seems to me to be wise in its recognition of the power of alterity in our historical readings. We encounter works of art from the past not because they are our surprising contemporaries but because they are so evidently not.
McGann comments: âIf the critic lays art under the microscope, a mordant eye returns his quizzing gazeâ (McGann 1983: 151â152). McGannâs image is an uneasy one; the critic appears in scientific mode, objectively subduing art as a microscopic entity, but finding an eye-to-eye encounter, where disinterested acquisitive âquizzingâ is met by an intersubjective response that seems atavistic in its potential ferocity. This is a standoff, with critic and art object mutually eyeballing one anotherâs otherness. If McGann is suggesting alterity is the primary power of art, then this could be the return of the âalienated vantageâ with a vengeance. In one possible reading,...