“Now can you see the monument?” Some notes on reading for “form”

Notes on (poets and critics) reading for form

The question that concerns me most in thinking about "new" or "old" formalisms, formalism now, is what counts as reading for "form" (or, what counts as "form") in the context of contemporary poetics in the U.S.1 Let me assure you from the outset that I am not interested in deciding one meaning for the term 'form' for poets, or even for one poet. Still I wish to speak from poetry's corner, where yet to "watch [or read] it closely" does not always mean to fix it in place.2

For many poets and poet-critics in the twentieth- and even twenty-first century in the U.S. and Britain, form's special meaning remains the so-called inherited "fixed," "closed," or "traditional form" of meter and rhyme — often taken as something to denounce or defend.3 Some poets and critics align the defenders with what Americans call "New Formalism," the name attached since the late-1980s and 1990s to a scattered antimodernist poetic movement calling for a "return" to form in the writing of poems.4 For others less exercised about what counts as "form" (understood in this quite narrow poetic sense), and more interested in so-called "free" forms, "form" may similarly mean meter and rhyme but also typography, spacing, line break, and enjambment.

For both, then, the meaning of "form" is quite restricted: it refers to textual arrangements on the page, and in this spirit, "form" summons and engages a reader's sensory and cognitive attention. "Form" is understood in this sense as a mediation of "content," and demands that we attend to it and treat its textual prompts as inherently meaningful, or as "effects" taken to be ... effective.5 Many poets and poet-critics presume that reading and writing poems requires attention to this kind of "form," because 'technique' or 'form' — construed from the vantage of the maker as deliberate choices about arrangement and rhetoric — is fundamental to their understandings of poems as meaning-making objects, or makers of effects.

I cannot imagine, I admit, teaching poems from any era in an undergraduate course without perpetuating, to some degree, this parochial meaning of "form" (as arranged or otherwise meaningful features of a poetic text). I suspect I'm not alone.

Of course that's not all I think "form" is. There are many interesting and awkward moments in such classes when the implications of this position toward form rear up as hopelessly flawed, terribly unstable, as when a dutiful student launches a brilliant reading of enjambments produced by the printer's lineations — that is, by "line breaks" added only because the line as originally written and printed was too long to be accommodated by the current volume's trim size. Good teaching moment: these features, too, are "form" or "designs," I might say. Not all forms imply or can be explained by artist-as-maker. We understand "assorted candies" to mean a miscellany, not quite needing to imagine a human hand doling out intended groupings (why, oh why, so many green Jujubes?). Such accidents are an occasion to complicate the sense students sometimes have that what "counts" as elements of a poem's form have to be intended. Such accidents challenge that tacit presumption that "form" (or is it attending to "form"?) confirms an ideal of expressive connection between two private minds — reader's and writer's.That ideal of an expressive connection between reader and writer is one of the strongest associations that attaches to the word "poetry" in most modern Anglo-American literary cultures, some might say beginning in the fifteenth century.6 The particular and enduring strength of that expressive connotation for contemporary readers is one sign and consequence of what Virginia Jackson calls the lyricization of all verse genres (all poetry) across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 This investment in expression is useful critical and historical context for understanding the strong affect that can course through debates about poetic formalisms in the U.S., including New Formalism (in this poetic sense), avant-garde formalisms (politics of form), and others. It may also motivate critical debates that pit formalist modes against historicist modes of reading poetry. Poetry, read and defended in its twentieth-century lyricized character, stands as humanism's cherished monument, something to defend from political or instrumental kinds of reading. As Yopie Prins and Jackson put it in 1999, "Cultural studies has so far avoided the study of lyric because lyrics have been misunderstood as the personal subjective utterances of historical subjects."8 There's something thought to be inhuman about reading poetry as a (mere?) cultural form.

Prins and Jackson's charge of misunderstanding is, I sense and sometimes feel, threatening in several ways. It supposes and argues that the "terms of subjectivity" that this ideal of Poetry (writ large, abstracted) emblematizes and protects are themselves "quite lyrically generic, particularly by the latter part of the nineteenth century."9 What one took as, de facto, good and real — the individual (thus, de facto, worth sounding out in lyric) — was, per this argument, always already a genre, produced (in part) lyrically. Some twentieth-century poetics turned to rhetorics of new and anti-lyric "forms," in an attempt to leave behind this legacy of generic individualism, associated variously with the nineteenth century, class privilege, and burdens of subjective privilege, claiming, as William Carlos Williams did, that by being "through with the pentameter, through with the measured quatrain, the staid concatenations of sounds in the usual stanza, the sonnet," there would be a revolution in poetics that would allow it to meet modernity and modern consciousness on more authentic and less problematic terms.10 Poetry would progress, aided by new forms that refused meter, sentimentality, "stock" language, European-originated stanza forms, and other supposedly deadening formal traps of inheritance and convention.11 But one implication of historical poetics (also a kind of formalism) seems to be that the "new" forms can't be isolated from the nets of sociality, history, and conventions of reading against which they define themselves.12 That is, historical poetics challenges not only the persistent understanding of lyric (its forms, tropes, etc.) as an ancient tradition of individual self-expression carried forward, transcending social circumstance and contingent literary cultures, it also challenges the idealized view that new experimental forms escape that lyric imaginary.

Seen from another perspective, historical poetics' formalism suggests that it took a lot of expert critical work (modernist manifestos, or New Critical ideas and arguments about modernist form, for instance) to dislodge older cultures of reading that recognized the subversive potential of conventional, metrical forms of the nineteenth century. The twentieth-century hierarchical assumptions about the radical potential of "form," deep-seated in U.S. poetics, were produced in theories of reading that are themselves contingent and historical, informed by minor traditions and local curiosities. The question (for me) again arises: abstracted from their moment, the contexts in which form's meanings are produced, are specific forms (juxtapositions or abrupt line breaks, for instance) static? That is, are one age's "radical" forms necessarily capable of disruptive effects of normative subjectivity, as opposed to others that are taken to mean, say, conservatism and quietude?My students usually have to be taught what (I think) line breaks do. Students sometimes don't even notice the line as a line, as a sentence formed. Is this inattention a sign, as college professors often assume, that they need "re-socialization" to read beyond dull denotation?13 Maybe so. But to suggest that line breaks or any "forms" intrinsically disrupt meaning or subvert normative understandings (or, conversely, do the opposite) is another thing altogether. Recent arguments about how formal experiments by poets of color have failed to register as "radical" to white articulators of avant-garde aesthetics give the lie to what I want to call material premises of poetic formalist assumptions: the idea that form's effects are inherent.14

As a scholar of literary and critical history and culture and writing in the twentieth and twenty-first century, my understanding of "form" exceeds all that textual stuff I have so far talked about. I carry my attachment to elements of form in a self-consciousness of the particular literary culture that trained me to see them. I add to that understanding of "form" many other things: modes of circulation, material facts of a particular poem's publication history, how the poem came to my hand, versions of a poem that circulated in other contexts and formats (including readings of it in other essays, imitations, recontextualizations of it), the economic and political structures and aesthetic understandings that make a text count as "poetry" and for whom, under what assumptions in the first place and give "poetry" its particular cultural status. There is also the "form" that classroom discourse gives to a mode of inquiry, the shaping power of imaginary and real structures of university education — quiet circles and bowed heads and me at the head guiding our talk and writing, the historical moment in which I am reading, the form of the journal for which I am writing, or in which a poem was placed, the historical and biographical moment in which a work was produced, the literary cultures that fostered and repressed it, translations and spoken performances or recordings of it, the fact of its online life, and so on.

These count as elements of form for me as a scholar and teacher, and yet I continue to find myself working to shape readers of poems who will be capable of isolating, as "form," this narrower thing "on the page" — "every element of the textual dimension," as Marjorie Levinson puts it. ¹⁵ I struggle against the thought that students will be sharper readers in general for learning to respond to these "myriad textual prompts" that seem to ask for our attention (560). For Levinson, and for many poetry-focused critics, absent our attention to these prompts "we are reading something of our own untrammeled invention, inevitably less complex than the products of reading" for "form" (560).

And yet, how reliably does "form" understood as textual prompts help settle a text's internal logic, its supposed quiddity, its meanings, its politics, or anything about it? Levinson, one of the best readers of form I know, identifies the work of all formalism as the restoration of the artwork's internal critical and self-critical agency — work achieved for "activist formalism" in the demanding of the artwork's release "from the closures [it has] suffered through a combination of [its] own idealizing impulses, [its] official receptions, and general processes of cultural absorption" (560). Am I to understand that "the artwork" then stabilizes against such impulses, receptions, and officialdoms once "released"? That it remains stable as we would like the meaning of "form" to be? To be clear, Levinson does not quite claim this but I think poetic formalisms often subtly or unsubtly assume such stabilization. For instance, I find it both fascinating and frustrating that Marjorie Perloff, devoted as she is to poetic form as a reliable index of textual politics, close reads T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) once in the 1980s and again in 2001 to argue two entirely opposed takes on his supposed aesthetic politics, both times with recourse to "form" as her principle evidence for the claim. Critics sometimes turn to form as if to erect a bulwark against the absorptive powers of ideological regimes (to paraphrase Levinson) but Perloff's elements of form — oh so liquid and accommodating — beggar the metaphor.16 What are the temporal assumptions of (new) formalisms? In what relation to time does "form" exist?Levinson further suggests that formalists define reading as "multilayered and integrative responsiveness to" (again) "every element of the textual dimension" (560). What then about Perloff's multilayered responses that produce two opposed readings from the same dimension? Or is it? Her (Perloff's) recourse to form to make two quite opposite cases weaves two different poems in the process, both of them written the same, both interpretations tethered to "form," but whose "dimension" seems to include more than the text.

One possibility emerges in Levinson's claim that new formalists attend to form "only through a learned submission to [the text's] myriad textual prompts" (560). This phrase's beautiful near-paradox — "learned submission" — strikes me as both true and worth exploring. Suggesting an informed giving-in to something — a trained mode of surrender — implies a tracing-out and study of rules for form before the being moved by it begins. It suggests that learning what counts as form's prompt precedes the prompted encounter with matter, in-forming that matter into form. Does this make literary culture (one type of "context") inextricably involved in the recognition of or attention to form, in spite of form's being taken, in her account of this kind of formalism, as the opposite of "contextualist or materialist critique" (560)?

"It is of wood": a reading for 'form'

All of the above is to say that I almost never fail to wonder about "form" in reading poems. The form of "wondering" is to remain self-conscious of the fact that what I am inclined to see starkly, absolutely as a matter of form depends on training and habits that bind my mind to this or that aspect of a text, one that some readers might not even see until I point to it.17 This formal "training" is what I take to be one discursive norm of my broader literary culture, which is itself a contingent form, a temporary configuration of text/reader/writer/language/culture/history that brings into relief particular aspects of the blank, inhuman truth of matter, granting those aspects the seeming reliability and unimpeachability of "form" understood as truth or matter. In the "learned submission" figure, in this swivel round from training and discovery, I find the hinge where form meets genre (or are they two sides of a coin?). And thus, I tend to disagree with arguments in which this or that form 1/ is what will either overthrow or perpetuate this or that political or social reality or 2/ is thought to be radical or conservative in and of itself, or 3/ is assigned responsibility for any particular lived results in the world. Form (in the way I've been using it) is an abstraction, and particular forms are contingent.

Let me here turn briefly to Elizabeth Bishop's 1939 poem, "The Monument," written just as a New Critical culture of lyric reading was beginning to make a monument of "the poem," the cause célèbre of its formalist arguments.18 That literary culture understood good (successful) poems as the "well-wrought urns" then being theorized by Cleanth Brooks. For Brooks, whose Understanding Poetry (a college textbook written with Robert Penn Warren) appeared in 1938 and whose Modern Poetry and the Tradition appeared in 1939, "the poem" is, if not hostile to "history," a sign of stability, something that will transcend social contingencies — contingencies of reception and perhaps cultural difference, the ravages of time and war and social upheaval. Critics and students should "emphasize, not the special subject matter" of poems, Brooks wrote in the 1940s, "but the way in which the poem is built, or — to change the metaphor — the form which it has taken as it grew in the poet's mind." In so doing, we must consider the "formal structure and rhetorical organization," which bring us closer to the "structure of the poem as an organism" and, furthermore, "the formal pattern suggested by these terms [formal structure and rhetorical organization] seems to carry over from poem to poem."19 One had to read good poems for form in order to realize their enduringness as "poetry."Brooks offers this in part to suggest that "poetry" is an antidote to the historical relativism of the kind I've endeavored above, which he finds unthinkably detrimental to "poetry"; it means "giving up our criteria of good and bad," which is to "give up our concept of poetry" itself.20

Bishop's poem can almost seem a critique of Brooks's and Warren's confidence in formalism, though it also proceeds in a formalist manner to produce an ekphrasis of the titular, imaginary object (the monument). Already in its opening question — "Now can you see the monument? It is of wood" — the poem explores the contingency of artistic valuations, putting its own formalism on display as provisional, unsatisfactory, partial. Apparently, the titular monument's monumentality, perhaps even its existence, isn't self-evident; it seems not quite distinguishable from its own landscape, and the poem frames the encounter with it as mediated by the already ongoing scene of instruction — training — that tries to bring its status or its existence into view. Already the object's purposiveness, its aesthetic value, and its generic character, are in question.

The formalist mode of instruction about what might be a modernist object — this careful delineation of the object's objecthood without reference to its meanings — is markedly hesitant, self-conscious of error, distinct from the easy security of Brooks and Warren's pedagogical manner in explaining the quality of "the poem" and how to identify it:

Now can you see the monument? It is of wood
built somewhat like a box. No. Built
like several boxes in descending sizes
one above the other.
(1-4)

This halting descriptive mode goes on for another twenty-six lines, with few epithets or metaphors to guide our sense of the monument's meaning or import, always marked by stagy uncertainty: the monument's cubes are "pierced with odd holes," from which "fishing-poles or flag-poles" emerge, with a "sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood,/long petals of board" on top, and "vaguely whittled ornament" (8-15, emphases mine). The poem's own metrical, rhythmical, structural, and even rhetorical constructions are similarly odd and "sort of." Though now and again the poem falls into runs of perfect iambic pentameter (as in line 63, "It chose that way to grow and not to move"), or in lines of three- and four-beat accentuals (or are they iambic tetrameter and trimester lines? Depends whose mode of scanning you use!), it then suddenly drops us short:

and from them jig-saw work hangs down,
four lines of vaguely whittled ornament
over the edges of the boxes
to the ground.
(14-17)

Line 17 does this kind of dropping, conspicuously leaving the accentuals behind as it draws ekphrastic eye off the object and to the ground.

Significant here in understanding these formal gestures are the specific biographical contexts for Bishop's odd, mixed, 1930s training in meter and modernism while at college. Bishop seriously engaged a predominantly Victorian interpretive culture of metrics at Vassar College, which ran headlong and painfully into her interest in the specifically anti-metrical formalist poetics of such early modernists as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.21 The unpatterned mix of metrical and "free verse" lines in "The Monument" seems to play with the (then receding) expectation for poems to mean metrically at the same time that it seems also to play with the rising assumption (bothersome to her) that "free" form necessarily indicates the liberated politics of either a literary object or its maker. Flaunting its own straddling of two opposed poetic cultures of form — the metrical and the concrete (visual or "free" verse) — "The Monument" admits and confronts me with the contingency of varied modes by which one might receive the depicted monument or "The Monument."

In the formalist reading of the monument that the poem itself advances, the object's very character seems to morph: at first it seems to be a three-dimensional tower or non-representational object made in wood with origins never mentioned, but then it becomes (oddly) a two-dimensional representation of a tower-like monument (maybe a frottage in the style of Max Ernst, some scholars propose), with sea and sky and monument all represented in wooden boards with the representation "geared" and "set." These verbs — adjectival in origin — confuse the idea of form as pattern with the question of formal intention in that pattern and, like the words "assorted" or "design," connote both the plastic arts (point perspective in painting, for instance) and rhetorical purposes. We are aswirl with the problem of distinguishing the artwork's making from its effects, on one hand, and the problem of distinguishing the description of the artwork from its material quiddity, on the other.Bishop seems to construct the poem in two voices: the first, which asks the opening line's question, "Now can you see the monument?", is more certain of the monument and its value; the second, that of the questioner's addressee, seems dubious about the whole project. Efforts of the first voice at formalist accuracy in describing this shifting monument are gradually eroded by the increasing inscrutability of the object in question, and finally dismissed as quasi-foolish by the objections of the second voice, which casts doubt on the generic expectations for "monumentality" on offer. In a line that splits the two voices by breaking itself mid-way, voice two asks "'What is that?'" and voice one responds, rather redundantly, "It is the monument":

"What is that?"
It is the monument.
(45-46)22

Voice two counter-retorts, employing its own variety of formalist description, "'It's piled up boxes / outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off'"(47-48), bemoaning both the object's poor quality and having been brought to see it, asking, "'what can it prove?'" (56). What indeed. My own formalist reading wants to prove any number of things with recourse to Bishop's use of form, but, the poem suggests, there will always be another voice to come.

Voice one offers a formalist approach to the object that is powerless to fix its nature or to justify an aesthetic appreciation of it. The poem then goes on to offer such a wealth of responses to the question, "'What is that,'" that it starts to read as wry response to a culture of lyric reading determined to narrowly dictate "the nature of the poem and its quality," as Brooks and Warren argued, and to determine standards for "good poetry" with recourse to form.23 In "The Monument," the first voice either contradicts itself in this section, countering its own formalism with a vaguely historicist perspective, or a new voice enters that supposes meanings and purposes for the object that are lost to time — in an "ancient principality," an "artist-prince" "might have wanted to build a monument / to mark a tomb or boundary, / or make a melancholy or romantic scene of it. . . ." (37-39). However, notably, the historicist voice and its method suggest not one possibility but several, marching through monumental time, from monuments as statecraft in the ancient world, or funerary objects, to ruined monuments and fragments as "melancholy," Romantic objects occasioning meditations on time and aesthetic endurance. Numerous possible ways of approaching the monument practically rush us at the end: in line 73, "the bones of the artist prince may be inside" (is it a literalized repository of the human, or just a tomb?); or (then again), in line 74, the artist may have lived "far away on even drier soil." The monument is presented as possibly solid, or hollow, as enduring and almost animatedly self-producing, held together "better/ than sea or cloud or sand could by itself . . . It chose that way to grow and not to move" (60-63). Yet mere lines away, the monument is then cast as merely organic, a blank "artifact / of wood," subject to decay, preyed upon by the elements (59-60).

Finally, we are told that "what is within . . . cannot have been intended to be seen" (76-77), making voice one (is it?) sound near the end a little like a New Critic warning us against the intentional fallacy. The poem finally ends (whose voice are we listening to now?) by suggesting that the point of its reading has not been to arrive at intrinsic value, meanings, aesthetic judgments, or at static historical purposes for the monument. Instead, the art object's existence is determined by its ability to produce more culture (including this partial interpretation of "The Monument"): "It is the beginning of a painting, / a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, / and all of wood. Watch it closely" (78-80).

 

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Gillian White is the author of Lyric Shame. She teaches English at Michigan.

 

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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Banner image: Kurt Schwitters, "Difficile" (1942-43) by Sailko is licensed under CC BY 3.0. Image has been cropped.

 

References