It's often said that the best way to keep the old forms alive is to mess with them, to break them. Sonnets can break out of rhyme, villanelles can fudge the repeated phrases, haiku can concern themselves with more than nature, and so on. I agree, even as I also treasure the pure forms, that breaking the rules from time to time helps keep form relevant. This is how poetry evolves, building on the before as it creates itself anew.
John Drury's Poetry Dictionary does quite a thorough job defining and redefining poetic forms. I turned to it a few days ago to see how Drury defined an ode, as I was feeling a little self-conscious about the free verse odes I wrote recently after a friend noted that odes are, of course, typically quite a bit longer than my twelve-line pieces. Drury's definition is helpful, noting that an ode is a "song or lyric, often passionate, expansive, exuberant, rhapsodic" (195). He then goes on to discuss the evolution of the ode: Pindaric or choral odes, Horatian odes, Cowleyan or irregular odes, and Neruda's elemental odes. I wondered how Sharon Olds would categorize her odes to hymens, composting toilets, and the like; I suppose they, too, are elemental, "passionate and rhapsodic about the ordinary," even if composting toilets aren't quite ordinary to most people (198). I then wondered whether an ode can still be an ode if its expansiveness, exuberance, and passion are tight, focused, and small -- regardless of its subject. Surely an ode can be small as long as its heart is still big, right? I should think so. Perhaps resizing it can help the ode to stay alive in the years to come as readers continue to expect quick reads and bite-sized inspiration.
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2 comments:
i really love this idea of breaking a poetic mold. it really strikes me as funny that poems come with expectations about subject and length. i always thought the notion of poetry is about being unruly with sentence structure and grammar. but my education in poetry is just beginning i see!
Well, there are different schools of thought on this! Of course, language itself is necessarily structured (symbols combine in particular ways to signify meaning; words combine to create rhythm, pleasurable or not), so we can argue that it's impossible to be totally and fundamentally unruly in poetry. When I look at Ferlinghetti's wild line breaks and subjects, for example, I still see poetic devices (alliteration, assonance, repetition, etc.) that provide order even as they challenge poetic form with visual and internal disorder.
I agree that the expectations about subject and length are funny. Surely a watercolor is still a watercolor whether it is 1"x1" or 10'x10'and whether it's of a flower or machine gun. It's still not an oil painting unless there are oil paints, though! We know it's still essentially a painting if we mix the paints and traditions -- even if we add feathers and glitter (mixed-media) -- so I think a poem is still a poem if it borrows from the ode, from free verse, from prose, etc. It's just required to have some kind of structure, some kind of meaning. It has to sing somehow. And I guess an ode has to sing a praise song, regardless of whether it departs from other "ode" structural traditions. It can look like a sonnet or a novel in verse -- or, perhaps, out of verse!
Anyhow, thanks for the comment, Jean!
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