What, then, can poets writing today, in the vers libre form that has dominated the past sixty years of poetry, gain from studying English-language forms that moved in and out of fashion over the previous thousand years?

One answer is that the poet can gain a sense of connection to poetic lineage. Discovering that poets have been re-inventing our relationship to language for thousands of years can be deliciously humbling. Perhaps this is what Emerson meant when he said that poetry must be “as new as foam, and as old as the rock.” Even more than this important universal perspective, though, I feel that I have also gained personally as a poet through studying form.

One gain for me was the discovery, through practicing various forms, that constraint galvanizes creativity. In fact, I would say that I found a kind of freedom within constriction. By practicing various forms, I have learned that many types of constraints–such as meter, rhyme scheme, or even just a list of words to use when writing a poem–intensify my relationship to the “assignment” at hand. My creativity rises to the challenge, and I find myself writing more interesting lines than if simply given a blank page and a pat on the back. Exercises in form have helped me build creative muscle. It is a bit like running with weights. And as an added benefit, sometimes the formal poem succeeds as well.

Another wonderful aspect of studying form is being influenced by the musical heritage of poetry. I studied sonnets extensively as an undergraduate, writing essays on Dante, Petrarch, and Sydney, as well as the occasional sonnet to my girlfriend at the time. When I became more serious about writing poetry, I thought I had to somehow make a clean break from verse, and learn to write free verse as though I were starting from scratch. What I found, over time, and through working with astute mentors, is that the thousands of sonnets I had ingested in my teens became a tremendous asset. Musicality wins in poetry, above any other element (imagery, ideas, you-name-it). The music of natural English speech is closely allied to iambic and trochaic patterns. And so, once I embraced it, I found sonnet-like music suffusing my free-verse poems quite naturally and effectively.

Finally, there is a gain in studying form that brings together the aspects of lineage, creativity in constraint, and poetry’s musical heritage. By dancing between free-verse and formal poetry, I feel not only connected to poetry’s lineage in the abstract, but more able to synthesize old and new in my own work. This is the paradox of poetry–that it is a long-standing tradition of breaking with tradition. I have found that those poets who seem most unique, and whom history often celebrates as the vanguard of some new movement, were steeped in understanding of their fore-bearers–not as an abstract appreciation, but through the practical application of exercises, studies, and experiments with form.

Since free verse means the poet must invent and reinvent the form as she goes, understanding and practicing elements of form are, more than ever, a key part of a poet’s development. It is important, though, for writers to study form from a writers’ perspective–with an eye toward practical application. The intricacies of form can be seductive, since the analytical interrelations have themselves an aesthetic appeal. But it is important to ask: how is this making my poetry better? How is this increasing the musicality, and creative zeal, of the poems I write? This is a key to reaping what studies in form can offer: a greater sense of place in the timeless lineage, an explosion of creative freedom caused by seeming constriction, an attunement of the poet’s musical ear, an the ability to synthesize tradition and innovation in the centuries-old pursuit of using words to get beyond words.

Visual Cortex diagram courtesy Wikipedia

I have been questioning my preference for reading poetry on paper versus digital text for some time now, wondering what might underpin these instincts. It recently occurred to me that the difference in mental state I experience when reading a book versus surfing the web may actually have a basis in science. The advent of digital text has made a staggering amount of information available to us, and thereby altered forever how we learn. The further proliferation of digital text through the internet, and especially now with blogging and social networking, has made our ability to filter through words a survival skill. We must read faster than ever in the information age, skimming for nuggets of meaning or amusement.

Just how have we learned to read faster in the information age? Short of a research grant, an EEG machine, and plenty of literate volunteers, I have only a sample size of one, and my subjective methods of self-observation to guide me. But my theory is that we bias the visual processing centers of our brain, instead of the auditory centers, when surfing the web. This theory is supported by speed-reading courses that attempt to eliminate sub-vocalization and auditory processing to teach people to read faster. And yet, poetry has been an aural medium for centuries.

What are the implications for our poetics when readers stop listening to poetry in their head? Could this have a relationship to the advent of visual poetry, and language poetry, and to the false-starts of neo-formalism? Might the rise of free verse even go hand-in-hand with this explosion of the accessibility of written material? Surely, other factors, like the effects of the Second World War on postmodernism, play greatly into contemporary poetics. Yet this simple theory, with its potentially biological basis–that in an age glutted with words, we have stopped listening to their music–may have as much to say about contemporary poetry, and its decline from popular favor, as rock-n-roll has to say about the decline of classical music.

Furthermore, the volume of writing shows no signs of letting up. As Thomas Swick puts it in his essay, “Have Book, Will Travel”:

Tell a writer you write and depression sets in; tell a writer you read and gratitude blooms. Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or that hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead.

Indeed, it seems to be an art that is increasingly fading in our cultural memory–the art of listening–to ourselves, each other, the music of our language, and the wisdom of the dead. Perhaps my relationship to books is not anachronistic, or fetishistic; perhaps it is not the smell of the binder’s glue, the feel of the page, the pleasures of a good font in dark ink, or anything else about the book itself that I love so much as that poems served up in this format literally change my head space, making me quiet, attentive, and able to hear–really hear–what the poem is saying to me.