Expansive Poetry & Music Online

Guest Essayist: Paul Lake

The Shape of Poetry

Part I
Paul Lake



Written at a time when free verse was a relatively new and exciting development in English language poetry, Pound's metaphor was a brilliant piece of polemic. While allowing that "symmetrical forms" such as sonnets and villanelles and rhymed quatrains had "certain uses," it suggested that a modern poet would be wise to render most of his subjects in the more flexible, organic form of free verse. A vase might possess a pure, if somewhat abstract and fragile, beauty; but it is, after all, a human artifact--cold and unliving, a relic from the dusty museum of the past. Water poured into it must necessarily conform to its pre-existent shape.


Pound's metaphor has other implications for "symmetrical form" as well, almost all of them negative. For instance, didn't Keats write in a letter to John Taylor, "That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all"? Leaves are the natural outgrowths of trees, but can a leaf grow from a vase?

Looked at that way, Pound's metaphor seems a classic illustration of Coleridge's definition of organic form in his Lectures on Shakespeare, where he corrected those critics who confounded "mechanical regularity with organic form":


To a modern poet, the act of pouring poetic content into a vase-like "predetermined form" seems every bit as mechanical, and even less original, than pressing clay into a vase. Even considering the sacramental, mystical qualities attributed to water, one can't help thinking of the parable of the wine skins. As a result, writers of free verse from Pound to the present have argued that for poetry to be organic, it must be unbound by the mechanical regularity of meter and the formal rules and strictures of traditional poetry.

Merely looking at the two types of verse on the page seems to confirm Pound's intuition. A passage of the late Cantos, or a poem by Charles Olson or A. R. Ammons, sprawls down the page with the scraggly branchiness of an oak tree, or zig-zags from margin to margin like tide and shore. The shape of formal verse, on the other hand, is suggestive of lines, planes, squares, and stacked boxes. Its kinship to Pound's vase seems obvious.

A half century after Pound published his notes on form in "A Retrospect," A. R. Ammons published "Corson's Inlet," a now-classic poetic manifesto, which makes a similar distinction between the organic shapes of nature--and by analogy of free verse--and the more regular symmetries of traditional poetry. In Ammons' poem, the speaker walks among the sand dunes and along the shoreline of Corson's Inlet, watching sand and ocean intermingle, and musing suggestively in words that echo Pound:

        . . . I was released from forms,
        from the perpendiculars
             straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
        of thought
        into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
                        of sight . . .

A few lines later, he makes similar observations:

        . . . in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
           more or less dispersed;
        disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
        of dunes,
        irregular swamps of reeds . . .


        . . . in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
       blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
        snail shell:
                       pulsations of order
                in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
        broken down, transferred through membranes
        to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
        lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
                   and against, of millions of events: this,
                                      so that I make
                                      no form
                                      formlessness . . .


                      . . . thousands of tree swallows
                      gathering for flight:
                      an order held
                      in constant change: a congregation
     rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
                  as one event,
                               not chaos . . .

Then while still musing on the birds and other "disorderly orders" he's observed around him, Ammons considers "the possibility of rule" in nature "as the sum of rulelessness."

Thirty years have passed since Ammons published "Corson's Inlet," and in that time, discoveries in science and mathematics have shed new light on the problems discussed in his poem--discoveries with immense significance for our understanding of form and content, nature and art, organic and mechanical form. In retrospect, Ammons' use of the phrase "not chaos" in his description of the swallows' behavior is startlingly prescient because, in fact, a whole new science of chaos--or "anti-chaos," as it's sometimes called--has come into being precisely to explain such phenomena. Surprisingly, though, what the new sciences of chaos and complexity have shown is that Ammons is wrong in his conclusions about art and nature: that the "rule" of nature is not the sum of "rulelessness," as he proposes, but is clearly derived from formal rules and principles, which can be described and even imitated by a new form of mathematics called fractal geometry. Thanks to these new discoveries, we now know that the "order tight with shape" he observes in a tiny snail shell is the same order seen in "the large view": in coastlines, weather systems, sand dunes, mountain ranges, and galaxies. That the laws governing the growth of trees--as well as of leaves, ferns, pine cones, and sunflowers--is the same law that governs the growth of human organs, snowflakes, tornadoes, bird wings--and, I will argue, the elegant, broken symmetries of formal verse.

It turns out that writing formal poetry is not at all like pouring water into a vase, but, rather, like the growth of a tree--far more so than writing free verse, which, except in special cases, is too ruleless, arbitrary, and mechanical to produce the organic integrity of a good sonnet.

Let's begin by considering those flocking swallows. In his book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a presentation by Craig Reynolds at the Santa Fe Institute on the flocking behavior of birds. As Waldrop explains it, Reynolds placed a number of "autonomous, bird-like agents," which he called "boids," into an artificial environment filled with obstacles on a computer screen. Then to see if flocking behavior could be generated by applying a few simple rules, each boid was programmed to behave in the following ways:

           environment, including other boids.

Waldrop describes the results of this computer simulation as follows:


One of the most interesting aspects of the emergent behavior of the flock of "boids" noted by Waldrop was that there was no top-down rule telling the boids to form flocks: "Instead of writing global, top-down specifications for how the flock should behave or telling his creature to follow the lead of a Boss Boid, Reynolds had used only the three simple rules of local, boid-to-boid interaction."

This should alleviate the fears of those poets who, like Ammons, think that by writing in traditional forms they are submitting their work to the arbitrary rule of authority, to the top-down rules and "Boss Boids" of the past. In "Corson's Inlet," Ammons explicitly rejects such authority, arguing that in poetry, as in nature, there is, or should be,

               no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan
     or thought:
     no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept . . .

Ironically, though, by rejecting the rules of formal poetry, Ammons is not, as he declares in the poem, leaving "all possibilities / of escape open," but rather cutting himself off from the possibility of achieving the types of rule-governed behavior that produce nature's emergent forms. Once we look at how poems actually take shape, it becomes clear that Ammons and Pound are wrong: The rules of formal poetry generate not static objects like vases, but the same kind of bottom-up, self-organizing processes seen in complex natural systems such as flocking birds, shifting sand dunes, and living trees.


. . . my practice is absolutely the reverse of saying, well let's write a sestina now, let's see if I can write a roundeau. I've never, never found myself doing that kind of thing. It's always a matter of sensing that something wants to be said, something of which, as yet, I have a very imperfect knowledge, and letting it start to talk, and finding what rhythm it wants to come out in, what phrasing seems natural to it. When I've discovered those things for a couple of lines, I begin to have the stanza of my poem, if I'm going to have a stanzaic poem. In any case, the line lengths declare themselves organically as they do, I suppose, for a free verse poet. The difference between me and a free verse poet is simply that I commit myself to the metrical precedents which my first lines set. I have found that though I don't know how a poem is going to end, I always have a pretty good advance awareness of how long the poem is going to be, what its tone is going to be, and thus can initially arrive at rhythms and line lengths which are going to be capable of repetition without troubling the flow of thought as it emerges.




The term scientists now use to describe the complex, elegant patterns that emerge from nonlinear dynamic systems is "strange attractor." The honeycomb pattern emerging from heated silicon oil is one; a tornado organizing itself from random atmospheric turbulence is another. Completely unpredictable from the behavior of its constituent parts, a strange attractor is a higher-order, emergent phenomenon. Like the flocking behavior of real birds and computer "boids," it somehow spontaneously happens when a simple set of rules, interacting in a holistic way throughout a complex system, produces a dynamic new form of order.

There's a deep paradox here, and one that poets should pause to consider. On the one hand, a poem in its early stages resembles the chaotic random activity of a storm, organizing itself through a rule-governed process of self-adjustment and feedback to produce the strange attractor: the poem. On the other hand, as its name suggests, the attractor--the finished poem--somehow draws the turbulence into its final shape. It's both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomena--what Douglas Hofstadter calls a "strange loop" or "tangled hierarchy."

From the testimony of Richard Wilbur and other poets, it appears that a poem begins with a "something that wants to be said" that generates random phrases and rhythms that organize themselves into lines, then shapely stanzas, then poems. Wilbur says he doesn't decide ahead of time what the line lengths will be, but, rather, that they "declare themselves organically." Yet, paradoxically, these initial lines declare themselves into the right lengths because of his dim initial awareness of "how long" and of what the overall "tone" of the poem is going to be. The initial lines determine the shape of the finished poem, yet the overall shape and tone of the finished poem is what draws the initial lines into being.

Donald Hall in a recent interview (Poets & Writers) gives a similar description of the way poems evolve, declaring that he begins with "a notion of a subject area, maybe a tone of feeling in connection with a phrase, maybe an image with a compelling cadence." He adds that he doesn't know where he's heading with the poem, but simply jots down phrases, often over a period of years, till a sufficient number have accumulated. "The scattered words that accumulate before I start to write," he concludes, "are the first draft of the poem. Along with them I have something like an impetus toward a poem, a shadow that hulks toward the page."

Hall's description almost exactly echoes Wilbur's: a poem begins with a mysterious "impetus," a chaotic scattering of rhythms and phrases, and a sense of the poem's overall tone. All of these disparate elements then somehow coalesce into the poem's final form, which also somehow already existed as a strange attractor: "a shadow that hulks toward the page."

The great Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges in his poem "A Poet of the Thirteenth Century" offers a further parallel to the descriptions of Wilbur and Hall. Borges describes how an unnamed thirteenth century Italian poet (possibly Guittone D'Arezzo) invented the sonnet form in words that suggest the theories of complexity science. As translated by William Ferguson, the poem reads as follows:

Think of him laboring in the Tuscan halls
On the first sonnet (that word still unsaid),
The undistinguished pages, filled with sad
Triplets and quatrains, without heads or tails.

Slowly he shapes it; yet the impulse fails.
He stops, perhaps at a strange slight music shed
>From time coming and its holy dread,
A murmuring of far-off nightingales.

Did he sense that others were to follow,
That the arcane, incredible Apollo
Had revealed an archetypal thing,

A whirlpool mirror that would draw and hold
All that night could hide or day unfold:
Daedalus, labyrinth, riddle, Oedipus King?

Borges suggests that the sonnet was an "archetypal thing," a strange attractor that somehow caused those first quatrains and triplets to self-organize by reaching back through time: ". . . a strange slight music shed / From time coming and its holy dread / A murmuring of far-off nightingales." Borges' final image of an "avid crystal"-- or "whirlpool mirror" in Ferguson's translation--is another apt description of the "strange attractor" that pulled myth, riddle, paradox, and labyrinth into the sonnet's equally tangled form.

Still, I know that while some people can accept that the free-flowing forms of leaves and trees are produced by rule-governed natural processes, they can not believe there's anything natural about poems being coaxed into existence by metrical rules and formal procedures. Coleridge, however, in the same essay quoted above, has already answered those skeptics:

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one--and what is organization but the connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and means! This is no discovery of criticism; it is a necessity of the human mind--and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of meter and measured sounds as the vehicle and involucrum of poetry, itself a fellow growth from the same life, even as the bark is to the tree.

As with the poem by Borges, this passage remarkably evokes the discoveries of chaos science. In it, Coleridge declares that as with a living body, "the spirit of poetry" must operate through "rules," which allow a new type of organization incorporating a bottom-up and top-down connection between whole and parts--the way the root system, leaves, bark, and other subsystems of a plant emerge into the thing we call an oak tree. Far from being a dead "received form," meter is, in Coleridge's words, nothing less than the "vehicle and involucrum of poetry," an"involucrum" being the outer covering of part of a plant. The relationship, therefore, of the "spirit" of poetry to "meter and measured sounds" is not that of water poured into a vase, but, in the words of Coleridge again, "a fellow growth from the same life, even as the bark is to the tree."

The error made by Pound and Ammons is a common one. Like many a contemporary theorist, they saw the shapes that formal poems make on the page, noted their resemblance to Euclidean squares and rectangles, and concluded that they were produced by a different geometry than that which produces the biomorphic shapes of trees and leaves. They mistook the two-dimensional outline of the poem on the page for the shape of the poem itself--which, as Pound said more wisely in another famous aphorism, is a shape cut "in time." In confusing a poem's two-dimensional outline with the four-dimensional shape it creates when spoken or read, poets like Pound and Ammons resemble the citizens of Flatland in the classic novel who see only a two-dimensional cross-section of a multi-dimensional object when it intersects the flat plane of their universe. Like his predecessor Charles Olson, who also composed on a typewriter and thought in spatial terms, Ammons tries to substitute a typewriter's mechanical spacing for the organic coherence produced by rules and "measured sounds." Ammons once even composed an entire book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, on a roll of adding-machine tape, letting its narrow dimensions mechanically dictate the form and rhythms of his poem.




Nims has even speculated that the ratio in the Golden Section might lie behind the proportions of the Petrarchan sonnet, giving further support to Borges' suggestion that the sonnet is an "archetypal thing" discovered by a Tuscan poet in the thirteenth century. Interestingly, the Fibonacci sequence was discovered by another thirteenth century Italian, Filius Bonacci.

But the perfect symmetry of the nautilus shell is clearly of a different type than that of leaves and trees, not to mention clouds and coastlines. That's because the nonlinear equation that produces the Fibonacci sequence lacks the element of chance provided by environmental feedback to a tree or a boulder-strewn beach. But as John Briggs and F. David Peat note in their book Turbulent Mirror, ". . . when a random variation in the iterations is allowed so that details vary from scale to scale, it's possible to mimic the actual forms and structures of nature much more closely. This suggests natural growth is produced through a combination of iteration and chance." They go on to show that by "combining an iterative scaling with a random element of choice," the shapes of mountains and coastlines can be generated so realistically on computers that they're now used in movies and videos. A landscape similar to Corson's Inlet can now be generated on a computer screen.

Paul Lake's essay on the shape of poetry will continue in issue No. 10 (next month.) We hope to have a review of Paul Lake's novel (which has the contemporary poetry scene as its setting) soon.

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