Lesley University
November, 2004
What is Open Form poetry?
I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Garrison Keillor (23)
20th century American poetry is the best era for poetry since the T’ang Dynasty… The Japanese are reading more (of it) than Americans are. They’re reading Philip Levine…and Allen Ginsberg, including all (his) crapola. – Sam Hamill
“…a poet of some local interest, perhaps.” – T.S. Elliot on William Carlos Williams (1)
Walt Whitman, Allen
Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams. To read the words of these intelligent,
thoughtful people, you’d think that poetry would have been better off without
these three luminaries. After ten years of serious study of their work and the
work of what one might call Open Form poets,
it is clear to me that they represent three pillars of one of the most
brilliant achievements in American art, not just literary art. Yet, to many
intelligent people, they wrote a lot of shit. It reminds me of what Red Barber
said about people who knock the American pastime, that baseball is dull only to
those with dull minds.
Open Form. Birthed in
There is
a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must
paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint
in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or
break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists
must practice a particular discipline, that of
allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a
direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the
complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that
those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation (Evans).
After having read some Ginsberg, Williams and Whitman (and I consider myself much less than an expert on these writers) and having interviewed Allen in 1994, I was sucked deeply into the open form universe reading Michael McClure’s brilliant poem “Dolphin Skull.” I took a review copy along with me on one of my backpacking trips into the Olympic National Park. A dibia from the Igbo tribe and two other chums ended up doing a ritual at 5,000 feet and used “Dolphin Skull” as our entryway in a different state of consciousness. There was a sense of timelessness about the evening that I have only experienced on rare occasions. At one point I was afraid something paranormal had happened when the Big Dipper was no longer visible in the sky, but after getting up to look around the tree I realized time had elapsed, my sense of time so distorted by the evening’s events. For some reason this poem was immediately accessible to me and profoundly powerful. I interviewed Michael shortly after the trip and have had subsequent conversations with him since. I searched out other poets writing, as Michael does, in “Projective Verse,” and though there are a few who do, there are hundreds of others, I am convinced, who are (consciously, or likely not) practicing some variant on the suggestion. (“Projective Verse,” by the way, is the title of an essay by Charles Olson, published in 1950, which is Olson’s take on Open Form, perhaps the most definitive so far.)
One of the remarkable things about people writing with a spontaneous process is that the poem often has more depth to it than the poet realized while writing. Perhaps this should be true in all forms of poetry, but to me closed verse is missing that life force that open verse, at its best, is brimming with.
One example Sam Hamill has used on occasion to demonstrate a poem that does not leave enough mystery in it is the William Stafford poem: “Traveling Through The Dark,”
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
There is no negative
capability, as Keats put it. “That is, when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason.” We get that the poet did what he felt was right, but Stafford does not
give the reader any credit for being able to suss
that out and as a result prevents the poem from being a high-energy-construct,
as Charles Olson would say.
McClure said:
“To write spontaneously
does not mean to write without thought or deep experience. In fact, there must
be a vision and poetics that are alive and conscious. The moment of writing is
complex and at the same time it is natural and vigorous. I do
not know of a more adventurous gesture than to write spontaneously” (McClure
xv).
“So what is open form,”
the older Slam poet asked me at Red Sky Poetry Theater. He moved here from
Williams said: “…no
verse can be free, it must be governed by some
measure, but not by the old measure. We have to return to a measure consonant
with our time... a purely intuitive one which we feel but do not name…” (Williams 339-40). Each writer has
rhythms and tendencies that inform the work, so free is
a misnomer. Of course his life-long concern was with the line, an important
notion of which all too many free verse writers have no comprehension. (Ginsberg’s “Some Different Considerations in Mindful Arrangement
of Open Verse Forms on the Page” is an
excellent resource.) In one of the most powerful passages of
Without invention nothing is well
spaced,
unless the
mind change, unless
the stars
are new measured, according
to their
relative positions, the
line will
not change, the necessity
will not
matriculate: unless there is
a new mind
there cannot be a new
line, the
old will go on
repeating
itself with recurring
deadliness:
without invention
nothing
lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the
alder does not grow from among
the
hummocks margining the all
but spent
channels of the old swale,
the small
foot-prints
of mice
under the overhanging
tufts of
the bunch-grass will not
appear:
without invention the line
will never
again take on its ancient
divisions
when the word, a supple word,
lived in
it, crumbled now to chalk (65).
How to take this? Certainly he spent the majority of his career trying to make sense of the rules that might govern modern and postmodern poetry composition and page formatting. He excerpted a large selection of “Projective Verse” in his autobiography, suggesting perhaps that Olson articulated these ideas better than he did with his phrase “variable foot.” His notion of aural empathy is a critical one for those who seek an in to these open form poets, or for open form poets seeking to explain the talent required to give life to such work. What is such work? My conversation at Red Sky continued. It’s more than free verse, but alludes to the notion, (Olson again) that when the writer puts him/herself in the open (the field) (s)he “can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares for itself” (Olson 148). Williams articulated this earlier, as Paul Mariani pointed out in his excellent biography of Williams: “He meant to think with the poem and not with a preconceived master plan, going where the poem led him (Mariani 540).
So why the suggestions
of intelligent people that Whitman, Williams and Ginsberg have written a lot of
shit? Part of it may be a need to control and a resonance with the cosmology of
control and domination, or that left-brain linear impulse which is not open to a
different way of ordering. Part of it is the same reason why Olson was such a
tough nut for our Slam poet friend to crack. It usually takes an effort to get how the poet’s mind works. Hearing a
poet read her work helps and surely there are those poems which are immediately
accessible: Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “A Supermarket in
Yet if one is open, he
or she can be moved by the field of
energy the poet swirls out. Olson and Duncan have written extensively on this, following
the lead of Williams. His essay: “The Poem as a Field of Action,” written for
his talk at the University of Washington in 1948, (Williams’ first academic
exposure for which he waited until he was 65 years old), is an essential
document for understanding how dependence on European forms was finally
released, something Williams spent his whole career trying to do. He was using
the words field of action as early as
1944. Olson subtitles “Projective Verse” “Composition by Field” in 1950, and
we’re off.
I was open and ready for the complex field of McClure in 1995 when I first read “Dolphin Skull.” Something about it was beyond my conscious comprehension, but there was enough content to hook me. I open The Maximus Poems and whoosh, I am back in Olson’s unique universe which I find has a fire and depth lacking in the work of other poets.
Maximus
to
Letter 2
….tell you?
ha! who
can tell
another how
to manage
the swimming?
he was right: people
don’t change. They only stand more
revealed,
I,
likewise.
(Olson 9)
So besides those already mentioned, who are other Open Form poets? In no particular order some who interest me are: Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, Jerome Rothenberg, George Bowering, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Adrian Castro, Ed Sanders, Jose Kozer, Gloria Gervitz and others. As Williams did not get the recognition he deserved during his lifetime, and because the academy has something of a stranglehold on major awards, major funding, etc. and as American culture is, in the words of media literacy advocate Gloria deGaetano, an “industry-generated culture,” expecting the average person to do a little legwork might be asking too much. As documentary filmmaker John DeGraaf says, Americans are “people who scream at the microwave to hurry up!” Yet, I am confident that future historians will, like Sam Hamill, see American 20th century poetry as a golden age, with the poets cited here at the front of the pack.
WORKS CITED:
Eliot, T.S. from Conarroe, Joel
O. “The Preface to
Winter, 1969,
(39-53)
Evans, Bill from liner notes of Kind of Blue Miles Davis, New York: Columbia Records, 1959.
Ginsberg, Allen, Deliberate Prose Harper
Collins:
Hamill, Sam at
Poets-in-the-Park,
Keillor, Garrison Good Poems, Penguin:
Mariani, Paul, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked McGraw-Hill:
McClure, Michael, Three Poems Penguin:
Olson, Charles, “Projective Verse” Poetics of the New American Poetry, Grove:
Olson, Charles, The Maximus Poems
Sharma, KK, “Poetry
as an Exposed, Open Form: Robert Duncan’s Poetics”, Indian Journal of American Studies:
Williams, William Carlos, Selected Essays New Directions: