Bloggendipity: On Form

Sometimes a thread materializes when you read a number of blogs and it begins to weave its own meaning across several sites. I began noticing it this morning while reading a posting about Langston Hughes on Dumbfoundry. My ears perked up because I had recently written something about Hughes and John Kerry also. But Malcom quotes near the end of the piece the co-chair of the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, Maryemma Graham, commenting on Hughes and form:

Graham told me, "He was misread by the vast majority of critics, and I think that led them to characterize him as simplistic and not complex enough. He refused to put poetry on such a high pedestal that it was not accessible to the average person. He was writing at a time when poetry was getting farther and farther from readers and moving into the academy, where Hughes felt it didn't belong. He was saying to critics, 'I don't need your approval because what I have is readers." '

Hughes continually devised new ways to communicate with his audience, Graham says, including blues poetry, jazz poetry and gospel plays. "This man was an inventor of new forms that we still don't have the language to talk about yet," she added.

Then I read a humorous series on Ivy is Here that seemed to follow these comments on critics and form very nicely:

If caught by poor reviews, relax and write toward the end of the poem at a 45-degree angle until you are free of the critics. If the poor reviews are influential, write parallel to the avant-garde, going in the same direction as the literal current and then rhyme diagonally toward the poem's conclusion.

When writing in form, do not write poems in a straight line toward predictability.

Next Mike Snider in his comments about his post on Robert Frost speaks to the difficult work involved in keeping things straight on a slant:

Frost could employ that "easy rhyme and meter" because of an astonishing amount of work, just as Michael Jordan made basketball look easy because he worked harder than anyone else.

And finally completing the hoop, Michael passed to this Dr. J post concerning Housman and his similar mastery of form:

The trick with Housman, I think, is his deceptive simplicity: as with Robert Frost, it's tempting to reduce his writing to a kind of folksy pastorality, but to do so is to undermine the depth of his writing -- and, in fact, the intricacy of his poetic technique, much of which rests on a stern (some might say rigid) obedience to iambic rhythms. Some have accused Housman of being "metronomic," tick tocking his way through his verse, and while there's a sense that Flicka and Mr. Ed could have stamped out the stresses, that says more of our tendency toward relatively unmeasured speech patterns.

In the end, it might look simple, but there's some real work to make it so. Critics may confuse that simplicity for something easy, and mistake the genius for an idiot. That's a great mistake and a testament only to their own ignorance. Criticizing is easy but writing 'easy' is critical.