Contents Under Pressure

There’s an interesting interview performed by Jack Foley with Michael McClure that I googled up recently when searching Projective Verse. First let me say that I saw McClure read many years ago during a Kerouac festival in Lowell, backed by Ray Manzarek (of Doors fame) on keyboards. It’s way up there on my top ten poetry reading list. McClure was breathtakingly syllabic and Manzarek's accompaniment was dexterously exquisite.

But I digress. As a poet working in form, one of my concerns with formalist poetry as a whole is its lack of vigor. Not only is some of it slack in its practice, but much is just too domesticated or cultivated for its own good. Now don’t get me wrong. You can write about matters domestic without being domesticated. Rhina Espaillat may be the best example of that. Her work is anything but settled down. On the other hand, outdoors work is not always necessarily fresh. Although Tim Murphy’s work almost always is.

But setting aside these masters, the direction I see in that school (if you can call such a diverse crowd of poets a school) seems sometimes too safe and sound. I’ll admit I’m searching for my own direction, but that’s neither here nor there. More digression.

Here’s an exchange that I find awfully intriguing:

Jack Foley: W.C. Williams published most of Olson’s “Projective Verse” in his Autobiography (1951). Williams was impressed with Olson’s essay. It’s interesting your seeing projective verse as an alternative to free verse--which I think is quite right. At the point of which you’re speaking, free verse was beginning to become the major way in which poetry was taught in the universities.

Michael McClure: It was the major way in which poetry was taught in universities, and young academics who were pretending that they weren’t academics were cranking it out by the mile. You can crank out miles of free verse.

Jack Foley: Yes, it’s bad prose. Broken prose. One of the things that’s been happening with the New Formalism is that its practitioners tend to talk about free verse versus formal verse. Sometimes you write in one, they say, sometimes you write in another, as in the case of Thom Gunn or Dana Goia. But by free verse they mean something that returns to the left-hand margin. I think your version of projective verse is a wonderful response to the either/or problem postulated by the New Formalists. Projective verse allows for both within a single form.

Michael McClure: I know how to write forms. I’ve written most of them: sonnets, ballads, sestinas, villainelles, sapphics--and I love those forms. Parts of them sneak into my projective verse. I truly love them. But I believe that if you follow forms closely today it would be difficult to make poetry of significant energy. I can imagine that there are people who might be able to. But I haven’t seen it. People like Lewis Turco write books about these forms and write poems in these forms--it’s charming--but it doesn’t do much more for me other than to be a wonderful museum exhibit.

And McClure is right: it is difficult to make poetry of significant energy following form. But not impossible. Some have done it in their way. Although I think the examples are few and far between. I’m still looking for my own way. Because I believe the combination of form and energy can create a major blast. It’s like: Warning! Contents under Pressure!