[New-Poetry] Grammatical

[David Graham]

Well, it does strike me that a rather hefty proportion of the Norton
Anthology of Poetry abides by the conventional grammatical rules.  I'm not
annoyed by Whitman or Yeats, no.  Nor, at this remove from 1914, am I very
startled or impressed by sentence fragments, lacunae, or other modernist
rule-bendings per se.

I'd say conventions are simply agreed upon ways of communication--nothing
inherently good or bad about them, except insofar as abandoning them runs
the obvious risk of miscommunication.  And clearly conventions evolve over
time.  I admit that I blink twice these days when I encounter a poem--free
verse or not--that capitalizes first letters of each line.  It stands out as
retro.

But there's always been poetic license, of course--poets bending the rules
of usage, diction, punctuation, etc.  And that's both normal and in any case
an unstoppable part of poetic development.

I am aware that my own style is, for some, hopelessly retro.  I cling to the
left-hand margin and generally don't fracture grammar, etc.  Nothing for me
either to brag or apologize about, I don't think.

In any case, as a reader I am not bothered by poets writing in nice correct
grammar, unless they're writing badly.  I'm guessing that behind Finnegan's
query is a sense that too much contemporary verse is simply dull exposition,
to his eyes.  It might be better rhythmically and otherwise if more daring,
jazzy, swifter of foot.  With that I'd probably agree.  But Dulness is also
eternal, even in heroic couplets. . . .


On 9/1/06 2:11 PM, "JforJames at aol.com" <JforJames at aol.com> wrote:

> Speaking of deploying a 'sentence fragment' in a poem, has anyone noticed
> that an annoying amount of contemporary poetry is written toward complying
> with 
> grammatical rules? I'm wondering if the number of young Creative Writing MFAs
> forced 
> (not at gunpoint, but for the tuition abatement or economic survival) into
> teaching 
> Composition courses is having the deleterious effect on some of our younger
> poets,
> making them more conservative in their employment of the language, less likely
> to bend/break the rules of proper grammar. Likely I'm imagining this, but a
> caviling
> about the use of a sentence fragment in a poem, by a poet I otherwise respect,
> prompted me to pose this question.
>  
> Finnegan



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