[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[jfq at myuw.net]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Bob Grumman wrote:

>> Although with the options available to contemporary lyric poets i fail to 
>> see why one would want to remain shackled to received forms and meters.
> You don't feel a poet can work with a received form and meter once in a while 
> and at other times take advantage of the options available to contemporary 
> lyric poets?

Oh absolutely. But I think it's important to look at received form and classical scansion as a limited subset of a wider field, rather than the beginning and end of the field which is the position of a many these days.

> Also, to respond to the post of yours that asks about slam poets, I feel Bob 
> Holman has very catholic taste, and seems supportive of all forms of poetry. 
> But, as a visual poet, I sympathize with the slam poets who think of themselves 
> as a we against the them of Kooser, Bernstein and other Establishment Poets, 
> most of whom  are as biased against poetry not like theirs as the slam poets 
> you were referring to.

Absolutely. I like a lot of slam poets, Anis Mojgani and Buddy Wakefield in particular. And I definitely relate to the us vs. the them of the establishment. As a lyric/audio poet, it's tough working out a niche in a field so dominated by performance poetry on the one side and new formalism on the other. Still, what I think is a little bit limiting for the slam scene that doesn't seem to be the case with visual poets I'm familiar with, or my case hopefully, is that while politically we may see the AWP Unnofficial Stylebook as an 800 pound gorilla that the world would be better off without, I think there's an awareness that there are elements within there that are more or less aesthetically in alignment with whatever projects we're working on. Whereas in Slam there's a sort of pervasive ignorance of everything going on beyond the confines of Poetry Slam Inc., Taos, and Youth Speaks.