[New-Poetry] 'The turn' has its own blog

[David Graham]

This appears to be a wonderful web site:  thanks for flagging it.   
I've been meaning to get ahold of the associated book (*Structure &  
Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns*) for a while now.   So far I've only  
browsed a bit on the blog, but Michael Theune looks to be hitting the  
right notes, from my vantage point.  I very much like his essay on  
"The Structure-Form Disctinction," for instance, and note that he  
alludes to Ellen Bryant Voigt's wonderful essay "The Flexible Lyric,"  
in her book of the same title--one of the best books on poetry I've  
read in the last decade.

I suppose that "the leap" would be one sub-category of Turn, in  
Theune's taxonomy.  What's valuable about what he's up to is in  
creating a category for a crucial element of poetry (structural as  
opposed to formal) that's been lacking a convenient label, and thus  
is often neglected or misunderstood.  As I understand it so far, the  
Turn is not a single poetic move but a constellation of possible  
structural moves.  Thus, for example, the sonnet's volta is only one  
brand of Turn.

In my own teaching I've usually described such turns as aspects of a  
poem's dramatic shape.  (Every good poem's good to the degree it's  
dramatic, said Frost.)  It's always seemed to me that the lyric  
equivalent of tension or conflict in fiction (with associated  
resolution) is what Theune calls the Turn.  Since lyrics don't  
require narrative but do require some shapeliness, I've been looking  
for some handy way of describing the lyric equivalent to a story's  
conflict/crisis/resolution.

In order to create a satisfying closure, and indeed a sense of poem- 
ness, poets instinctively reach for dramatic reversals, shifts of  
scale (now/then; big/small; ordinary/profound; etc.), irony &  
paradox. and so forth.  It seems notable that such moves are not  
imposed from some higher authority, but are instinctive.  They're  
what most readers want and expect; we're not just fiddling with  
terminology here, then, but tapping into something primal about poetics.

So as I understand things, Theune is looking for a way to make such  
primal intutions explicit, and thus helpful both pedagogically and  
critically.

Here's an excerpt from Theune's essay in which he's discussing the  
value of taxonomy (Bob G please note!)--

"One of the main reasons we don’t acknowledge the ubiquitous turn as  
fully as we should is the simple fact that we don’t have a more  
encompassing, generally accepted term for it.  This is no small  
matter.  Terms are important; they are the markers of and signposts  
for our attentiveness.  The term form encourages attention to aspects  
of the poem including meter, rhythm, and rhyme; content asks us to  
consider more carefully what a poem is about; syntax turns our  
attention to the role of sentence structure in a poem’s meaning- 
making pattern.  The term turn is inadequate; because of the turn’s  
strong associations with the sonnet, turn indicates one part of a  
poem’s, or rather just a sonnet’s, formal concerns—turn is just one  
more item on par with the facts that the sonnet is fourteen lines  
long, written in iambic pentameter, in possession of a particular  
rhyme scheme, and so on.  Thus, we need a larger, more encompassing  
term to mark the presence of the turn in poetry.

The most appropriate term available is structure, the term most often  
used by the few commentators—among them: Randall Jarrell, Ellen  
Bryant Voigt, and Stephen Dobyns [in “Writing the Reader’s Life,”  
from Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (New York: St.  
Martin’s, 1996), 35-52]—who have attempted to significantly  
differentiate between structure and form.  However, the term  
structure also entails many difficulties.  It is somewhat confusing,  
because generally often is considered synonymous with form.  For  
example, if in a handbook of poetry there is a chapter called  
“Structures of Poetry,” that chapter will very likely be about forms:  
villanelles, sestinas, ghazals, pantoums, blank verse."

http://structureandsurprise.wordpress.com/theory-criticism/the- 
structure-form-distinction/

Later on in the essay, Theune offers his own taxonomic terms, which  
unfortunately strike me as unlikely to catch on, though the  
categories he identifies seem real.   Anyway, the whole essay is  
worth pondering; and, I presume, so is his book.


========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================




On Apr 9, 2009, at 10:13 AM, <jforjames at aol.com> <jforjames at aol.com>  
wrote:

> Includes a taxonomy of types of turns...
>
> http://structureandsurprise.wordpress.com/
>
> What ever happened to 'the leap' in poetry?
> Finnegan
>
> Get the scoop on the live music scene in your area and hit a show  
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