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

[Anny Ballardini]

I would like to underline that "volta" is the Italian term for "turn" (la
"vuelta" in Spanish) and alas it is more exotic, but it means just the same
thing.

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 5:12 PM, David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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