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Going Formal

Tradition for women artists is a complicated thing. The great Adrienne Rich, turning her back on the formal poetry of her youth, famously said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And, true, it is hard to feel deeply connected to forms and conventions that seem to reek of the priviledge of educated white men of the owning class.

Yet few would argue that her youthful training in rhyme and meter gave Rich some of the sinewy power she so readily employs today. Growing up in the next poetic generation, I begged my graduate school professors to teach me form, but they told me it was outmoded. Told me to get over it.

But tradition has its uses. Although it commonly implies restriction, lack of innovation, stick-in-the-mudness, the word itself is really wilder than that. From trans- (over) and tradere (give), tradition means more than just respecting what’s handed down from the past. It also means giving oneself over, giving up the self to other powers—as an oracle might do, or an ecstatic maenad.

Poetry in strict meter and rhyme is typically called formal poetry. “Formal”: a ballgown and tuxedo come to mind, attire intended to impress, uncomfortable and constricting. Although it sounds classy, but the word actually derives from a proletarian source, for in Latin it described the molds used by potters and other artisans in producing wares for the market. The etymologies of other words we use of such work are similarly instructive: conventional, from words that mean “to come together” and related to both coven and convent; and conservative, a word that merely means “to keep watch together,” but one that’s come to imply guarding the watchtowers against the hordes of threatening barbarians.

Of the lot, I like “traditional” best, because it can also be used to describe an approach to the old religions of the goddess. But as Adrienne Rich warned, trying to be a traditional artist is not easy for a woman, for the tradition itself is built upon excluding women. I can write in blank verse, for instance, but I don’t want to: it sounds too much like Shakespeare, with all the baggage that implies. But forms adopted and adapted from other cultures are less fraught. The poem “Caer’s Song to Her Beloved,” for instance, is a katuata, a Japanese form that I find quite appealing. In its original, it was syllabic (based in syllable count); pure syllabic poetry is difficult to sustain in English, with is accentual orientation. But the shape of the katuata is exciting to employ. It requires that one ask a question in the first line, then provide two images that obliquely answer the question—answer it emotionally rather than logically. I wrote this poem using dream images, which seemed to satisfy the demand for a nonlinear response; when it was finished, I decided to name it for the swan-goddess Caer, said to have sung such beautiful lyrics that she put people to sleep for three days and three nights (a suitable matron goddess for a dream-based poem).

Here is another katuata, from a manuscript of poems in different women’s voices on which I am working:

Before Dawn, Before Spring

(Lady Tai-Ken, Japan, 1190)

Is all the earth dead?

Dawn comes earlier each day.

I have been dreaming of crows.

What do the crows say?

There is a gate at the end

of the path; it is shut tight.

Who can open it?

There was a man I loved once.

When he died, the lock rusted.

Has no one come in?

Do I hear a bamboo flute?

Or is it just the spring wind?

What does the wind say?

Light pearls the gate. The crows call.

Oh, the perfume of flowers—

Employing traditions other than those common to English poetry provides a spine, a structure, that is lacking in entirely free verse. Supported by this spine, this structure, we can “give over” ourselves to inner meanings we might not have otherwise discovered.