Among the many kinds of poetic form are those that realize themselves in stasis (achieved by motion) and those that identify their shape, their intelligibility through motion, as motion. Sonnets, villanelles are inventions like triangles (these may be discoveries) and their use is to cause “nature” to find its form only if it can do so in arbitrary human terms. There is the famous possibility that internal, organic form and imposed external form may on splendid occasions complement each other as in a single necessity. But arbitrary forms please us even when they are interposed and impositional because they reassure us that we can repress nature, our own natures, and achieve sufficient expression with no more than trifling threat, or we can take delight that we, mere human beings, have devised systems nature (or energy) is clearly, truly, abundantly released through. The danger is that arbitrary forms may be boringly clever compensations for a lack of native force, boxes to be filled with crushed material, boxes which may be taken to exhaust the unlimited existences inventive prosody can find to station the arbitrary in the work of art.
There are gestural and figural forms, too, internal assimilations that are narratives shaping transactions. I’ve chosen a short poem of mine to show how the figure of winding can suggest the manifold accuracy by which a brook or stream summarizes the meteorological action of whole terrains, so that wherever there are hills and valleys one can confidently look to find the winding of this dragon of assimilation.
Serpent Country
Rolled off a side of mountains or
hills, bottomed
out in flatland but getting
away, winding,
will be found a
bright snake—brook, stream, or river, or,
in sparest gatherings,
a wash of stones or a green
streak of chaparral across sand.
The figures, though, in this poem are controlled by other progressions, and these progressions are the real form of the poem. In one motion, the figure enlarges from brook to stream to river, but then the figure disappears till the only “stream” in the landscape is a trace of green in the brush where an underground stream once briefly moved. The form of the poem is the motion from the indelible river to the nearly vanished green. It is a figure of disappearing. That is one kind of internal form. It allows to nature full presence and action, it excludes nothing a priori and imposes nothing. It discovers within. It uses human faculties to imagine means, analogies to simplify so much material, to derive from the broad sweep of action the accurate figure and the ineluctable, suitable form of motion.
“Inside Out” first appeared in Epoch 33, no. I (1983): 38-39. Reprinted in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, ed. David Lehman (New York: Collier Books, 1987).