'Free
Verse' and Punctuation
I have some beef with the
popularity of so-called ‘free verse’ poetry. Whether that beef lies more with
the naivety of its practitioners or with the form itself, I am undecided.
Either way, the central problem is that its existence and popularity is due, in
part, to something of a misnomer, and the result is that whole swaths of poets,
new and experienced, stymie their own creativity through its overuse. For that
matter, poetry as a species of art has suffered due to its overuse.
For the poets I have in
mind, punctuation amounts to little more than a necessary evil, and its sparse
appearance in poetry today, excluding maybe the comma, attests to poet’s
indifference toward or outright dislike for it. Along with traditional forms,
the presence of punctuation within the poem is believed to handcuff the variety
and liberality (i.e. the free expression of creativity) of both the artist and
the interpreter. Forget the use of periods and semicolons, they say;
punctuation in free verse poetry carries the same burdens as traditional forms.
When we (the free verse poets) do use punctuation, it’s only the comma, and
even that we only do so reluctantly—knowing that without it the reader gets
bogged down. The overuse of the comma, or even the mere presence of a period or
a question mark, drags the skeleton out of the dirty, old coffin to put on
display. Leave tradition where it belongs: dead and in the ground with Tennyson
and Byron.
Poets who consciously
operate with this mindset are the ones I have in mind. They are like that
well-meaning atheist freshman sitting in the front row of her first 101
religion class: eager to reject the Judeo-Christian morals and values of her
upbringing without realizing that the rejection itself is only possible, is in
fact the manifestation of, the emphasis of particular aspects of those morals
and values in the absence of all of the others. She hasn’t quite figured out
yet that ‘you shouldn’t sleep around if you’re in a committed relationship’ is
the 21st century American version of ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s
wife’. Just like the contemporary poet, she hasn’t quite realized that while
her criticisms may be merited, they are incomplete.
I think it’s important to
pause and point out that this thought process is rare. Thought processes in
humans are rare in general and particularly rare in poets—who believe, rightly,
that thoughts get in the way of words. The poets I’ve known (not that there are
many in rural PA) rarely think about what they're doing at all. They just
borrow the methods of their predecessors, unconscious of their own aesthetic.
But even if ignorance is bliss, it is still optional. Two minutes into e.e.
cummings, for example, is all it takes to recognize that he is cognizant of
what he’s doing, and, moreover, part of what’s impressive about cummings’
writing is his cognizance. The same is true of, say, W.B. Yeat’s use of form.
And yet, your average contemporary ‘it was weird watching my mom come to
realize that she is a lesbian’ poet isn’t thinking like this--or perhaps at
all. With a flourish of unconscious irony, she conforms to the nonconformists’
nonconformity.
I think part of the problem
is that for today’s poets, the rejection of form—or punctuation in our case—is,
or at its advent appeared to be, the final poetic achievement. The Form of the
forms was not the Good—as Plato would have it—but the formless. The best
punctuation was no punctuation, or the absolute minimum. When meaning is caged
in by commas, periods, and question marks, interpretation is susceptible to
old, overused, and oppressive tropes and sentence structures. Poetic invention
itself is limited. The reduction of poetry to its minimal symbols (i.e. letters
and line breaks) omits tradition’s prescriptivist and formalist tendencies. You
can’t tell me where to end a sentence or a clause any more than you can tell me
when to emphasize a syllable—not, anyway, without restricting my creative
freedom. 'Free verse' begins to dominate the poetical landscape and, in almost
indecipherable increments, each generation of ‘free verse’ poets grows less and
less aware of why they even use it.
Somewhere in that history the period dies alongside iambic pentameter because both are examples of creative limitation. New doorways of poetical achievement can’t be attained if we’re imprisoned by an old way of speaking. We know now, or Wittgenstein has taught us, that the limitations of structural and verbal prescriptivism betray a naive view of language. Every 7th grade English grammarian teaches his students nothing about the English language; he only barks on about English convention.
Somewhere in that history the period dies alongside iambic pentameter because both are examples of creative limitation. New doorways of poetical achievement can’t be attained if we’re imprisoned by an old way of speaking. We know now, or Wittgenstein has taught us, that the limitations of structural and verbal prescriptivism betray a naive view of language. Every 7th grade English grammarian teaches his students nothing about the English language; he only barks on about English convention.
Ultimately, I think that
the ‘free verse’ usurpation of traditional forms and punctuation in English
poetry was fundamentally insightful, if still fundamentally naive. Though it’s
true that prescriptivist and formalist tendencies in early poetry ‘held poetry
back’, so to say; it’s equally true that the neglect of punctuation or form, or
both, is itself demonstrably not free.
At bottom, the question we
are asking is whether free verse can endure the limitations of punctuation
and/or form without sacrificing its creative options. Is free verse actually
imprisoned when its words come up against the prison bars of a question mark or
a comma? Do form and punctuation hinder poesis?
This is a lot like asking
why the Sistine Chapel ceiling should be limited to the dimensions of the
Sistine Chapel building. It’s even more like asking why a triangle must be
limited to having only three sides: the answer, put simply, is that a thing is
only what it is precisely because of its limitations. The irony (or tragedy, if
you prefer) of the popularity of 'free verse' poetry is that it isn’t free
verse at all. It isn’t being what it supposedly is. It’s a square posing as a
triangle: valuable in its own right but not a triangle. It's a misnomer that’s
widely used for, as far as I can tell, one of three reason: 1) it’s easier to
write and to learn how to write, 2) it fosters creative freedom, and 3),
everybody else is doing it. The third in that list is especially true. Poetical
debutants write free verse for the same reason a child picks his dad’s favorite
basketball team. It’s all he knows. But by denying poets the freedom of
including— at random, even— an instance of punctuational insight, a line of
iambic pentameter, or even some as-of-yet-undiscovered syntactic or linguistic
limitation, free verse poetry is only posing as free verse.
Okay fine, but this is just
mincing words; free verse doesn’t mean free verse. So what? Didn’t we already
establish that Webster’s prescriptivism betrays a naive view of language? Why
apply it now? The meaning of a word, we remember, is its use. I agree. If the
use of the moniker ‘free verse’ merely designated a type poetry that utilizes
line breaks and sparse punctuation—or even arbitrary line breaks and excessive
punctuation—then I would be content with this use. But this isn’t the use: it’s
used, especially by new poets, to designate that form of poetry which is
non-traditional, anti-form, and contra-conventional. Poets sitting in MLA
seminars around the country consider free verse the formless, untethered
poetical form, and often imagine this ‘fact’ a good enough reason to neglect
the poetry of the predecessors of ‘free verse’ like Shakespeare and Byron.
What then, should the idea
be to create a form that omits all forms and punctuation? This, like before, is
a lot like saying that we should remove the Sistine Chapel building to make
room for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It’s probably not the best idea. You can't
have a recognizable version of the one without the other. Too many of our
artists fail to realize that a necessary condition of freedom is the access to
limitation— a fact as true of life as it is of poetry. If the final poetical
achievement lies with providing the poet with every creative option, limitation
must be one of those options.
Take the ironic existence
of line breaks so common to free verse poetry today. Their use betrays exactly
the type of naivety I have in mind. Why bother having line breaks if not to
force the reader to pause, however briefly, before moving to the next line?
Aren’t line breaks vestiges of something older and, perhaps, wiser— the idea
that the full length of the page doesn’t lend itself to emphasis in the way
that concision lends itself to emphasis? Aren’t line breaks limitations that
serve a function in the same way that, say, the limitations of the sonnet serve
a function?
For that matter, even the
space placed between two individual words is, as Koine Greek shows, itself a
choice (however unconscious) that forces the poet and the interpreter into a
way of writing and reading that is itself ‘conventional’ to the way of writing
the English language. To the poet, the purpose of a space’s inclusion between
two words has an equal, if opposing, function to its absence between two words:
the former is clarity and ease and the latter is obfuscation and difficulty.
Don’t we already know that both can serve the poet?
In other words, 'free
verse' poetry cherry-picks line breaks and the occasional piece of punctuation
from tradition and naively imagines itself free from that tradition. This is
actual, empirical, anachronistic nonsense. Free verse isn’t antithetical to
tradition or even meta-traditional; it’s entire identity is contingent on the
tradition that started its line breaking, punctuation-having limitations. Free
verse isn’t non-traditional: it’s piecemeal tradition.
What’s more, the bulk of
today’s poetical debutantes borrow this artistic framework unconsciously and
try to express new dimensions of poetical insight while enduring,
unconsciously, the very creative limitations they believe to be freeing. Free
verse is a linguistic prison so obscure and complete that its practitioners
grimace in disgust or confusion at the work of, say, John Keats in the same
breath that they praise the work of Charles Bukowski. And yet, both are
geniuses precisely because they knew what they were doing with the given
limitations they set themselves.
But wait, isn’t all this blather
little more than a defense of avant garde poetry over and against
free verse poetry? Not really. While avant garde poets dabble
more in what 'free verse' might mean more if we took its definition more
literally, there’s a very real sense in which the avant garde
writer ignores, if not altogether avoids, traditional poetry, too. To be and to
revel in the unorthodox or radical means to neglect or, more accurately, to
reject that which is orthodox and traditional. But what I’m suggesting is
subtler than free verse and avant garde; what I’m suggesting is
something closer to what T.S. Eliot says about the total conversation of art
occurring over time: that instead of rejecting orthodoxy, we create a
neo-orthodoxy through new combinations of orthodoxy.
Like Eliot, I do not
believe that poetry, or any art, occurs in a vacuum. The comma, too, we must
remember, was an invention. The old voices and methods sneak their way into the
new voices and methods (lousy or masterful) simply by virtue of having existed.
The words, syntax, punctuation, and forms poets use (or neglect) today are
older than the poets themselves, and it’s the neo-combinations (or neo-neglect)
of those things which are overused and worn out that generate something new.
Specifically, our up-and-coming poets could find the addition, even aggressive
addition, of punctuation to their poetry freeing. No more of this ‘necessary
evil’ nonsense. No more line breaking to let the reader catch their breath;
consider the advantages of drowning. Turn punctuation and form from a necessary
evil into an exercise in poetical neo-orthodoxy.
Of course, none of what I
have to say here would matter if free verse poetry were only a subgenre of
poetry. It would amount to little more than a misnomer practiced by a few, and
what poetical insights that group had would be cherished for their own sake.
But a misnomer practiced by the majority and, moreover, adopted by nearly every
novice poet, generates legions of poets using squares when they think they’re
using triangles. It creates legions of poets wholly and unequivocally naive to
the one-dimensionality of their own aesthetic.
But I want more from
poetry. Every poet who deserves the name wants more. Part of what it means to
be a poet is to obsessively search out the as-of-yet undiscovered openings into
reality. Poetic achievement amounts to turning the doorknob of words and having
to brace from the brightness of the new sun waiting on the other side. Free
verse helps and has helped us do this for a century now; but it is time to move
onto new doorknobs and other suns.
- Kevin Hughes’s poetry and essays explore the cross-pollination of the subjects he teaches in college: English, philosophy, and religion. He holds an M.A. in philosophy and religion from The University of Pennsylvania and lives in East Earl with his wife and three children. Contact: kdhughesmail3@gmail.com
- Kevin Hughes’s poetry and essays explore the cross-pollination of the subjects he teaches in college: English, philosophy, and religion. He holds an M.A. in philosophy and religion from The University of Pennsylvania and lives in East Earl with his wife and three children. Contact: kdhughesmail3@gmail.com
Copyright©2017 Kevin
Hughes – All Rights Reserved
