It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The jar, the made thing, the not-natural thing, orders the reality round it, subtracts its wildness, its will; this plain repetitive form in its too-roundedness leaves the world, in which it becomes the central form, ‘sprawling’—it masters ‘everywhere’—and at the same time the poem pushes back at and away from its own formal urge, it argues with itself, refuses to do quite what the form should, syllabically and in terms of our expectations of rhyme. Where’s the rhyme for bush? There isn’t one. Or for wilderness. The only thing that rhymes with Tennessee is Tennessee; same for hill. Rhyme, in this poem, connects air and everywhere to the word bare.
There’ll always be a dialogue, an argument, between aesthetic form and reality, between form and its content, between seminality, art, fruitfulness, and life. There’ll always be a seminal argument between forms — that’s how forms produce themselves, out of a meeting of opposites, of different things; out of form encountering form. Put two poems together and they’ll make a third:
Not Marble: a Reconstruction
A Sqezy bottle in Tennessee,
if you want permanence, will press
a dozen jars into the wilderness.
It’s bright, misspelt, unpronounceably
itself. No one loves you! I guess
there’s amour propre in a detergent not to be
called sluttish. Vulgarity
dogs marble, gildings; monuments are a mess.
Exegi this, exegi that. Let’s say
I am in love, crushed under the weight
of it or elated under the hush of it.
Let’s not just say. I actually am.
Hordes, posterities, judges vainly cram
the space my love and I left yesterday.
Litter-ature! Litter is even brighter than, more powerful than, more enduring than art, and ‘if you want permanence,’ Edwin Morgan says in this 1987 poem, it’ll last. But the poem, absolutely about contemporary forms, unites Stevens and Shakespeare then digs back through the landfill past them both to Shakespeare’s original source for Sonnet 55, Horace’s Odes: exegi monumentum aere perennius: I have raised a monument more permanent than bronze. So what? says Morgan, intent on pushing past the gesture, the ‘just saying’ of words: ‘Let’s not just say. I actually am.’ Morgan revels in the space, the not-marble, the nothing-but-air left by the lovers, into which the future can rush, fill if it likes, because this form, made from nothing-but-air, in being so permeable, is impermeable, the lovers being gone. And the loveliness of the rhyming somersault in Morgan’s sonnet, crushed under the weight of it or elated under the hush of it, bowls him over and we’re back to lightness versus weight again, the relationships between weight, lightness of touch, space, and air.
It’s about the connecting force from form to form. It’s the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It’s the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental. Like a people’s songs will tell you about the heart and the aspirations of that people, like their language and their use of it will tell you what their concerns are, material and metaphysical, their artforms will tell you everything about where they live and the shape they’re in.
For those in the business of making aesthetic forms, the god-business, the business of calibration, the questions and complications of aesthetic presence and absence, instinct and craft, are complex ones riddled with hubris, humility, hope, respect. ‘It will be a great miracle to make a painted man a real one,’ as Michelangelo (translated by Christopher Ryan) wrote in one of his poems; there’s a story about him hitting one of his just-finished statues and yelling, furious, ‘Speak, why don’t you?’ To cut this urge down to size, here’s the start of another of his sonnets: ‘The greatest artist does not have any concept which a single piece of marble does not itself contain within its excess, though only a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.’ Woolf suggested some similar crucial understanding between thought, essence, reality, and form when she wrote about ‘the born writer’s gift of being in touch with the thing itself and not with the outer husks of words.’ Let’s not just say. I actually am.
We make form and form makes us. Form can gladden us, tease and worry and madden us, like it does in Ciaran Carson’s description of the art of storytelling, near the beginning of his 1999 work, Fishing for Amber:
Or sometimes, plagued by his children for yet another story, my father would appear to yield, and begin, It was a stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, and the Captain and his sailors were seated around the fire. Suddenly, one of the sailors said, Tell us a story, Captain. And the Captain began, It was a stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, and the Captain and his sailors were seated around the fire. Suddenly, one of the sailors said, Tell us a story, Captain. And the Captain began, It was a stormy night in the Bay of Biscay, and the Captain and his sailors were seated around the fire. Suddenly, one of the sailors said—
Carson is always asking questions of form, with everything he writes. His novels are collections of stories; his realities are all fiction-driven, his fictions and his poetry are as attached to reality and politics as it’s possible for anything to be. His forms are creative fusions that stir up the possibilities of form. Here it’s as if he’s found the essence of form itself — it can generate dimensionality out of nothing, out of repetition, out of fusion, even out of its own barrenness like Stevens’s jarring jar. It sorts the shape from the shapeless — not that the shapeless doesn’t have form too, it does, because nothing doesn’t. Even formlessness has form.
And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left — say we lost everything — we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it. I placed a jar in Tennessee. Once we know it, we’ll never not know it. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. They always will. Rhythm itself is a kind of form and, regardless of whether it’s poetry or prose, it becomes a kind of dwelling place for us.
In its apparent fixity, form is all about change. In its fixity, form is all about the relationship of change to continuance, even when the continuance is itself precarious — here, for instance, this fragility and its opposite sureness are evident in the form, the diminishing line-length, and the thematic preoccupation of Wisława Szymborska’s six-line poem (translated by Cavanagh and Bara´nczak), called, simply, Vermeer:
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.