Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Finch, Annie. The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 178 pages. ISBN 0-472-06895-4, paperback £34.50/$49.50.
Reviewed by
Northwestern State University
Free verse, with no rhyme scheme or metrical pattern, has been the dominant mode of American poetry for the past century. Somehow, the concept of a verse free from any rules or limitations became conflated with the notion of freedom from governmental tyranny, reaching absurd heights during the postmodern “culture wars.” At one point, poet Robert Bly asserted that “the rhymed metered poem is, in our consciousness, so tied to the feudal stratified society of England that such a metered poem refuses to merge well with the content of American experience. We therefore have no choice but to write free verse.”
Young poets coming of age in the decades of the sixties, seventies, and eighties had to keep their love of sound in poetry closeted. Although rhyme and meter lived on in the rock song lyrics which can sometimes seem more vital than much of the poetry of the period, free verse was in and formal verse out in academic circles, and to publish a poem in “traditional” form was to risk being branded a right-wing political conservative.
That this attitude changed in the last decade of the twentieth century, and that New Formalism became the most powerful and cohesive literary movement of the era, can be credited in large part to the two leading New Formalist poet/critics, Dana Gioia and Annie Finch. While Gioia has stressed the populist appeal of rhymed and metered verse, Finch has approached the same subject from a mythic and multicultural perspective. Combining her pagan, goddess-oriented spiritual beliefs with Jungian depth psychology and a solid grounding in postmodern literary theory, she makes a convincing argument for both the timelessness and timeliness of formal verse.
Finch defines “formal” poetry broadly to include the repetition of any linguistic element, from vowel and/or consonant sounds through words or phrases, rhythmical patterns, larger structures such as stanzas, and even procedural processes. In so doing she builds a bridge between New Formalist poets writing sonnets or villanelles with a contemporary “edge” and experimental poets such as Lynn Hejinian, whose “My Life” comprises forty-five prose paragraphs of forty-five sentences each, or Joan Retallack, who jettisons every letter of the alphabet except “y” and “o” as she proceeds through one poem. Embracing the oral and folk poetic traditions and multicultural literature as well as American “academic” poetry, Finch refutes those who would argue for free verse as the only legitimate mode. She further reminds us that patterned sound in poetry appeals sensuously to the body even before a poem’s content makes its appeal to the rational mind. Traditional meter, argues Finch, anticipates the postmodern emphasis on the reader as co-creator of poetic meaning, “because a good metrical poem shimmers rhythmically on the page until the reader’s ear and/or mouth complete it.” Meter and other formal patternings also serve to foreground the materiality of language and to defamiliarize the referentiality of words—strategies that formal verse thus shares with its seeming opposite, postmodern experimental poetics.
Not experimental poetics, but the ubiquitous anecdotal free-verse poem masquerading as “sincere” and “natural” expression, is what Finch takes aim at in this collection. She argues that the post-Romantic legacy of an ego-centered poet expressing highlights gleaned from his individual experience, forever seeking to transcend the limitations on his art or behavior or consciousness, has caused us to devalue the great majority of poems written by women. That we cringe at the sentimental lyrics of a nineteenth-century “poetess” such as Alice Cary or Frances S. Osgood is because we fail to see that their poetic strategies anticipate those of the twenty-first century. According to Finch, such “poetess” poems replace the central lyric self with “diffuse lyric subjectivity,” take up communal experiences rather than individual ones, honor the separateness of nature rather than seeking to metaphorize it, and adopt a “self-consciously artificial aesthetic” rather than seeking to appear natural and transparent. Claiming that both the personal and collective unconscious influence the choice of metrical possibilities and that specific meters become imbued with cultural associations, Finch uncovers the presence of hidden triple meters, particularly dactylic rhythms, in traditional “poetess” poetry as well as in passages of free verse written by more recent women poets. For Finch, dactylic rhythms carry nonverbal connotations of the unconscious, the body, feminine power, and nature’s energy—particularly in opposition to the connotations of patriarchal power embodied in iambic pentameter, the dominant meter of traditional English-language poetry.
While Finch freely admits that she is generating a critical context within which her own poems can be read and understood, she is by no means pursuing a narrow or selfish interest area in this collection of essays. In critiquing “our era’s idiosyncratic emphasis on originality and progress as the fundamental poetic values,” she helps us to see how the values of community and sustainability have been repressed in our culture as well as in our poetics. Reconnecting with poetic form, she believes, can help us reconnect with nature itself, before it is too late.
One could quibble with a few things in this book, but not much. Finch can oversimplify, to the point of inaccuracy, some of Julian Jaynes’s ideas about poetry, music, and brain laterality—but she is writing for a literary audience, not a scientific one. When she scans “dactylic” passages, they are often so peppered with extra syllables and trochaic substitutions that the examples detract from, rather than support, her claims—and yet, one cannot fail to see that there is something wild and unique about such non-iambic rhythms. Perhaps it is just that our metrical definitions, borrowed from duration-based Greek prosody and imposed upon stress-based English poems, are not nuanced or sophisticated enough to capture exactly what those rhythms are. And a Bibliography section, compiling the many books and articles cited by Finch with specific publication data that could help the reader locate them, would have been useful—but that may have been the publisher’s cost-based decision, not the author’s. This is a brilliant book by an important contemporary theorist, written in an elegant and accessible style, and it deserves to be read by everyone who still cares about poetry in our decidedly non-poetic age.