Years ago, my professor and mentor Milton Kessler told me that if I did not want to be a professor myself, I should stop taking workshops. He felt that any more workshops would, “Kill my voice.” At the time I knew as much as anyone in their mid-twenties knows about what they want to be for the rest of their lives. I did not think I wanted to be a professor. I took his advice and moved on to a myriad of odd jobs in order to support my habit – writing.
After one reading, at New York City’s ABC No Rio, where I stood in the middle of the room seemingly quietly and read the poem in my shaking hand — hoping people would hear the words over the din of reaction produced by the woman I followed — a woman who threw herself at the walls of the room as she recited random words, it became clear to me that my place was in my home, honing my work and whittling away at my words. There were no public ceremonies when I ceremoniously took my work and went underground. It was obvious to me academics thought I was avant-garde, and avant-gardes thought I was academic. There was no box or label that my work fit neatly into.
In the eighties and nineties when I was studying and workshopping, free verse was a popular form of expression, and I wanted to find a way to use it to make my poetry accessible to any reader. I enjoy the sound of words playing off each other, making music out of thought. I use line breaks in place of punctuation, try to manipulate the twists and turns of colloquial speech, in the hopes that if you see a poem written by me, you will instantly recognize it as mine.
After a very long break from workshopping and the academic literary world, I went to a writers' conference, last August. One day I found myself sitting across the table at lunch having a conversation with a young woman who said to me, “There is no poetry without form.” I asked her politely (at least, I thought it was politely), “Then how do you feel about the Beats, the Dadaists, the Futurists, or even Gertrude Stein?” She turned away from me, either because I was challenging her belief or because she found my opinions ridiculous.
At another conference, I heard someone refer to Kerouac in a dismissive way. I paraphrase here because I can’t quite recall the exact words, but it was said in a jesting way, with Kerouac the butt of the joke, “…like when a teenager first finds Kerouac.” I first found Kerouac, the Beats in general, in a graduate class taught by Professor Jerome Rothenberg. I left that class feeling as if Jack Kerouac’s, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" had given me an invisible permission slip to write anything, in any way I wanted.
As I have begun to reenter the world of the workshop through writing conferences, I have found that there are people who seem to be very closely tied to the idea that poetry must have form. On a packet of my work that I turned in to one of these conference workshops, one of the comments that came back to me was that the person giving me feedback on my work now refers to my writing as the “Ramer Form.” This was a compliment, perhaps? I have, as I mentioned above, been working hard for many years to make my poetry instantly recognizable. Another person in this same workshop asked me if I was a performance poet as if that would explain the length of my work. No, I am not, although my work has been performed. It is not by any means performance poetry, as we know it. I am a poet of the page. Testimonial, long-form, free verse is my box; I don’t always fit comfortably in it, and sometimes I even break my own rules. I suppose I was surprised by this commentary because I went to this conference specifically to study with Campbell McGrath, who is well known for his long-form free verse.
These comments led me, again, to wonder what of all those poets that came before us? The Dadaist, the Futurists, Gertrude Stein, the Beats, and a myriad of other writers who worked together with musicians and painters, who fought against the establishment so that poets could have the term free verse, could play with language and form?
When form is used well, the mathematics of poetry, line, meter, beat, verse all come together, the power of that work cannot be dismissed. Theodore Roethke’s, “The Waking” is a poem I live by, exquisite in every line and repetition. Don’t we all learn by going where we have to go? If you can find your way in form, if the constrictions hold you in, swaddle your words, and add more power to your work, there is true beauty in that precision. I see a place in poetry and literature for all forms. Whether the words are tightly measured or as flowing as the brilliant twenty-three-page poem by Susan Stewart, “Channel,” that was published in the most recent issue of The Paris Review.
I do not truly have an accurate idea if poetry is turning back on itself and becoming mostly tightly configured and academic, as I only have these two conferences and a few conversations to measure by. I spend much of my time writing these days while trying to balance parenting and returning as much of my energy as I can towards my own creativity. I have heard things said like, “Long Form is hard to place,” and, ironically, a few days later been given the gift of Ross Gay’s astonishing book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Perhaps, there is no answer. The awe-inspiring book, Headwaters by Ellen Bryant Voigt uses no punctuation at all but is clearly tightly delineated by her choice of line breaks
When I was an undergraduate I had the honor of taking a few graduate level classes with Professor Jerome Rothenberg. He once invited Jackson Mac Low to participate in our session. We all waited for him patiently in the lecture hall, a space we did not usually use for class. Jackson Mac Low walked into the room picked up a microphone groan growled the words, “August Moon” into it so that the words rebounded the walls of the huge space. He then put the microphone down and left the room. He left me deer-eyed. I can still hear the tone of Jackson Mac Low’s voice and those two words today. Kerouac may now be seen as pubescent revelation, but he opened my eyes, and once eyes are opened walls can be broken. I bow to the vigorous space dash. I salute Gertrude Stein and her cubist repetitions. I feel incredibly lucky to have been exposed to the avant-garde and different literary movements and styles by Jerome Rothenberg. His classes changed my view profoundly.
Three years ago I, excitedly, bought myself a birthday gift. A CD compilation of recordings from Tennyson to Eliza Griswold called, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work 1888-2006. We listened to it on a long family drive. My son, then twelve, hearing Gertrude Stein read, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” asked me, “Mom were you inspired by her?” Well, yes child, yes I was.
To purchase any of the books,The Paris Review, or the CD mentioned above visit: http://www.barnesandnoble.com, or http://www.indiebound.org/indie-next-list, or visit your local bookstore. Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) postcard.
Poets especially when young are all too prone to take an exclusive and exclusionary position on the form versus freedom debate and other such "critical" subjects. Too avant-garde for the academics, too academic for the avant-gardists -- I think a lot of us are in that box. But maybe we should ignore the box in favor of the particular pleasures we prize. For example, the delight of Stein's "If I Told You."
Thanks for this stimulating post. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 06, 2016 at 10:39 PM
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond. I agree we should all ignore boxes and just enjoy the joy of words -- no matter what form they come to us in. Thank you for the forum. This week has been a true pleasure -- CR
Posted by: Carlie Ramer | October 07, 2016 at 09:55 AM
dallying with schooner life crafts to assemble their rescue as the wind was blowing hard that morning and sharks ambled near
Posted by: Alexander Simon | September 19, 2021 at 05:06 AM
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Posted by: Alexander Simon | September 19, 2021 at 05:06 AM