Open forms

Open form: I found myself a little at sea, which certainly clarifies the uses of traditional forms – there may be a limit to what you can do with a sestina, but that limit can be fruitful.  I sought a theme, as Yeats has it: the wide open nature of the open form – everything else, as it is – in suggesting everything, suggests nothing as well.  On the other hand, there are, as is pointed out, resonant engagements with the fragmentary remains of form in the anthologised works.   The example of the rag and bone shop is apposite; a form-to-function thing, admirable.  Because he hasn’t entirely deserted traditional scaffoldings, but here they are adapted, a bit shopworn, metre and stanzas but stretched, an engagement in form with questions of form. 


The anthologized poems are, in fact, a serious selection, as though this sort of engagement, this interrogation of the structure of the poem, proceeds in tandem with wider interrogations, large themes. 
It is interesting that so many of the North American poets here write poems addressed directly to America.  Why does an open form lend itself to such address?  Or maybe, why don't more traditional forms?  Why America? Because America represents a break with the old order?  I can't, in all seriousness, address myself to the aul' sod in these terms.  I suppose a long disturbing history of personification to some violent end makes one a little dubious about that sort of formatting. But I thought in the light of these models and that of the national circumstance, that this week’s endeavour should at least skirt around the serious.

And in my mind was another of Wallace Stevens' poems, which fits the brief – a serious piece of work about empty rituals, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’ In terms of form, I like Stevens' recourse to rhyme towards the end (in the ‘dead’ section of the poem).  Ice-creams - I think you can barely use the word, really, without invoking the Stevens' poem - presidents and the shockingly supine, albeit anxious, response of the Irish public to our current travails: these blended.  Waiting for a bus suggested itself, the powerlessness of the public transport user.   Here’s the current draft, still a long way from anything it should be:

The Irish for Ice-Cream

Nine presidents on: the office seems exhausted as the woman at the bus stop who would trade her gas bill for a Cornetto.

Soon it’ll rain.  Our electoral errand melts from memory: ice-creamish, preceding 

a sugar crash.

Nauseous, we’re waiting at this bus stop and all that’s passed has been an ice-cream van on its way home from the Park. 

There’s any number of us waiting, we are exhaling visible air while the ice-cream van still jangles though it’s done with sales for today.

Here’s the rain, sooner than any transport.  We forget Magnums, we forget Orange Splits, waiting in wet furrows for the oncoming

bus.