Predetermined Avant-Garde Forms

Mark Wallace, An Exaltation of Forms.

This article is pretty short, and highlights 5 poets who have come up with forms for their poems-- the poems, perhaps, have created the forms (in some cases). Says Wallace:

...The goal of poetry was not to control experience by distancing oneself from it through formal devices, but to engage experience more openly and directly. Rather than seeing form as something that existed prior to the poem, such poets believed that shifts and disruptions of the moment of composition should determine form.

...That is, predetermined self-created forms allow writers to reveal their skepticism about the notion that any single form, or even group of forms, can offer a final solution to the problem of form in poetry, while making it clear that they understand that language structures exist prior to the act of composition.

Writers profiled: Jackson Mac Low, with one of his forties (I've read some of these but don't really get what he's doing with the form-- it's being ordered, somehow, or ordering, but I don't quite get the significance), Joan Retallack's AID/I/SAPPEARANCE (which seemed pretty good as a conceptual idea, but after the first rotation is kind of dull), Forrest Gander (trying to make his poems look like rocks or something, I don't know), Dan Zimmerman (awesome, more on him in a sec), and Tina Darragh, who models her text after an Ames distorted room on a dictionary page-- getting at, I guess, the recognition that must accompany reading? Making the reader aware of their own [active] participation?

So Dan Zimmerman is working with anagrams-- he starts with 4 words, such as

SKIN

WINE

ALTO

NOON

then finds words in them and their letters and composes a poem. I enjoyed his poems-- they reminded me of Jackson Mac Low's vocabularies or Gathas -- but more "structured" in that they were put together to make a poem, not just written down in a way that resists linear reading.

no lie is not known,

so on, like a non-twin,

I, a known stone lion,

now link one to a sin.

a silken notion now,

no lotion, a new skin,

a tension low on ink,

no oil in a news knot.

I skin no town alone,

know no one in a list.

I ink a sonnet, no owl,

ink sown onto a line,

a sonnet Loki won in.

I like that this is both a commentary on language's innerlinkings and doing its own thing-- I think I might try this, as Zimmerman says people will, get bit by the bug.