The meaning of form in contemporary innovative poetry

Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifi ce and Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Meddling the Medieval: Carolin

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

The Meaning

of Form in Contemporary

Innovative Poetry

Robert Sheppard

Series Editor Rachel   Blau DuPlessis

954 Anderson Hall Temple University Philadelphia ,  Pennsylvania, USA

topics in the burgeoning fi eld of 20th and 21st century poetics Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems

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The Meaning of Form

in Contemporary

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

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Department of English, History and Creative Writing,

Edge Hill University,

St Helens Road, Ormskirk, L39 4QP Lancashire , UK

I gratefully acknowledge funds from the Edge Hill University REF Development Fund which assisted in the writing of parts of this work, and for travel to conferences and talks Early thinking on formal mat-ters informed conference appearances and talks at the Universities of Amsterdam, London (Innovative Poetry Seminar), Edinburgh, Salford, Edge Hill, Northumbria, and for CONTEMPO (the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, and Brighton) ‘The Innovative Sonnet Sequence’ was the title of the annual lecture at Hay Poetry Jamboree, 2011, a playful pre-version of Chap 3 I thank the organizers of these events for encour-agement and opportunities Working notes often appeared on my blog-

zine, Pages (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I am particularly pleased to be able to republish, with permission, two pieces which were published elsewhere in earlier forms: a version of Chap

2, ‘Linguistically Wounded: The Poetical Scholarship of Veronica Forrest-

Thomson’ in ed Turley, Richard Margraf, The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, Essays and Studies 2011 Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,

for the English Association; and a version of Chap 9, ‘Stefan Themerson and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry’ in eds Blaim, Ludmiły Gruszewskiej,

and David Malcolm, Eseje o Współczesnej Poezji Brytyjskiej i Irlandzkiej ,

Volume 5: Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Ludmi,

2011

The author and publisher are also grateful for the permission to duce work from the following sources:

Atkins, Tim Collected Petrarch London: Crater, 2014 Permission

granted by Tim Atkins and The Crater Press

Bergvall, Caroline ‘Shorter Chaucer Tales’ in Meddle English Callicoon

(NY): Nightboat Books, 2011 By kind permission of Caroline Bergvall Reprinted by permission of the author and Nightboat Books

Bonney, Sean Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud London: Ukant

Publications, 2012 Permission granted by Unkant Publications

Fisher, Allen Proposals Hereford: Spanner, 2010 Permission granted

from Allen Fisher and Spanner

Forrest-Thomson, Veronica Poetic Artifi ce Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1978 Permission granted by Professor Jonathan Culler

Griffi ths, Bill eds Halsey, Alan, and Ken Edwards Collected Earlier Poems (1966–80) Hastings: Reality Street (with West House Books), 2010 Griffi ths, Bill ed Halsey, Alan Collected Poems & Sequences (1981–91)

Hastings: Reality Street, 2014 Permission granted by Reality Street and the Estate of Bill Griffi ths

Hilson, Jeff In the Assarts London: Veer Books, 2010 Permission

granted by Jeff Hilson and Veer Publications

Hughes, Peter Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets Hastings: Reality

Street, 2015 Permission granted by Peter Hughes and Reality Street

MacSweeney, Barry Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 Tarset:

Bloodaxe, 2003 By kind permission of the publisher on behalf of the Barry MacSweeney Estate

Monk, Geraldine 2003 Selected Poems Cambridge: Salt, 2003 Monk,

Geraldine Ghost & Other Sonnets Cambridge: Salt, 2008 Permission

granted by Geraldine Monk and Salt Publishing

Monk, Geraldine 2001 Noctivagations Sheffi eld: West House Books

Permission granted from Geraldine Monk and West House Books

Moure, Erín O Cadoiro Toronto: House of Anansi, copyright 2007

Reproduced with permission form House of Anansi Press, Toronto Perril, Simon Archilochus on the Moon Bristol: Shearsman, 2013

Permission granted by Simon Perril and Shearsman Books

Place, Vanessa: extract from ‘Statement of Facts’ from, Dworkin, Craig,

and Kenneth Goldsmith, Kenneth eds Against Expression: An Anthology

of Conceptual Writing Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011

Permission granted by Vanessa Place, with the approval of Northwestern University Press

Robinson, Sophie.‘Geometries’ from Hilson, Jeff ed The Reality Street Book of Sonnets Hastings: Reality Street, 2008 Permission granted by

Sophie Robinson and Reality Street

Seed, John New and Collected Poems Exeter: Shearsman, 2005.Seed, John Pictures from Mayhew Exeter: Shearsman, 2005 Seed, John That Barrikins – Pictures from Mayhew II Exeter: Shearsman, 2007 Permission

granted by John Seed and Shearsman Books

Terry, Philip Shakespeare’s Sonnets Manchester: Carcanet, 2010

Permission kindly granted by Carcanet Press Limited

Themerson, Stefan Collected Poems Amsterdam: Gaberbocchus Press,

1997 Themerson, Stefan Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry

London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1965 Permission kindly granted by the Estate of Stefan Themerson

By Rosmarie Waldrop, from BLINDSIGHT, copyright © 2003 by Rosmarie Waldrop Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp

By Rosmarie Waldrop, from CURVES TO THE APPLE, copyright ©

1993 by Rosmarie Waldrop Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp

Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifi ce and

Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative

Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter

Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure 85

Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney 101

Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms, and Palimpsest

The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual

Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith,

Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments

The Making of the Book: Bill Griffi ths and Allen Fisher 173

Geraldine Monk’s Poetics and Performance:

Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry

xi Fig 1 Sophie Robinson, ‘Geometries’ (Hilson 2008 : 352) 63

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

R Sheppard, The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative

read-‘means’ is intended to enact the supposition that if poetry does anything,

it does it chiefl y through its formal power and less through its content, though it also carries the further suggestion that form is a modality of meaning in its own right If we use the term ‘formally investigative’ of this poetry, we are also suggesting that the investigation of reality and the investigation of, experimentation with, form and forms are coterminous, equivalent, perhaps not, in the fi nal analysis, to be determined apart It should be clear—my slip from ‘form’ to ‘forms’ above hints as much—that

I am not only thinking about particular poetic forms (sonnet, villanelle) which impose their formal patterning upon semantic movement, although the sonnet will be scrutinized in the third chapter and re-visited in the fourth Yet neither is this simply an argument for free verse, whose long tradition is well-assimilated into the poetry I shall be examining; Robert Creeley’s aphorism, quoted by Charles Olson, that ‘form is never more than an extension of content’ oddly underplays form (Hoover 1994 : 614), whereas Denise Levertov’s re-phrasing of this as ‘Form is never

more than a revelation of content’ recasts the distinction in terms of post-

Coleridgean organicism, but still maintains the separation of content and

form (Hoover 1994 : 632) Fixed form or free form—open or closed—is not the issue here, and much of the poetics of contemporary poetry, even

I have to admit as a scholar of its forms, is of little help on this specifi c point, although Charles Bernstein’s affi rmation that ‘poetry is aversion

of conformity in the pursuit of new forms’ comes close (Bernstein 1992 :

2), and Clark Coolidge’s declaration, ‘I don’t want to use the word form ,

I want to use the word forms The word is plural’, may be inadvertently

prescient for my argument (Coolidge 1978 : 147) What is at stake is the agency of form: how it extends, reveals or—in my terms—enacts, enfolds, and becomes content

Before moving forward onto new theoretical ground, it is worth sidering the academic—rather than the literary—context of this critical perspective ‘Since the era of high theory in the 1980s’, writes Peter Barry summarily,

we have seen various ‘turns’, including the ‘turn’ to history … the turn

to ethics, and the turn to aesthetics Of course, all these ‘turns’ are really

re turns, and in particular they are returns of what was repressed by the two

revolutions in twentieth-century English Studies (the Cambridge-led tual revolution of the 1920s, and the Paris-led theory revolution of the 1970s) (Barry 2003 : 196)

My previous studies have demonstrated these various turns, though not

I hope in any programmatic way—the linguistic turn of Far Language

( 1999b ); the ethical turn of The Poetry of Saying : British Poetry and Its Discontents , 1950–2000 ( 2005 ); and the historical turn of When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry ( 2011a )—though throughout there has been a con-cern for poetics as a speculative writerly discourse 1 Yet at another level, I see these works forming a unity in terms of my larger project of the study

of the forms and poetics of British (and associated) writing of an garde persuasion

The aesthetic turn was announced by books such as Isobel Armstrong’s

The Radical Aesthetic ( 2000 ) and Joughin’s and Malpas’ edited

collec-tion The New Aestheticism ( 2003 ) But even as recently as 2013, Derek Attridge, in the volume Moving Words : Forms of English Poetry , was

expressing cautious optimism about the future: ‘It is perhaps too early to tell whether the current hints of a revived interest in formal matters are harbingers of a major shift, but it seems a distinct possibility’ (Attridge

2013 : 21–22) This turn accompanied a return to ‘form’ in its broadest

sense, as a corrective to readings of literature that privilege ‘content’:

‘instrumental readings’ Attridge calls them, and they derive in part from what Barry calls the second revolution, and partly from the demand for

‘relevant’ or socially comprehensible literature in schools and the academy (Attridge 2004a : 6–10) 2 The danger of such theory-driven instrumen-tal reading whose ‘signature’ is ‘reading-as-paraphrase’ is its prejudicial nature and the lack of (aesthetic) surprise in reading, as Ellen Rooney says: ‘Our arguments are familiar before they are even developed, yet they remain unpersuasive to the skeptical … because they fail to uncover for-mal features not known in advance’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 39) The text is ‘read’ before it is encountered, meshed in a grid of extra-literary concepts, and the quality of attention and nature of the aesthetic encoun-ter remain unconsidered

My own work (as poet-critic, as pedagogue of creative writing) has always foregrounded ‘form’, and as such I have some right to feel ironic toward crusading rhetoric or hushed reverent murmurings in favor of what has been second nature to my thinking for some years 3 As Attridge puts it: ‘Poets, of course, have never ceased to be interested in form’ (Attridge

2013 : 19) I have always concurred (or have since I fi rst publicly professed literary beliefs) with the Russian Formalists, in the defi nition of defamiliar-ization offered by Shklovsky, that ‘the technique of art is to make objects

“unfamiliar”, to make forms diffi cult’, where the former relies upon the latter for the purpose of ‘impart(ing) the sensation of things as they are perceived’ (Shklovsky 1965 : 12) 4 Two of the earliest infl uences upon my critical thinking (and poetics) were formalist in derivation The fi rst was

Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension ( 1978 ), with its insistence that

‘in its autonomy art both protests’ prevailing social realities, ‘and at the same time transcends them Thereby art subverts the dominant conscious-ness’ (Marcuse 1978 : 25) More epigrammatically: ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative: things must change’ (Marcuse 1978 : 13) Later, through this, I accessed Adorno’s monumental negative ver-

sion of the imperative, in Aesthetic Theory (1970), in which the spirit of

aesthetic form carries a tortured utopian critique, even if the matter of

a particular artwork is tainted by history’s evils and society’s inequities, and even if it is not ‘The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in art-works as immanent problems of form’, as Adorno says (Adorno 2002 : 6), although he is careful to state that ‘formal elements are not facilely inter-pretable in political terms’, that is as direct content (Adorno 2002 : 255)

He expresses a belief in the irreducibility of form: ‘Form repudiates the

view that artworks are immediately given’ (Adorno 2002 : 144) In dance with my general argument here, Adorno maintains that ‘formalism’ fundamentally asserts the condition of ‘art being art’ (Adorno 2002 : 144) The chapter ‘Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs’ returns to this theoretical monolith to pick up on the unresolved antagonisms of theory

The second infl uence is re-visited in detail in the chapter ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifi ce and Naturalization in Theory and Practice’, on Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifi ce ( 1978 ), which also repudiates the non-mediated view of art She valorizes what she calls the non-meaningful devices of poetry, which she arranges as levels of artifi ce; meaning can be read only as torqued by artifi ce in defi ance of

a method of reading called ‘naturalisation’, which she defi nes as the

‘attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic isation by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world, by making the Artifi ce appear natural’ (Forrest-Thomson 1978 : xi) Our best reading occurs when this process

organ-is resorgan-isted almost successfully and artifi ce shines most artifi cially In the

chapter, Forrest-Thomson’s schema of levels of artifi ce is supplemented

by another neglected book of the 1970s, Yuri Lotman’s Analysis of the Poetic Text ( 1976 ), whose multi-systemic modeling of the literary work, rather than its semiology, seems both a fi tting extension of the work of the Russian Formalists and a way of suggesting that the mutual interfer-ence, rather than the blending or cooperation, of levels, is what creates formal complexity in a poetic text

The axiomatic sense that an unexamined form is not worth reading

opposes instrumental readings that temper textuality with social

natural-izations Writing about what is sometimes called ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry that works by defamiliarization, undecidability, or through struc-tural and linguistic complexity, and radical poetic artifi ce, means that I take form to be unavoidable as an issue, though it seems not to be in other areas of literary (or cultural) studies, though even to say so should seem odd, particularly with Rooney’s minatory words ringing in our ears My critical and poetic commitment to the discourse of writerly poetics also necessarily focuses upon form

I turn to the aesthetic ‘turn’, particularly its re-evaluations of the supremely rich pickings of Romantic poetry, with recognition, but also with perplexity at the vehemence of the position-taking by some of its

proponents The main target for their attacks are the New Historicist ics; the accusation is, bluntly put, that New Historicism plays fast and loose with historical data and contextual information, and forces this to (pre-) determine interpretation, often ideologically constructed, what-ever the formal evidence of the text Alan Rawes offers a nuanced but critical summary: ‘Key to each of these readings … is the idea of reading silences about social and political realities and issues, and reading into those silences deliberate acts of ideologically motivated exclusion—or,

crit-to use McGann’s now famous word, “displacement”’ (Rawes 2007 : 96) The greatest antagonist in some versions of this affront is indeed Jerome

McGann, but I fi nd his comments about reading Shelley, in The Romantic Ideology ( 1983 ), salutary: ‘Poetry’s critical gift to every future age’ is ‘that alienated vantage’ afforded by the speaker in a poem being ‘removed from

us in the set of his mind’, which paradoxically ‘permits us a brief objective glimpse at our world and our selves’ (McGann 1983 : 66) While baulking perhaps at ‘critical’ and ‘objective’, this seems to me to be wise in its rec-ognition of the power of alterity in our historical readings We encounter works of art from the past not because they are our surprising contempo-raries but because they are so evidently not

McGann comments: ‘If the critic lays art under the microscope, a dant eye returns his quizzing gaze’ (McGann 1983 : 151–152) McGann’s image is an uneasy one; the critic appears in scientifi c mode, objectively subduing art as a microscopic entity, but fi nding an eye-to-eye encoun-ter, where disinterested acquisitive ‘quizzing’ is met by an intersubjective response that seems atavistic in its potential ferocity This is a standoff, with critic and art object mutually eyeballing one another’s otherness If McGann is suggesting alterity is the primary power of art, then this could

mor-be the return of the ‘alienated vantage’ with a vengeance In one possible reading, this instrument of revenge—less the eye that can be seen and more the dynamic mordancy that is intuited in it—is form

Clearly, contextual and historical evidence can hold—and obscure—its object in a vise-like grip of determination, but an overly technical atten-tion to poetic artifi ce runs its own risk of replacing generous response with formal description, as evinced in part by New Criticism, itself the progeny of the fi rst revolution described by Barry with its ‘practical criti-cism’ This is why the name New Formalism has been used by some of the recent critics to distinguish their practice from the old They are less interested in New Critical themes, such as the autonomy of the artwork and in questions of formal coherence, or of aesthetic unity and issues of

ambiguity—for example, whether embodied in the well-wrought urn the old critics borrowed from Donne, or the supernal isolate one they ven-triloquized after Keats Rawes comments on this new approach: ‘Where

an interest in unity and totality does surface, these are thought about

at arm’s length from New Criticism and in the context of very different traditions of thought’ (Rawes 2007 : xiii) Whatever the approach (and it varies) the dynamic passion that drives contemporary formalist criticism is best summarized by Garrett Stewart: ‘The formalist imperative is to read,

to read what is written as form (and formation) of meaning, both ally designed and culturally inferred’ (Stewart 2006 : 256) This passion seems lacking, for example, in the non-evaluative semiology of Lotman, which is one reason why it is used selectively in this study

Before we take solace in the vantage of formal criticism, it is worth examining Virgil Nemoianu’s arguments in ‘Hating and Loving Aesthetic Formalism’, published in one of the New Formalists’ founding docu-

ments, the anthology Reading for Form ( 2006 ), to examine what ist purity might look like in its least appealing apparel: ‘In a philosophical vision that will admit some (any!) kind of transcendence, aesthetic formal-ism might act as a link between the immanent and the transcendent It might be, for instance, a substitute for the latter; it might be one of its foreshadowings; it might mirror it’ (Nemoianu 2006 : 64) A neo-Paterist aestheticism underlines what appears to be a Kantian formulation, but is not quite Formalism bears the promises of transcendence on its broad shoulders, to deliver us from materialism while hinting at the spiritual While aesthetic ‘writing incorporates complexity and multiplicity, “over-determination”, multidimensionality, the dialectics of harmony and con-tradictoriness, the coexistence of displeasure with the pleasures and hopes

formal-of beauty’, we are told, ‘New Historicism and related movements’—which are aligned summarily with totalitarian regimes of left and right—‘den[y] the existence of a human nature and essence and replaces them with nega-tivity, confl ict, adversariness, and, at bottom, hatred as the central value and ultimate motivation of human behavior’ (Nemoianu 2006 : 56) In this account, postmodernist terms such as multiplicity rub shoulders with liberal humanist values and unexamined claims on behalf of the immutable human soul The mordancy of this defense is unappealing, as much as its terms are suspect in a postmodern world conceived of as one of multiple spaces populated by dynamic forces of subjectivation, for example It is a

relief that one editor of Reading for Form , the infl uential formalist Susan

J. Wolfson, comments, in contrast to this narrow compass, ‘The vitality of

reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from any form discipline’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 5)

We must be wary about what work form might be asked to perform

in the service of other causes, beware of anti-instrumental isms As Attridge says: ‘It would be a pity if formal analysis, which could play a major part in a revaluation of literature as a cultural practice and an individual experience, became just another tool to “prove” the critic right’ (Attridge 2013 : 27) 5

Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature ( 2004a ) and its

‘supple-ment’, The Work of Literature ( 2015 ), provide synthetic theoretical gation of the potentially choppy waters of revitalized formalism (Attridge

navi-2015 : 11) 6 Attridge offers the following summary of his tightly argued

The Singularity of Literature , picking up on his active redefi nition of form

through descriptions of events of readerly engagement, and of ‘forming’

as per-forming, and emphasizing formal innovation’s transformation of the fi eld of cultural production 7 (He also outlines the almost necessary sense, even trust, we have in artistic form that carries a promissory note of signifi cance through the fact of it having been intentionally authored, and

I return to this issue in the chapter ‘The Trace of Poetry and the Non- Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed’)

The singularity of the artwork is not simply a matter of difference from

other works … but a transformative difference … that involves the

irrup-tion of otherness or alterity into the cultural fi eld And this combinairrup-tion of singularity and alterity is further specifi ed by inventiveness : the work comes into being, through an act that is also an event, as an authored entity … Works of art are distinctive in the demand they make for a performance …

in which the authored singularity, alterity, and inventiveness of the work

as an exploitation of the multiple powers of language are experienced and affi rmed in the present, in a creative, responsible reading But performance

… is a matter both of performing and being performed by the work: hence

the eventness of the reading … is crucial (Attridge 2004a : 136) 8

This is a rich modeling of the operations of form in, and the constitution

of form by, acts of reading and response I will elaborate on their tions via readings of the works of other formalist critics, and touch on some themes and develop a methodology that arises from these works and will inform the rest of this study 9

Susan J. Wolfson’s Formal Charges ( 1997 ) is an account of ‘the ing of poetry in British Romanticism’, to borrow the subtitle of her book, which echoes the active sense of the forming of form, in Attridge’s terms Angela Leighton draws out the implications of Wolfson’s title: ‘To regard form, not as a shape, an object, or technique, but as a “charge”, with all its headlong, economic, even judicial connotations, is to release it from stasis Form does not stay still; in many senses, it “charges”’ (Leighton 2007 : 24) While focusing on the six major (male) Romantic poets, Wolfson selects lesser-known texts and reads them both formally and in terms of histori-cal and social contexts that are often revealed by textual practices, proof

shap-of Barthes’ suggestive aphorism ‘that a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it’ (Wolfson 1997 : 18–19) 10

These readings alone are invaluable; they are the kinds of transformative and creative readings that do not leave the object of study unchanged; they are singular and inventive, to use Attridge’s terms Wolfson professes concern with ‘events of particular forms (those stanzas, verses, meters, rhymes, and the line)’ (Wolfson 1997 : 3) She quotes Attridge’s work as prosodist: poetic forms ‘resist incorporation “into the kind of interpreta-tion we habitually give to linguistic utterances”; they are not transpar-ent’, she adds (Wolfson 1997 : 3) She argues that formalism is inherent in the poetic theory and poetics of Romanticism itself: ‘What distinguishes Wordsworth’s enactment is the way his verse form operates as a trope for its own formalism’ (Wolfson 1997 : 28) Forming, in Attridge’s sense, is

evinced by The Prelude : ‘The powers that form the mind … are staged in

a scene of which the poet’s mind is not just a refl ector but the formulator’ (Wolfson 1997 : 28) She studies Romanticism’s ‘involvement with poetic form’ with the aim of showing ‘how these texts submit cultural informa-tion to the pressure of aesthetic practice, and in doing so not only contrib-ute to the cultural text but apply their own critical intelligence’ in order

to refashion New Historicism’s supposed social and ideological focus, so

that such matters may be read through or in form (Wolfson 1997 : 30) She is combatant in her ultimate credo: ‘My deepest claim is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a specifi c kind of critical attention’ (Wolfson 1997 : 30)

Formal Charges is not just a potent polemic for ‘showing how the forms

of poetry can have their own agency’ (Wolfson 1997 : 231–232), but is

an exemplar of a formalist methodology that avoids the New Critical value judgment that—in Welleck and Warren’s terms—‘the tighter the

organisation of the poem, the higher its value’, which reduces form to

a will toward unity (Wolfson 1997 : 167) However, her methodology retains the virtue of New Criticism’s recognition that ‘form and content cannot be separated’ or, even more radically, that ‘form is content’, as Cleanth Brooks puts it (Wolfson 1997 : 168) Her reading of Keats is one

of the highlights of the volume, because it is here that earlier ism is dealt with head-on The reputation of Keats’ odes as the ultimate New Critical well-wrought urns is dependent upon their appeal to this will toward unity, formal, structural, or semantic Wolfson turns her attention

formal-to Keats’ neglected late sonnets formal-to show not the superlative qualities of

‘intense organization arising from the strict discipline of a critical ligence’, as Marshall McLuhan puts it of the odes, but to trace the formal adventure of these sonnets (Wolfson 1997 : 168) This involves, in part,

intel-a formintel-al engintel-agement with, intel-and negotiintel-ation of, the frintel-ame of the sonnet, but is also ‘a problematic of form … at play’ more generally, troping on form itself within poetic form and undertaking ‘an investigation of poetic forms as factitious, temporary and situated’, as though Keats himself were

a formalist critic with a deconstructive tinge (Wolfson 1997 : 192) While her quasi-deconstructive reading of Coleridge centers upon his tropic play and indeterminacy, particularly with regards to his use of simile that his formalist poetics overtly devalues, the genetic approach to Wordsworth

shows how revisionary stages of The Prelude articulate and gate a dynamic process of unfi nished forming Byron’s The Corsair is read

self-interro-almost entirely through its use of the heroic couplet, particularly the mal–semantic connections of rhyme, which is not merely a tracking of the reappearance of a single element of poetic artifi ce, but is presented as

for-a revelfor-ation of the socifor-al experience of the poem’s refor-adership, through for-a paradoxically aristocratic mode of mediating the ‘rebellious individualism’

of Byron’s unstable public and political persona (Wolfson 1997 : 163) Shelley is similarly read in social terms, and again often through rhyme (and through resonances of certain potential rhyming words—crypt words—that are absent from the text but which form its chiming under-song, as it were) 11 Contrasting the supposedly social texts relating to political unrest after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 (paradoxically unpub-lished in Shelley’s lifetime but touchstones for various later radicalisms from Chartism onwards) with the intensely personal late lyrics (often left

in manuscript or even woven between the manuscripts of other poems), a complex relationship between poetic form and social form is established However, this is a reading that argues against formalism’s severest critics

(such as Bourdieu or the New Historicists), and states that ‘each poem

is … a specifi c event that is not equivalent to the dictates of tradition or their degree of force in the historical moment of its composition’, while its ‘forms are informed by personal motivations, domestic interactions, political developments, social and cultural contradictions, and receptions both actual and imagined’, to quote from Wolfson’s own summary of the various contexts she brings to bear on her readings throughout the book (Wolfson 1997 : 231) More accurately, and elegantly, in terms that refl ect the brilliance and subtlety of her method, these contexts arise through and within the discussion of formal relations and poetic artifi ce, so that they feel as much a part of poetic form as they do of the world Form is the book’s content, and content is traced arising in form Wolfson insists her formalism indeed brings one back to history: ‘Reading the local par-ticularities of events in form, we discover the most complex measures of human art—the terms of its durable, social, political, and psychological interest We also feel the charge of an historically persistent, forever vari-ous, aesthetic vitality’ (Wolfson 1997 : 232) As Michael Schmidt notes

of modalities of reading: ‘History and politics can play a part: they pose questions In poetry the answers come not as argument but as form’ (Schmidt 1999 : 2)

Part of this ‘vitality of reading for form’ might be dissipated, if we lack defi nitional exactitude Turning specifi cally to poetry, form can mean the identifi able formal properties of a text, the poetic artifi ce that Forrest-Thomson writes about as the ‘non-meaningful levels of language’ (Forrest-Thomson 1978 : xiv): ‘all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal and logical devices which make poetry different from prose’ (Forrest-Thomson 1978 : iv) Form, as the chapter ‘Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence’ will show, can also ‘refer to an abstract structure or arrangement (“the sonnet form”) or the specifi c properties of a single work (“the unique form of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116”)’ (Attridge 2004a :

107), as Attridge points out, reminding us that German uses ‘ Form for the former and Gestalt for the latter’, a distinction which could be clumsily

accommodated in English, but seldom is (Attridge 2004a : 107)

A nuts and bolts emphasis upon devicehood complements Attridge’s

sense that form is the force that stages a performance of the text, but he

insists that devices of artifi ce ‘are precisely what call forth the performative response’ of any engaged reader, directly connected to the event of sin-gularity which is the irruption of an inventive otherness in our productive reading (Attridge 2004a : 118) Forms have to be formed

The event of the literary work is a formal event, involving among other

things, or rather among other happenings, shifts in register, allusions to other discourses, … the patterning of rhythms, the linking of rhymes, the ordering of sections, the movement of syntax, the echoing of sounds: all operating in a temporal medium to surprise, lull, intrigue, satisfy (Attridge

2015 : 117)

We need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the literary work, which means that form needs to be understood verbally—as “taking form”, of “form-ing”, or even “losing form”’ (Attridge 2004a : 113) Attridge states: What I carry away from my reading of the poem is not primarily an idea or

an image … but a memory of this specifi c sequence of words, a memory suffused by the qualities of my experience of them … As long as I retain

a memory of the ‘form’ of the words … I retain something of the poem (Attridge 2004a : 112–113)

This way of conceiving form, as a process of forming, leaving a trace of its eventhood,- he contends, complicates the distinction between form and content; what is staged by form’s very presence is meaning and feel-ing, sense and affect ‘We apprehend these so-called “formal” features

as already meaningful , and meaningful in a particular context’ (Attridge

2004a : 113)

However, even the strict mistress of the non-meaningful, Forrest-

Thomson, writes about internal expansion and limitation as the process

by which the external world is admitted to a reading only by permission of the artifi ce, ‘by selecting and ordering external contexts’, as they are read out of the poem into ‘the world and back’, as she puts it (Forrest-Thomson

1978 : 36) Attridge describes this from the other side, when he says: ‘The effect of this mobilization of meaning by formal properties is that the text can never close down on a represented world, can never become solely the refl ection of or a pointer to a set of existents outside language’ (Attridge 2004a : 118–119) We read through form, and through its forms we make meaning—a meaning which is not static, but open to further re- forming in consequent productive acts of reading We open the reading outward to the world to embrace the relevant contextual ‘objects’ and fold them back into readings of its formal structures, as both Wolfson and Forrest-Thomson variously demonstrate Such an approach, Attridge suggests, is ‘form without formalism’, new or old (Attridge 2004a : 119) All artifi ce becomes meaning ‘It’s through formed language that we’re

invited to participate in its emotion-arousing capacities; this means we feel the emotions, but always as performances of language’s power’ (Attridge

2015 : 267)

In a slightly different aesthetic mode, Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters

( 2001 ) gives quiet but unwavering voice to his ‘mutism’ (De Bolla 2001 : 5) before the ‘affective’ qualities of great artworks (a painting by Barnett Newman, a recording of Bach by Glenn Gould, and a Wordsworth poem) (De Bolla 2001 : 8) He avoids the potential fi xity of aestheticist questions such as ‘What is art?’ (De Bolla 2001 : 11) in favor of fl exible explora-tions of his hospitable ‘sense of wonder’ (De Bolla 2001 : 16) before these works (which is to be distinguished from effects of surprise, shock, or sensation) through ‘the materiality of an affective response’ to them (De Bolla 2001 : 138) De Bolla’s is partly an intersubjective account of his highly cultured encounters, and his readings ‘illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach’, as Attridge puts it, in that it is fas-cinating in its personal engagement, but it is impossible to generalize from its attempts to describe ‘wonder’ (Attridge 2004a : 157) Attridge, as

we have seen, prefers the word ‘forming’ to form, to cover these events that happen as irruptions of otherness, eventualities of invention that both thinkers call ‘singularity’ Attridge is able to tame wonder into the model

of a process that is less mute abandonment to form, and more openness to the otherness of form as a forming staging process, along with a commit-ment to critical commentary that is far from ‘mute’

However, de Bolla poses one question which arises from this ‘radical

singularity of aesthetic experience’ (De Bolla 2001 : 137), which introduces

a nagging theme that recurs in formalist criticism and which concerns the cognitive value of form: ‘What does the text know of this, what does it know that the reader (as yet) does not, perhaps cannot?’ (de Bolla 2001 : 120) What does any artwork know, a knowledge that even its creator might not possess? ‘I have asked if my responses give me knowledge’, he muses (De Bolla 2001 : 134) Importantly, de Bolla conjectures whether the cognitive values of artworks derive from their formal material proper-ties during his encounters His useful general answer is in the affi rmative, but it is tempered by his suggestion that ‘what is required … is a radically different conception of knowledge’ (De Bolla 2001 : 134):

This kind of knowledge would not be exclusively the property of an agent, not something I own or could be said to be familiar with It would also be within the artwork, something, as it were, known to it Although it makes

no sense to talk of this as propositional knowledge, it is equally tory to dismiss out of hand the sense of knowing that is made apparent

unsatisfac-to me in an aesthetic encounter I prefer unsatisfac-to call this knowing rather than

knowledge since it is more like a state of mind than an item of knowledge (De Bolla 2001 : 135)

Robert Eaglestone, in ‘Knowledge and the Truth of Literature’

(pub-lished in The New Aestheticism ), contrasts two modalities of truth, cognate

with these revised senses of ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’ On the one hand, there is propositional truth, ‘often identifi ed with scientifi c understandings

of the world Assertions made under this way of understanding truth can

… be proved or disproved’ (Eaglestone 2003 : 152) On the other hand, there is existential truth, an unfolding cognitive growth, one indeed asso-ciated with works of art and with Heidegger’s essay ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, in which he ‘argues that artworks do not simply represent reality as assertions do (though they do do this) More importantly and more fundamentally, they open up or “unconceal” the world … Art is able

to break “open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual” because of its nature as what Heidegger calls “poetry”’ (Eaglestone

2003 : 153) As with truth, so with knowledge; it can be either tional or existential, knowledge or knowing 12

Simon Jarvis, in a series of scattered articles, has ‘been trying to explore the question of whether music’ in poetry, and particularly its prosody, ‘need

be opposed to thinking’ (Jarvis 2011 : 7) He raises a similar concern in his article ‘Prosody as Cognition’ ( 1998a ), where he conjectures: ‘It would

be possible to begin thinking about the birth of prosody only upon tion that we stopped thinking of the bodily, and the musical, as the non-cognitive vessels for a cognitive content’ (Jarvis 1998a : 11) Form (or one aspect of it, its containing qualities) would no longer be a body disembod-ied from meaning Jarvis asks us to ‘imagine’ ‘a study of [John] Wilkinson

condi-in which it could be understood how the most helpless scraps of prcondi-int or chatter, are made prosodically animated’ (Jarvis 1998a : 12), but offers few clues as to how this ‘materialism of the beautiful’ could come into being, one whereby we might come ‘to understand a single affective duration not as the endless repetition of an instantaneous passage from being into nothing, the foundation of any possible ontology In the printed melody

of verse is heard … news that such experience is’ (Jarvis 2011 : 13) 13 The tortuous syntax betrays the political and philosophic force that is exerted upon this aspiration, the conditional imagination that promises political

utopia, even if it is Adorno’s aesthetic utopia ‘draped in black’ (Adorno

2002 : 135) Taking the cognitive qualities of form more generally, Jarvis states: ‘Art thinks historically, and that what it knows, when it thinks well,

is natural-historical experience’ (Jarvis 2011 : 7) His fi rst axiom is that

‘technique is the way art thinks’ (Jarvis 2011 : 7) Elsewhere Jarvis affi rms that ‘technique … is itself cognitive and critical, not purely instrumental craft’, which broadens his analysis to all levels of artifi ce and form, and to poesis and praxis generally (Jarvis 1998b : 108) In other words, ‘technique knows something about the world Yet it knows it, Adorno suggests, just

by the most obsessive, and perhaps even the most fetishistic and solipsistic, absorption in its own proper stuff’, that is, in its form (Jarvis 2011 : 7) Form, Adorno reminds us, is ‘the objective organisation within each art-work of what appears to be bindingly eloquent’, but it has an eloquence of its own (Adorno 2002 : 143)

Although Attridge opines, ‘When a work seems to be possessed of its

own capacity to think, to question, to harbour knowledge, so much so that

we call on metaphors that supply it with a brain, a will, a consciousness, it’s a sign of both its otherness and its inventiveness’ (Attridge 2015 : 253; emphasis mine), this apprehension—he dubs it ‘anthropomorphism’—does not alone account for an artwork’s cognitive aspects (and will and consciousness are not at issue here) (Attridge 2015 : 242) An artwork does not simply provide ‘a performance of knowing or thinking’ (Attridge

2015 : 255) To regard cognition as having independent existence outside the brain, inherent in things in general (or in artistic form in particular), is not a metaphorical or mystical formulation, and indeed, is a ‘materialism of the beautiful’ It can be conceived of as a variety of ‘material engagement’

in the light of a cognitive theory that takes that very name as its own

Lambros Malafouris’ How Things Shape the Mind ( 2013 ) contrasts nalist views of mind, in which a Cartesian entity computes and calibrates

inter-a world it cinter-annot enter, with his own externinter-alist one thinter-at recognizes ‘the intersection between cognition and material culture’ (Malafouris 2013 : 17) It sees the mind as engaging, and interacting with, learning from and with, the world, and entering it via means of what he calls ‘the extended mind’ (Malafouris 2013 : 17) ‘For active externalism, marks made with a pen on paper are not an ongoing external record of the contents of mental states; they are an extension of those states’ (Malafouris 2013 : 74) One result of this might be a poem It follows that ‘cognition has no loca-tion’, or no fi xed location between mind and things (Malafouris 2013 : 85) Malafouris is an archaeologist and his examples are prehistoric as well

as historic ‘ Mark-making action and thinking are the same ’, he remarks

of early stone inscriptions which, he points out with care, may not have originally been depictions; the marks and lines may ‘ externalize nothing but the very process of externalization ’, pure external cognition (Malafouris

2013 : 190) As such, artifactual actions developed toward depiction (over

breathtaking lengths of time): ‘Those early pictures bring forth a new

pro-cess of acting within this world and, at the same time, thinking about it’ (Malafouris 2013 : 203) This is nothing less than a story about how we became human (and how we know we are human) through the agency of this radical interpenetration of mind and world: ‘Our ways of thinking are

not merely causally dependent upon but constituted by extracranial bodily

processes and material artefacts’ (Malafouris 2013 : 227) But things are also mobile: ‘The sensual properties of things and the aesthetic experi-ence of things permeate every aspect of our cognitive activities and perme-ate our social and emotional relationships’, Malafouris states (Malafouris

2013 : 87) The uses of objects in mourning, or the uses of religious icons

to access absent beings or to concretize abstract entities, are powerful examples Arguably a literary work might be one of those objects, and its formal properties, its form, could be thought of in this way as a material

cognitive entity, knowledge within the artwork, in de Bolla’s and Jarvis’

terms

Even though Attridge remarks, ‘Every work is a knowing work, every work smiles enigmatically, because there is no way we, or it, can satisfy the thirst for knowledge that it generates’, this does not do justice to the cognitive material engagement that an artwork summons into activ-ity (Attridge 2015 : 257) Yet when Malafouris comments that ‘Meaning does not reside in the material sign; it emerges from the various param-eters of its performance and usage as they are actualized in the process of engagement’, he sounds distinctly like Attridge on the way we form and perform objects as art (Malafouris 2013 : 117) More importantly, and from the position of poesis, ‘“Form” is always “informed” by the proper-ties of the material to which it gives shape’ (Malafouris 2013 : 177) The result of this, in the case of a potter, is revelatory ‘The being of the pot-ter’, as Malafouris nicely puts it, ‘is co-dependent and interweaved with the becoming of the pot’ (Malafouris 2013 : 212) The cognition of the potter and even his or her neural pathways are changed by the cognitive

function of the artifact Form in a literary work is arguably cognitive—

whether through de Bolla’s active aesthetic experiencing or Jarvis’ tive prosody—through the processes of material engagement, through

affec-the apprehension of actual forms that embody cognition, and through a reader’s involvement in perceptible acts of forming 14

Angela Leighton’s On Form : Poetry , Aestheticism , and the Legacy of a Word ( 2007 ) has the benefi t of coming relatively late to the debate, and she judiciously accounts for Attridge, de Bolla, and Wolfson (It is per-haps symptomatic of the state of current British criticism that the sources referred to above connected with linguistically innovative poetry, Forrest- Thomson and Jarvis, seem beyond her scope) Her book offers useful readings of the history of the term form and of aesthetic criticism and of its relationship to poetry since the Romantics and Tennyson, with useful foci upon Pater and Vernon Lee, and she fi nds an interesting recurring trope connecting notions of ‘form’ to notions of ‘nothing’; to be an aes-thetic writer is to articulate form but to say nothing, as Oscar Wilde and others assert She not only offers illuminating readings of Douglas Oliver, W.S. Graham, and Roy Fisher (who are arguably under the ‘linguistically innovative’ umbrella) but also writes about Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Anne Stevenson, and Heather McHugh

She adopts a multiple distinction recognizable from earlier studies, ering varieties of form and kinds of forming: ‘Form can signify both the

cov-fi nished object, the art form in its completion, or the parts that make up its technical apparatus It can signify a visionary apparition in the mind, or the real, physical properties of a work In addition, it can suggest the force that drives to completion’ (Leighton 2007 : 3) She offers a brief historical reading of aestheticist thought after Kant, focusing on notions of form and force The refi nements of Schiller are singled out as the source for many later defi nitions and tropic play: ‘Schiller fi dgets’, she says, with the term form, ‘trying out grammatical alternatives: “form-drive”, “formal qualities” … as if to push the noun into new shapes, new “forms” So the

“play-drive” of art is a “form-drive”, a wish to make forms, and that leads

to a notion of “living form”’, a phrase often used to introduce dynamic impulse into later arguments (Leighton 2007 : 6) ‘In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, the form everything’, writes Schiller (Schiller 2004 : 106) 15

By the time such notions are picked up by Coleridge, as ‘forma mans’ [forming form], form has ‘become not a body but an agent’ It forms (Leighton 2007 : 7) ‘The difference between “forming form” and

effor-“formed form” appears throughout Coleridge’s writings’ and is one source

of Attridge’s insistence upon ‘forming’ as a process, a verb (Leighton

2007 : 7) Leaving aside considerations of the relationship between beauty

and truth in post-Romantic thought, which culminates in Pater’s purist awareness that ‘form … shuts in beauty and shuts out truth’ (Leighton

2007 : 10), Leighton draws out the ambiguities of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Modernist mantra of ‘signifi cant form’, which is usually taken as a plea for the autonomy of the artwork but more accurately ‘registers the contrary pressure of signifi cance, and therefore the stress of incompatibles being brought together’, content and form (Leighton 2007 : 13) Mid- century thinkers Henri Focillon and Suzanne Langer are shown synthesiz-ing views that ‘form … is not a fi xed shape to be seen, but the shape of

a choice to be made’ (Leighton 2007 : 16) Leighton notes of Langer’s

Feeling and Form :

‘Form and Feeling’ would once have been a contradiction, but it is now

a hybrid, rather like … ‘living form’ which, like Schiller’s original, or Coleridge’s ‘forma efformans’, or Focillon’s ‘life of forms’, insists on life

at the heart of form … She thus continues the project … of wresting form away from the museum of untouchable … art forms, and giving it back to the human beings who make or perceive it (Leighton 2007 : 19)

This prepares the way for an aesthetic theory that has at its center the receptiveness and response of the user of the artwork, that ‘suggests that form stops us in our tracks of thinking, and asserts itself in that moment

of stillness’ (Leighton 2007 : 21) Form discovers us as we discover it in material, and mutual, engagement

The preceding critical accounts show that form is not just a matter of technique, artifi ce, vessel, or conduit, that it is an active material force with semantic or cognitive value However, most accounts retreat from specifi cs, recognizing that the formal revolution in criticism is not com-plete, and that attention to form requires methods without specifi cs, sensitivities without targets, ‘freedom from program and manifesto’ in Wolfson’s words (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 5) Individualized accounts end in untranslatable (or mute) wonder, which are themselves wonders to behold (in de Bollas’ case at least), but are not very useful for considering the effect of an enjambment in a poem by John Seed, to bring it back to a page that one might fi nd in one’s hands

How should we approach form critically? Leighton answers the tion for her own study, which negotiates her chosen texts with scrupu-lousness and subtlety that derives from the tradition she traces and also,

ques-I surmise, from her sensitivity to form as a poet She loosely derives her

methodology from her immediate precursors She quotes Attridge’s verbal adjustments, ‘taking form’, ‘losing form’, and the one this study favors,

‘forming’, with approval of their distension of temporality and of tion (Attridge 2004a : 112) She comments, ‘Thus we catch form in the act’ (Leighton 2007 : 27) Though once we espy this rare entity, she still wonders ‘what kind of criticism could be devoted to’ these dynamic for-mulations of form? (Leighton 2007 : 27) She takes from de Bolla the cog-nitive imperative: ‘Perhaps to think of form as a way of knowing, not as an object of knowledge, might be the beginning of the answer’, but she also takes from him the cautious tone and nascent suggestiveness that seem the hallmarks of these conjectural modes of thinking (even in textually specifi c readings, such as Wolfson’s): (Leighton 2007 : 27) ‘Being willing to listen

atten-to the strange things that are said’ by form prepares us for a state of ness to alterity, but this sounds disarming if estrangement is its only gift (Leighton 2007 : 28) 16

The fuzzy logic of much of the best thinking about form raises odological questions This study is drawn toward the work of formalist critics whose revulsion toward instrumentalism often takes the form of an evasion of ‘method’ ‘Our care’, write editors Wolfson and Brown, speak-

meth-ing for the contributors to Readmeth-ing for Form , as well as for themselves,

is ‘to heighten attention to the analytical force of forms for our ing’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 12) This collective agenda is endorsed, but not in any manifestic way: ‘In reading for form in the twenty-fi rst century, the contributors to this volume share a concern both with how poetic form is articulated and valued, in James Breslin’s phrasing, “with the changing theories and practices of poetic form”’ (Wolfson and Brown

read-2006 : 13 n) They thereby affi rm a commitment to theoretical ment and promise to engage with poetry and its poetics, but admit that a slippery net is being used to catch a slithering eel ‘The play of form in cul-tures of reading is nothing if not mobile, variable, unpredictable Readers for form are joined only, but vitally, by a care for this, and our conviction that the forms of our attention will persist in ceaseless, lively transforma-tions’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 23–24) 17

This puts pressure upon the quality of attention demanded of critical thinking and its forms of writing One must be alert, as de Bolla says, during ‘an interpretive act to reveal what it conceives of as its other, its “over there”… its adjacency’ (de Bolla 2001 : 97) One is gingerly bringing the textual other within the realm of the same, as Attridge puts it The aesthetic encounter may be one of risk: ‘To acknowledge

that the text might know what we, as yet, do not (or could not), and

that knowing this (acknowledging it) is bound to be either benefi cial or

potentially harmful to us (or indeed at different times both)’ (de Bolla

2001 : 97) de Bollas’ profoundly subtle awareness of mutability and risk in the apprehension of the cognitive value of form may leave the reader bemused, dazzled, silenced with ‘the recognition that one may never know the knowledge that is known to this poem, but in acknowl-

edging that one might … come to a sense of what it means for oneself ’

(de Bolla 2001 : 125) Close reading takes on the attributes of close encounter Attridge acknowledges that ‘in a creative reading it is only as

a singularity that I can respond to the singularity of the work’ (Attridge 2004a : 83) The text, the object of analysis, becomes ‘the event of its coming into being in my reading’ (Attridge 2004a : 91) Attridge clearly sees that a redefi ned attitude of attention for critical discourse is required: ‘In an inventive response the reader attempts to answer the work’s shaping of language by a new shaping of his or her own (which

in turn invite further responses)’ (Attridge 2004a : 93) 18 An attentive formal (individual) reading will inevitably involve an apprehension of the ‘work’s shaping’, and that will ‘shape’ a response, shaped itself by others’ readings and re-readings of its formulations and acts of forming

in ‘ceaseless, lively transformation’ (Wolfson and Brown 2006 : 23–24)

Of course, such a reading treats form not as a fi xed pattern but as a structuring process, one that remains fl uid or malleable in transforma-tive contact

It can be perceived that ‘formlessness’ in a work can ‘just as often be a lack of form in the observer’, as Schiller noted long ago, not only arguing against instrumental readings of his day (those readers ‘who will enjoy a serious and pathetic poem like a sermon’) but also placing the agency of the ‘form impulse’ in the ‘observer’ of the art work, as a site of ‘forming’ (Schiller 2004 : 107) Schiller’s cold word ‘observer’ could be convention-ally translated into the ‘reader’ of Attridge’s usage without much bother, but Muriel Rukeyser suggests the archaic term ‘witness’ in place of reader, listener, or audience This term, she recommends,

includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience The overtone

of responsibility in this word is not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revela- tion giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self (Rukeyser 1994 : 166)

While I adopt the term witness from time to time, I would like my sense of

‘reader’ and ‘reading’ to include its qualities at all times, as I believe they are in the readerly formulations of Attridge and others Additionally, I am here asserting my responsibility for the reporting of the critical encounters

I present in subsequent chapters

We would be wise to consider Wolfson’s conjecture that ‘the very fun of encountering language in form also might be a wiring of human conscious-ness for excess of function or necessity’ (Wolfson 2007 : 214) Attridge offers a schema that accounts for this excess, modifi ed or motivated to

a high degree by a particular model of literariness He recognizes that the act of forming—and of its continuing apprehension to memory as singularity—‘is inseparable from the deep pleasure which animates both

my reading of [the poem] and the internal representation of it which I keep, a pleasure which no summary of the poem would convey, however faithful it might be to the meaning of its words’ (Attridge 2004a : 113) Even he acknowledges that there is an incommunicable core at the center

of response, but he avoids impressionism through his theoretical rigor, while still being open to the mutability of different and/or subsequent readings As he reminds us: ‘Meaning is … not something that appears

in defi ning opposition or complementary apposition to form … but as something already taken up within form; forms are made out of mean-ings quite as much as they are made out of sound and shapes’ (Attridge 2004a : 114) But there still remains the question of how the specifi cs of poetic artifi ce—how this rhyme or that rhythm—are actualized in one’s witnessing reading, and how this responsiveness is communicated, and this is why Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s insistence that naturalization is

a process that has to be encountered, and must be encountered through

devicehood (and ultimately leads to necessary thematic synthesis, however much mediated by form), can still help us when we wish to read particular poems

Notwithstanding the skepticism toward strict method in the critical

turn to form, any study of contemporary poetry that wishes to use these

insights profi tably and practically in ‘close reading’ must be dual Reading

must focus on form in the technical sense, on identifi able form s in formal

play, as analyzed by a practical formalist like Forrest-Thomson with her identifi cation of all the elements of poetic artifi ce that make poetry poetry,

and on form in a general sense, one that derives from its act of forming and

in our apprehension of its coming to form as an event Forms and forming ,

I call this pair for ease Both types of form are capable of carrying semantic

or cognitive charge They contain or envelop meaning(s) of knowledge(s) and might demonstrate how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge might be formed and formulated, known and acknowledged

As such, aesthetic form carries a force operating on the individual (or lective) reader or ‘witness’, which—in the case of poetry—means that the reader is the site where such meanings are staged by form, so that reading

col-is formulating form, and formulating it into fl uxing semantic and tive forms as a ‘performed mobility’, and its ultimate forming of us, as Rukeyser insists, and for good or ill, as de Bolla darkly suggests (Attridge 2004a : 111)

Even my strategic overuse of, variations of, the word ‘form’ here onstrates how it cannot be held any longer to be a simple opposite to con-tent, a vase containing water, or even a cloud permeated with moisture

dem-‘Forms are made out of meanings’ too, as Attridge reminds us (Attridge 2004a : 114), and Wolfson writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms

as a kind of content’ (Wolfson 2007 : 214) Formal considerations of both

kinds ( form / s and forming ) are engaged by active reading and enact

mean-ings that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (that over-fashionable word), or

on rare occasions (it might be remembered) reinforce, the kind of able meaning that Forrest-Thomson and Attridge decry as ‘paraphrase’

extract-‘The poem is the poem, not its paraphrase’, as Wallace Stevens once wryly noted, to which we might add: paraphrase is amnesia of form (Leighton

2007 : 186) Strictly speaking, a poem cannot be paraphrased, as though one could skim off of the skin of words, because even if a description of forms were to be appended to a kind of summary or a précis of argu-ment, this would amount to no more than an account of formal proper-ties and would still not involve the complex interinanimation between form and content, experienced in acts of forming Wolfson identifi es this link between Forrest-Thomson’s notion of poetic artifi ce and the kinds of apprehension of forming examined above, when she comments: ‘Artifi ce

is what form supplies to attention’, but Attridge and others prove that the opposite is also true: form is what artifi ce supplies to attention (Wolfson

2007 : 216)

In terms of method, my identifi cation of poetic forms in the fi rst sense grounds my apprehension of processes of forming and meaning formation

in the second sense, as they meet in an aesthetic response which is also

a material engagement of the kind described by Malafouris with a

quid-ditative text Differing forms of formal experiment and innovation may

reveal differing modes of forming As Wolfson affi rms: ‘Poetic form …

(is) a politicized practice—and continues to be so every time new practices challenge traditional, or at least prevailing, forms’ (Wolfson 1997 : 20)

If poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through

the means (meanings) of form, its force quite literally makes and changes

forms of life The relationship between art and life—to which I shall return

in my concluding chapter—is increasingly central as the readerly focus

is more upon the forming events of poetic artifi ce Responsible criticism

is the activity of tracing those events of forming with ‘a specifi c kind of critical attention’ and fi delity to this doubleness of form, to forms and forming (Wolfson 1997 : 30)

NOTES

1 In Sheppard ( 1999b ), my adoption of the otherwise historicizing term

‘linguistically innovative’ to encapsulate the poetry I studied throughout may be seen in the context of the poetics expressed in ‘Linking the Unlinkable’: 54–55 Sheppard 2005 offers a tripartite model of levels of analysis of the text: the technical, the sociolinguistic, and the ethical (the last of which uses Levinas’ distinction between the saying and the said as ethical discrimination within technical and linguistic poetic practice): 2–19 (See chapter ‘Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs’, endnote 9.) Sheppard 2011a , b , c offers lightly theorized his- torical readings of ‘episodes’ in British poetry, which I hope respect both the nature of poetry and poetics, while using Bourdieu’s sociological schema of fi elds of literary production to outline a history of British poetry For poetics, see most episodes of Sheppard 2011a , b , c , 2008a , and my

blogzine Pages , Sheppard 2009

2 See Derek Attridge’s chapter ‘A Return to Form’ in Attridge 2013 : 17–30, for a measured review of recent readings for form, successful and otherwise

3 See Sheppard 2010 for the pedagogic implications of poetics

4 Later post-Russian formalisms that became important were Jakobson’s and Mukarovský’s various senses of the ‘artistic’ and ‘poetic’ functions, as well

as Lotman’s ‘analysis’

5 Even the nuanced readings of the New Humanism of Andy Mousley (in his

edited volume Towards a New Literary Humanism ( 2011 )) is

instrumen-talist to the extent that it concentrates upon literature as ‘an advanced form

of emotional and sensuous immersion ’ in the humanizing service of

‘com-plex and confl icting emotional states/urges’ without regard to the form that is advanced (Mousley 2011 : 13)

6 The Work of Literature ( 2015 ) is a ‘supplement’ and a ‘fuller account’ of

The Singularity of Literature (Attridge 2015 : 11) The title of the latest book is accurate to his renewed concept of the ‘act-event’ of reading and

to the distinction between the text and work, a ‘text’ being simply textual writing and the ‘work’, which is a text’s elevation to being read in a literary way ‘as distinct from other cultural practices’ (Attridge 2015 : 98) The book was published during the fi nal draft stages of completing this book, and its infl uence has been not only limited (in practical terms) but also profound (given its supplementary relationship to The Singularity of Literature )

7 See also Susan Stewart’s ‘Notebook on Making’, Stewart 2011 , which takes a formalist view of ‘making’, ‘freedom’, and ‘forming’ itself, which is the subject and title of her chapter 5: 111–141

8 Attridge’s insistence upon the fact that genuine literary engagement (when

one is reading non-instrumentally) is both an event that occurs and an

action that the writer and reader (variously) do, that is both passive and active, a ‘willed passivity’, (Attridge 2015 : 2) results in a renewed com- pound noun in his vocabulary in Attridge 2015 : ‘The coming-into-being

of the work of art is … both an act and an event : it’s something the artist

does … and something that happens to the artist’ (Attridge 2015 : 220) Creation and reception are similar ‘I use the term “act-event” in order to capture the strange duality of this process in which active and passive are not clearly separable—whether we’re talking about the work or the person responding to it In this way, the work is remade each time it is read’ (Attridge 2015 : 247) I have not been able to absorb this new term into this study (see endnote 6)

9 Attridge has also published a companion volume to The Singularity of Literature , Attridge 2004b , which offers rich engaged readings of fi ction

by J.M.  Coetzee It is an elaboration of the theme of The Singularity of Literature , in that it refuses to allegorize Coetzee’s work, and reminds us

that ‘formal innovation (of the sort that matters in literature) is innovation

in meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical testing and experiment’ (Attridge 2004b : 11)

10 A more recent exploration of this territory, for which Wolfson provides an

‘Afterword’ (‘Romanticism’s Forms’), focuses upon some lesser-known or neglected fi gures, such as Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey, to study form and its forms in the Romantic period: Rawes 2007

11 The term ‘crypt-word’ is Rachel Blau Du Plessis’ for ‘unwritten words and phrases’ in a poem (Du Plessis 2001 : 24) See endnote 15

12 Michael Wood, in Wood 2005 , admits to fi nding ‘the truly haunting tion’ de Bolla asks, ‘What does this painting know?’ the beginning of his own quest into cognitive-aesthetic values (Wood 2005 : 8) While meditat-

ques-ing a great deal on fi ctional forms—although he admits with an allusive nod to Wallace Stevens that all ‘literature is fi ction in the fullest, most powerful sense when it sets out to discover real knowledge along imagi- nary roads’ (Wood 2005 : 190)—he does pay attention to poetry (and to

‘small’ as well as great art), but his conjecture that ‘if literature knows something, or knows of something, then we shall need at some stage to ask what literary forms know or know of ’ suggests that the artwork is concealing its knowledge rather than per-forming it for us in the activity

of reading (Wood 2005 : 135–136) What Wood attempts to model here is

knowledge inside forms, in the sense of inside poetic artifi ce, rather than

de Bolla’s ‘knowing’, which inheres within the qualities of acts of aesthetic forming

13 See Wilkinson’s own take on rhythm in his ‘Cadence’, in Wilkinson 2007 : 143–147

14 There are some unresolved tensions within Malafouris’ theory, and they emerge from his study of the poesis of contemporary potters Unaware of the ‘decisions’ made, the potter nevertheless declares that he or she made the pot This is an ‘agency judgement’, and while artifi cers can conceive of the act as enactive, something happens to us in such an act and we never- theless claim authorship (Malafouris 2013 : 218) (This might be a mirror image of the ‘authoredness’ Attridge presupposes as a condition for literary engagement (Attridge 2004a : 136).) ‘Unfortunately’, Malafouris laments,

‘although a good phenomenological description can pull us inside this seamless fl ow of activity and agency, when we cut the fl ow and press the question of agency our inner Cartesian self or “interpreter” wakes up to take control of the situation’ (Malafouris 2013 : 220) If Malafouris is to

‘put back together’ the active and passive parts of a creative act, ‘and account for their ongoing and irreducible causal coupling’, he admits, ‘it remains to be seen whether agency can offer a way to bridge the neural and cultural correlates of our bodily selves’ (Malafouris 2013 : 226) He is still inspired by a ‘vision of the cognitive life of things’ which involves ‘the distributed and compositionally plastic image of the potter skillfully engag- ing the clay’, rather than by ‘the linear architecture of a Turing machine’, but admits to not having forged that link in his work thus far (Malafouris

2013 : 238) If we assume, in our apprehension of form in acts of forming,

that there is somebody there, material engagement makes us aware that there is something there as well, and that the thing as well as the somebody

(or even the body) is doing (some of) the thinking Although ‘cognition has no location’, perhaps ethics does; responsibility must lie with the

human agent because only he or she can be answerable (Malafouris 2013 : 85) Perhaps that is a small answer in itself to questions of the bridge between the neural and cultural

15 Schiller sounds distinctly modern at times: ‘The object of the form impulse,

expressed generally, may be called shape ’, he says (Schiller 2004 : 76) He wrote of artworks ‘annihilating the material by means of the form’, which sounds more radical than the consequent examples from the post-Kantian tradition he founded (Schiller 2004 : 106)

16 The American poet and theorist, Joan Retallack, articulates a formal sis of avant-garde works by Cage, Stein, Waldrop, Hejinian, and others Retallack 2003 argues, for, if not a reversal, then a revision, of Focillon’s terms, and states that ‘literature is an engagement with possible forms of life’ (Retallack 2003 : 146) Retallack here revives the term ‘form of life’ from Wittgenstein’s vague usage, which distinguishes between the various regimes of his ‘language games’, rather than from Schiller’s aesthetics, which is why I have not included her work in the developmental fl ow of this Introduction (although it should be acknowledged as contributory) (Retallack 2003 : 23) In Leighton’s terms, life is at the heart of form For Retallack, as a poet, ‘This is not a question of the daily habits and routines necessary to the sane ordering of any life but of the forms one chooses in one’s poesis, the making of forms of life out of words’ (Retallack 2003 : 147) She continues and introduces her central neologism: ‘If those forms are made in the course of thinking through one’s values, then it’s a matter

analy-of poethics’ (Retallack 2003 : 147) ‘Every poetics,’ she says, ‘is a quential form of life Any making of forms out of language (poesis) is a practice with a discernable character (ethos)’ (Retallack 2003 : 11) Some avant-gardes—like Retallack’s—develop coterminously with theoretical developments; some theories develop in direct relation to avant-garde practice and poetics, like Krzysztof Ziarek’s Ziarek 2004 is an immersive book, not unlike the confl icting aesthetics of Ziarek’s twin heroes, Heidegger, in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ essay and Adorno, in

Aesthetic Theory , and he compares the two in terms of their theories of

power Central to Ziarek’s thesis is his conception of the work of art as a force fi eld, a metaphor Leighton traces back to Schiller It is not an object but an event, and this eventness makes the artwork a ‘forcework’, in Ziarek’s neologism (and in a similar way to its acknowledgment by Attridge) Inhering neither in form nor content, the forcework is beyond aesthetics; the avant-garde artwork is beyond traditional aesthetic catego- ries Ziarek’s rejection of aesthetics has led his work to be excluded from this Introduction’s argument, although his sense of art as a non-violent force is gently absorbed into it See my critical poetics-poetry-essay Sheppard 2006b for a longer response to Ziarek’s book

17 While any method of close reading is a prophylactic to instrumentalist readings, there exist modes of close reading that may be profi tably used in

a formalist analysis that are not quite, in the sense I have adopted here,

formalist, but are fraternal enterprises One such is Rachel Blau Du Plessis’

‘social philology’, as outlined in Du Plessis 2001 She argues that ‘social materials … are activated and situated within the deepest texture of, the sharpest specifi cities, of the poetic text: on the level of word choice, crypt word, impacted etymologies, segmentivity and line break, the stanza, the image, diction, sound, genre, the “events” and speakers selected inside the work … and the rhetorical tactics of the thing on the page’ (Du Plessis

2001 : 12) I have made use of her term crypt word occasionally in this study See endnote 9

18 This ‘endless chain of responses’ is ‘alarming’, Attridge suggests, only ‘if

we conceive of literature as possessing an extractable content which can

fi nally be isolated’, if we see paraphrase as permanent substance rather than

as phantom (Attridge 2004a : 93) One’s sense of alarm abates when one realizes that this endless chain is actually the history of criticism, whatever the critical apparatus and positions

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