One of the inborn quirks of being an American is the desire to possess simultaneously several irreconcilable things. It’s a national fault. We want to be free, but we also want to micromanage private behavior via laws and ordinances. We want equality, but we also want untrammeled competition that allows some people to become much richer than others. We want stable family life, but we also want fast-track careerism for both sexes that leads to neglected children and divorce. We want solid education, but we also want free-form unstructured classes where no one learns anything. This mental tic is universally common in the immature; America has made it an identifying trait of its citizens. How many times have you heard some stupid ass—rolling his eyes upward in aspiration—sigh I want it all! as if it were possible to put together a dozen contradictory fates and lifestyles?
If you try pointing this out to the average American, he’ll look sheepish and mumble something about how “There has to be a balance” or “You’ve got to get the best of both worlds” or some other half-assed evasion. But many things can’t be finessed like that. You can’t have a pure and virginal bride who also has a whore’s sexual know-how in bed. You can’t write satirical poetry and still remain friends with everyone. You can’t listen to cacophonous rock music every weekend and keep your hearing unimpaired. Some things just don’t go together, and you have to choose between them.
One glaring example of this tendency can be noticed in teenage girls. I’ve dealt with thousands of them during my forty-four years as a teacher, and still see scores of them at the university today. It’s amazing to watch as they try to incarnate two aims, which could be expressed in the following sentence: I want to be a hot piece of ass, but I also want to maintain my politically correct credentials as a gender feminist! So a coed will come to school dressed like a Las Vegas call-girl, but if a male student so much as smirks at her, she’ll go screaming to the Sexual Harassment committee. As a result, the male students who attend college (there are fewer every year) generally avoid any interaction at all with their female classmates… which of course sends a lot of these coeds into a state of inarticulate, suppressed rage. Well, that’s what you get when you try to be oil and water at the same time.
A generalized manifestation of this mindset is consumerism: Americans buy and buy and buy out of a sheer passion to possess every little device or toy or service that catches their attention. Big Business, of course, deliberately inflames this evil tendency with its multibillion-dollar ad campaigns. And this national habit has necrotized itself into the pathology known as hoarding—a pathology so widespread that it now has two reality television shows dedicated to it. When you “want it all,” you bankrupt yourself to get it, and then you cram your house with it.
Look at the thousands of buffoons who queue up like soup kitcheners outside Apple stores to buy the latest iPhone. Imagine—a telephone that takes pictures, makes videos, sends text messages, surfs the internet, and does a dozen other virtual-reality hoop-jumps! Wow, I just gotta have it! IT DOES IT ALL! How profoundly and mindlessly American.
In the classic Edward G. Robinson film Key Largo, the criminal Johnny Rocco is talked into admitting that the force driving his violence and gangsterism is the desire for “more.” He says “Yeah, that’s it—I want MORE!” Back in 1948 when the film was made, this was seen as a horrifying confession of greed and ruthless self-seeking. Today, au contraire, we encourage the populace to emulate Rocco’s pathology. We tell them that they deserve to “have it all.”
So it’s not at all surprising that formalist poets in America frequently want to be free-verse poets too. Now if they satisfied this desire by writing strictly formal poems on Tuesdays and Thursdays and free-verse poems on Mondays and Wednesdays, there would be no problem. But unfortunately, that’s not the American way. Out of a psychological compulsion to integrate and possess disparate elements, they’ll write free-verse poems haunted by the ghost of meter and formal poems spoiled with free-verse carelessness. That way they can “have it all,” besides congratulating themselves on being hip, trendy, and au courant.
As the editor of TRINACRIA, I’ve had occasion to bicker with potential contributors over precisely this point. Someone once submitted a nearly perfect Petrarchan sonnet—one that had two glaring deviations in the meter. It took a good deal of debate to get him to fix them. His argument was that he could “incorporate” the randomness of free-verse rhythms into regular metrical structures, and that such mixing was a common practice among modern Irish poets. I finally convinced him that this was an absurd aspiration by pointing out that getting pie-eyed drunk was also common in Ireland, but it didn’t mean we had to follow that bad example. Another poet refused to change an easily correctable grammatical error in his work, on the grounds that grammatical errors were a form of poetic license. I refused to publish his poem. It would seem that there are many self-styled formalist poets desperately seeking to express themselves, even at the cost of disregarding what formal poetry is. And they hide behind catchphrases like “creativity” and “freedom” and “new directions,” when what’s really at work here is a dissatisfaction with received identities, and a desire to escape them. It’s a pathology that is much wider than the world of poetry.
Two cliché metaphors are frequently employed by such poets when you talk with them. They’ll say that they are “pushing the envelope” or “widening the boundaries” of formal verse. I’ve always said that metaphors don’t constitute arguments, but in these two cases the tropes are singularly inept. The whole damned point about formal metrical poetry is that it does have boundaries, and that it is contained in an envelope. That’s the linchpin of its identity. The only thing motivating a poet who wants to “push the envelope” or “break the boundaries” is deep hostility to the received identity of formal verse, and a corollary need to mangle it in some way. The hostility is camouflaged with Smiley-Face rhetoric about “new perspectives” and “openness” and “diversity,” but it’s there. That’s why I reach for my revolver when anyone spouts that tripe.
And this is where the desire to “have it all” is revealed for what it really is: a free-floating fear of being limited to a fixed identity, and a compulsion to escape anything that might stabilize one’s identity in a determinative manner. Or to put it less scholastically, it’s a desire for absolute freedom, even from definition. Such absolute freedom is a metaphysical impossibility, but that never stopped anyone with a compulsion. Just look at those idiots lined up to buy iPhones.
While I appreciate the broader issue you’ve addressed (another well-placed dart under the “ethopathy” rubric), I’ll narrow my comment to the sad plight — the specious altar — on which certain unnamed poets have sacrificed their souls.
First of all, a herd mentality bespeaks a profound lack of sound mentation. One can lament the fact that well-intentioned persons have chosen to “go with the flow,” and nowise does that interfere with their right to make such a choice. But correspondingly, these persons have no right to expect universal approbation.
Furthermore, if constitutive (as opposed to regulative) rules are in place only to be broken, then should we not despise contemporary masters of verse (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Frederick Turner and Stephen Edgar immediately come to mind.) for refusing to compromise their craft, despite their immense contributions to the canon? Or should we marginalize them as rogue demons?
The answers to these questions will be furtive glances
From those who let themselves forget how fine the dance is.
I shall say no more.
No one can object if a master of the craft disregards conventions and rules on occasion in the service of some higher aesthetic goal. But what has happened today is that vast numbers of self-styled practitioners of the craft (most of them hopeless amateurs and dabblers) have blithely assumed that disregarding conventions and rules is standard procedure. The poets whom you have mentioned are all acknowledged masters in the field, and they certainly have the right to bend the rules here and there.
As an editor, the practical problem that I face is the “trickling hole in the dike” danger. I must be strict and even a little rigid, because if I give way to one egregious violation of conventions, there will be a flood of requests from others that I do the same for them. And that way madness lies, and the death of any aesthetic identity. As a poet, of course I recognize the right of competent masters to do as they wish with their art.
I must recant my pledge (above) to “say no more” because it appears that my rhetoric may have been flawed. What I meant to say was that the luminaries I mentioned by name have never (to my knowledge) disregarded the constitutive rules of formal poetry. And thus my suggestion that we should despise these poets is purely ironic.
Wilbur, whom I’ve been reading of late, is exact in the metric substitutitions he makes, and what’s funny to me is that I could have studied under him while I was at Wesleyan University if it hadn’t taken me another thirty-five years to figure out that writing poems was my major avocation. He is an excellent, though unwitting, teacher.
To sum it up: It was far from my intention to suggest that poetic license should be issued as casually as a driver’s licence often is.
[Please note that I have misspelled "license" in the last line of my most recent reply.]