In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry [Paperback]

A good way to see how a poem works is to mess it up. Here is one reset as prose:

“Against brown walls, the servant bends over the coverlet she mends-brown hair, brown flocking, a dun hand under the lamp, the servant bends over the coverlet she mends draped across her broad brown skirts; knotting, nodding, the servant blends into the coverlet she mends.”

Nothing happens-then nothing happens again! Set it right, though, and “nothing happens over and over” turns to the “one moment unfolding forever” that is the lot of the servant, the scope of the painting, and the insight of this lovely triolet called “Vuillard Interior” by Elise Partridge:

Against brown walls, the servant bends
over the coverlet she mends-
brown hair, brown flocking, a dun hand
under the lamp, the servant bends
over the coverlet she mends
draped across her broad brown skirts;
knotting, nodding, the servant blends
into the coverlet she mends.

The interior is the servant’s inner life. That is the core around which a whole universe of attention is arranged. Through full absorption in her task she becomes the object of her awareness-the coverlet she mends. Through full absorption in our task we become the object of our awareness-a servant mending a coverlet. Though trapped, as she is, in a cramped room, pigment, a verbal construct, we are also made free, as she is, through a practice of devotional attention. And it is not the words themselves, but their arrangement, their form, that gives the servant her interior, conveys her freedom there, and has us enter it.
The triolet is a difficult minor form, eight iambic lines, two rhyme sounds (abaaabab), and two refrains, one recurring in lines 1, 4, and 7, the other in lines 2 and 8. Not a form to write an epic in-a form, rather, in which to study stasis, change, freedom, art, the cyclical. Partridge introduces two skilful variations, one to the rhyme scheme (a and b are rearranged and off-rhymed, and line 6 unrhymed, like a flicker of light in a dark room), and one to the refrain in line 7 (“blends” for “bends”). As in all good formal poetry-or, to use the infelicitous phrase of the work under review, “form poetry”-the form combusts so thoroughly that not even ash remains.
In Fine Form is an anthology of Canadian poems in (or at least in shouting distance of) the received forms thought of as traditional. Most of the poems that editors Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve have collected combust incompletely, leaving behind charred stick ends, bits of kindling that never caught, bricks and bottle caps that shouldn’t have been thrown in there in the first place. At one or more points, that is, imagination is severed from technique, the form becomes visible, a set of rules, and the poet, obeying or breaking them, strains, pads, chimes, or otherwise falsifies. There are maybe a score here that keep the necessary heat throughout, among them Irving Layton’s beautiful “Song for Naomi,” a pantoum by Kirsten Emmott, a lipogram by Paul Dutton that confines itself not just to the sonnet form but to the letters in the word “sonnet” and takes as its topic (what else) itself, and this tanka by David McFadden in the tradition of Issa:

Ian sees I am
Torturing myself again.
I tell him if I
Don’t torture myself who will?
He says give nature a chance.

Unfair to accuse an anthology of neglecting the poems one loves best. Still, it seems reasonable to wish for more of Birney (one poem) and less of Marilyn Bowering (three). One can never have enough Page (why only three poems) and even a little Carman is a surfeit (why oh why three poems). It is odd to make more room for Marianne Bluger (two poems) than for such luminaries, or at least sublunaries, as Pratt, Layton, Klein, and Skelton (one poem apiece). That said, nothing in either collection, the actual book under review or my ideal, lessens my feeling that our poetry stumbles as it tries to cross a certain threshold. I mean the threshold beyond which technical prowess and imaginative power are indistinguishable and enduring poetry becomes possible. One service this anthology performs is to make the point painfully clear.
Because that point will be unpopular with the editors, most poets, and many readers-indeed, even I, Canadian at my core, dislike it, and myself for voicing it-I shall now summon to my aid no less a critic than Northrop Frye, who writes in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada:

“If evaluation is one’s guiding principle, criticism of Canadian literature would become only a debunking project, leaving it a poor naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity. . . . There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference.”

The sooner we foreswear the tired, obligatory claim-made once more by the editors of this anthology, implicitly in their title and explicitly elsewhere-that Canadian poetry has “arrived”, the better. Such pronouncements are a self-defeating prophecy and reek of the insecurity they are meant to ward off.
In Fine Form is a look at how Canadian poets have explored, inhabited, and transfigured forms received from traditions with more depth and substance than our own. Poems are grouped by their form and introduced with a brief discussion of its history and demands; a schematic lays out “the traditional form” in terms of the stanza shapes, metrical patterns, rhyme schemes, and uses of repetition that define it. Several entries have real merit. The sonnet section offers a number of well-crafted poems, among them pieces by Kenneth Leslie, Margaret Avison, George McWhirter, John Reibetanz, and Barbara Nickel. The section on the glosa-a medieval Spanish form that plucks four lines from another poem, posts them as an epigraph, and works them into the new poem-takes a book of glosas by P. K. Page as its touchstone. The poets who draw their inspiration, and sometimes their epigraph, from Hologram, which is surely one of the high-water marks of Canadian poetry, also draw some of her austere sensuality into their own work. The demands of the form have stimulated here the sort of interplay between tradition and individual talent out of which a distinctive Canadian poetry of the first order might one day emerge.
But that is a possible future. The present is shabbier business. And, like the corpus from which it draws, In Fine Form generally isn’t. To start with a minor issue, there are numerous proofreading errors: spelling mistakes, missing dates for poets, neglected stanza breaks, skipped ellipses, apostrophes smart-quoted the wrong way round (‘tis instead of ’tis), indexing errors, and a bibliography that would have left my grade 10 English teacher, God love him, apoplectic. These flaws are small nicks from which the book begins to hemorrhage authority.
A devotee of syllabics, I turned to that section first, and found a bloody mess. Sapphics are described, incorrectly, as a syllabic form. Writing a syllabic line one counts only syllables; the stresses land where they may or as one wishes; any line that falls into feet-including the Sapphic, a sequence of trochees and dactyls-is not syllabic. In fact, the first poem in the section is iambic tetrameter; the second alternates iambic tetrameter lines with a single amphibrach; the third and fourth are in Sapphics. Only with the fifth do we come to a poem that actually belongs in the section.
One comes to feel the editors have less than full command of their subject. Explaining syllabics, they write that “[s]ince the sixteenth century, English has been primarily an accentual-syllabic language.” But the term “accentual-syllabic” applies to verse systems, not linguistic systems; our language is primarily accentual, modulating syllable stress rather than pitch or duration; our poetry has been primarily accentual-syllabic since the Renaissance. The afterword on poetics is just as prone to error. The editors write that “metrical patterns are divided into ‘feet’”-but only accentual-syllabic meters fall into feet, not syllabic schemes, nor accentual ones. They write that “isometric poetry was the norm until the end of the Middle Ages,” which would surprise all the troubadours, balladeers, and hewers of bobs and wheels who worked in stanzas with irregular line lengths.
Much of the secondary material seems half-digested. Citing one author’s notion that the sonnet was “the first lyric form of ‘self-consciousness’,” the editors write, by way of elaboration, that in the sonnet writers and readers “were, for the first time in European poetry, encouraged to think for themselves.” This falls well short of the authority one expects of a published text. The author’s point, surely, is that they were encouraged, or sentenced, to think of themselves as selves. The editors also pack the glossary with abstruse, unnecessary terms: anadiplosis, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, polyptoton, symploce! Meanwhile, genuinely useful terms are misused. In Fine Form wants to be both textbook and anthology but succeeds only in patches as either. Terms are mishandled, metrical systems only half-mastered, and the insights of secondary sources too often reduced to banalities.
I would be less dismayed by the book’s uneven taste and shaky command-and more swayed by its strengths, which are curiosity, enthusiasm, and a heartfelt wish to perform a service to Canadian poetry-if not for flaws in its basic conception. Arranging sections alphabetically, from ballad through couplet and syllabics to villanelle, the book conflates four distinct categories: poetic forms (sestina, sonnet), means to form (couplet, stanza), poetic genres (epigram), and metrical systems (syllabics). The confusion of form with means to form may trouble only the fastidious. But the conflation of form and genre is a real problem, since some forms bring with them generic expectations that may or may not be realized. One leaves the section on the ballad, for instance, feeling that the ballad form is defined by a set of tones and attitudes, rather than by metrical and stanzaic constraints. Poems faithful to neither form nor genre add to the confusion, for instance this ode to obfuscation called “The Ballad of Echolocation”:

Lighthouse the slick line
a spearing the far sky
for catching the capsize
a shipment of import.

As for meter, conflating it with form is like saying lumber or granite is the same sort of thing as a house or a cathedral.
If the book had avoided these category errors, it could have explained a poem like F. R. Scott’s “Metric Blues” in terms of its meter (podic verse), its form (a hybrid of Skeltonics, blues stanza, and medieval song), and its genre (pastiche), instead of tossing it into a grabbag called “Blues” that also includes a sonnet, a prose poem, an open form confection that happens to have the word “blues” in the title, and only one piece, George Elliott Clarke’s excellent “King Bee Blues”, within spitting distance of the aab tercet described in the preamble. If the book had treated different metrical systems adequately, the Anglo-Saxon line (a form) could have been offered as the central instance of accentual poetry (a meter) in our tradition-instead of being shelved at the back among the acrostics, concrete poems, limericks, and other misfits.
Meanwhile, with the poems in each section arranged chronologically, one often turns from the schematic description of a form to a poem that cheerfully violates it. A poet who departs from a form is entering a dialogue with the tradition, but without any felt sense of the form’s normative use, one cannot feel the significance, power, genius, or folly of her variations. An arrangement set free of chronology-Clarke’s poem first rather than seventh-would have served the material far better. In other words, a more sceptical, curious, or restless relationship to the traditional form of the anthology (sections arranged alphabetically, poems chronologically) might have led the editors to a more suitable arrangement. In particular, given the fondness of our poets for blues sonnets, sonnet lipograms, lipogram prose poems, concrete haiku, and the like, a separate section for hybrids would have shed light on the real distinction that runs through this material, between forms as they are received, and forms finessed, wrenched, or chimeraed, for better or worse, into something new and strange.
Christopher Patton (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

With this groundbreaking anthology, poets and teachers Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve set out to explore Canadian form poetry. The result is a thrilling collection of 175 poems, over 140 poets from the 18th century to the present day, and 20 distinct poetic forms (sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, epigrams, pallindromes, blues and more) that will appeal to every poetry-lover as well as teachers and students of poetry. Poets include Bliss Carman, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Dennis Lee, George Elliott Clarke, Alden Nowlan, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Molly Peacock, Lorna Crozier, Anne Simpson, smile Nelligan, Adam Sol, Barbara Nickel, Christian Bok and over 100 more. "No verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job." -T. S. Eliot