I really like this detail. In teaching us about organic form Levertov teaches us that the key is apperception, and then using that apperception to mold the shape the rhythm of the poem. She points out how this is different from free verse, which she argues is "inattentive to the relationship between lines."
What say you? Have you yet dabbled in organic poetry or do you tend to write free verse? From your knowledge and experience do you see one form being better than the other? Explain.
Having done work in both organic poetry and free verse, I can say that there is a subtle difference between the two. I would venture to say that the crucial difference between them is that organic poetry is a comprehensive exploration into the more nuanced complexities of rhythm between lines, while free verse is a comprehensive deconstruction of rhythm and rhyme within lines. Organic poetry is an attempt to make a more complex rhyme scheme that is dependent on capturing the essence of its subject matter. For example, when I wrote an organic poem about a sloth (because sloths are awesome, as everyone clearly knows), I purposefully made the stanzas short and made it to be read very slowly, so as to imitate the sloth's movement pattern. Brilliant, right? As to the nature of free verse poems, they basically allow you to run free and write poetry that is more akin to prose writing. But that doesn't make it any less viable than organic poetry.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction that this article makes between free verse and organic poetry is interesting to me. On one hand, I'm not sure that I quite agree with the statement that free verse "is inattentive to the relationship between lines." This strikes me as a generalization - I think a lot of free verse poetry does make use of techniques that establish a relationship between lines. It seems to me that repetition, for instance, creates meaning beyond the "truth and precision particular to each line" in which it appears that the article claims is the focus of free verse.
ReplyDeleteBut I may be misidentifying poems as free verse that would more accurately be considered organic poems. The concept of organic form is somewhat new to me, and I also realize now that I've never spent much time reading up on or reflecting on what "free verse" means beyond its basic definition. Prior to reading this article and discussing the concept in class, I probably would have labeled some of the poems that we read for class as free verse. I think it may just be difficult to discern whether a poem's form is organic or not just by looking at the finished product. Levertov's description seems more focused on the process of composing the poem, and I think the difference that she is describing may come more from the fact that there seems to be a specific mindset and approach involved in writing organic poetry that differ from those used to produce free verse. As the introduction states, organic form "attends first to the shape and rhythm of the entire poem," with the intent of capturing the writer's apperception.
I think most of my own poetry would still be classified as free verse, but after reading this article and the description of the difference between the two types, I think I sometimes incorporate elements of organic form. In the last poem I wrote, for example, I wanted the structure to reflect the themes and narrative. Before I sat down to write it, I knew the basic shape that I wanted the poem to take, and that shape was integral to creating the poem's meaning. That brings to mind the quote from the intro that I excerpted in the paragraph above. Now that I pause and think about it, I'm not sure that that was something I did with my poetry prior to that specific poem, though; I usually do have somewhat of a structure even though I don't write in traditional forms, but I don't think it's necessarily an organic one. Reflecting on it now, I do like how I was able to help to create the poem's meaning through its form - I think it adds something more to that particular poem that wouldn't be there otherwise because it allows the reader to experience the emotion of it in a way that doesn't rely on the words themselves exclusively. I don't think this necessarily means that organic form is better than free verse (or vice versa), though; different approaches might be better suited for different poems and poets.