Episode 1161: Getting Ahead Of Myself...

I'm having trouble deciding what I want to write about for my EN973 essay. I know it's definitely going to be related to questions of form (or apparent lack thereof, since I'd argue that even free verse, which is supposedly the absence of form, is in itself a kind of formal choice, if that makes sense), and I initially thought I'd got it all figured out. I was going to write about Thom Gunn and either Elizabeth Bishop or Jack Clemo, and it would be in relation to what has been thought of as 'the consolation of form', to borrow Frank Kermode's words, since I think it isn't hard to make a case that in the work of these poets, the formal shape of the poetry is very much a part of its effect. Intuitively though, I sense that I may be getting ahead of myself, since the particular angle I want to approach the poetry from, i.e. in relation to disease/disability and grief, could make for an essay question better suited to next term's EN954 Romantic Elegy. (Especially because then I could do Mark Doty or Paul Monette alongside Gunn instead, in relation to specifically AIDS and grief.) Then I was browsing through this book I'd borrowed by Marjorie Perloff, in which she does close readings of a whole series of poems, and there was one chapter where she brought up Christian Bök's Eunoia, and her reading of it really made sense for me of what I'd previously only been able to think of as an Oulipian exercise. So I got to thinking that maybe the broader question of constraints in writing poetry would be something interesting to look at. After all, form is a type of constraint when it comes to the writing of poetry; it's just one that can be handled well or misapplied. I guess what I really should be doing is talking all this over with Emma Mason, since she convenes both the modules that the essays are for anyway...