Charles Fort (poet)

Charles Fort (born 1951 New Britain, Connecticut) is an American poet.

Life

Fort graduated from Bowling Green State University with an MFA in 1977.^[1] He taught at the University of Nebraska at Kearney as The Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry (1997–2007

Awards

1994 winner of the Open Voice Award by The Writer's Voice
MacDowell Fellowship
Poetry Society of America award
1985 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize^[2]
The Mary Carolyn Davis Memorial Award

Works

. BOOK PUBLICATIONS

Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz (New and Selected Prose Poems) Backwaters Press, 2013 ISBN 978-1-935218-90-6 82 Pages

We Did Not Feat the Father (New and Selected Poems) Red Hen Press, 2012 ISBN 978-1-59709-172-5 219 Pages

The Vagrant Hours second edition 2000 Afro Psalms sonnet redouble second edition 2005 Afro Psalms sonnet redoublé third edition 2008

Selected Anthologies and Journals

Nebraska Poetry A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017 (A Book 150 Years in the Making) “We Did Not Fear the Father” “The Vagrant Hours”

The Heart is Improvisational An Anthology in Poetic Form 2017 “When We First Met I Was Half-in-Love With You”

Green Mountains Review 2017 "The Wealthy and Worthy Men of Color" (A Villanelle)

The Best American Poetry “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” Scribner 2016

The Best American Poetry “The Vagrant Hours” Scribner 2003

The Best American Poetry “We Did Not Fear The Father” Scribner 2001

“One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” “The Riderless Horse Fell On Sorrow Road” “These Were a Few of My Favorite Things“ “I Stooped and Held My Thin Wife’s Diary” “This Was My Story and This Was My Song” Green Mountains Review 2015

“Sorrow Road” Saranac Review, 2012

“How Stevens Met Crane On a Covered Bridge” “Hartford Was Seen Under a Black Street Lamp” “Stevens Walked a Yard Goat Back to the Woods” The Wallace Stevens Journal Johns Hopkins University Press 2015

“To A Young Child Waking” Villanelles Everyman’s Library/Knopf/Random House Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Annie Finch, editors April 2012

Making Arguments About Literature

“We Did Not Fear The Father”

5 Editions Bedford/St. Martin’s Press 2002-2011

Mississippi Review Prize Poems and Short Stories “The Vagrant Hours” University of Southern Mississippi 2002

The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal Providence College 2000

Mississippi Review Prize Poems and Short Stories University of Southern Mississippi 2000

The State of Poetry: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry Carolina Academic Press 1999

Emily Dickinson Award Anthology Universities West Press 1996 Immortelles Poems of Life and Death by New Southern Writers Xavier University Press 1995

Letters to America Contemporary American Poetry on Race Wayne State University Press 1993

The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry Carnegie Mellon University Press 1993

Reynolds Chair Books Limited Editions University of Nebraska at Kearney We Did Not Fear the Father 1998 As the Lilac Burned the Laurel Grew 1999 Immortelles 2000 Afro Psalms sonnet redoublé 2001 The Vagrant Hours 2002 The Poet’s Wife 2002 Blues of a Mumbling Train 2004 \ The Vagrant Hours second edition 2000 Afro Psalms sonnet redouble second edition 2005 Afro Psalms sonnet redoublé third edition 2008

"American Gargoyle", Oyster Boy Review 13
"The Magic Man Held a Blue Crystal Ball", Oyster Boy Review 13
Afro Psalms, University of Nebraska at Kearney Press
Frankenstein Was a Negro. Morris Pub. February 1, 2002. ISBN 978-0-9674123-1-3.
"In Memoriam (For My Wife, Wendy Fort)". Charles Fort (Poet). Retrieved 1 January 2016.
Immortelles: poems. University of Nebraska Press at Kearney. 2000.
Darvil: prose poems. St. Andrews Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-932662-58-3.
The town clock burning: poems. St. Andrews Press. 1985. ISBN 978-0-932662-54-5.
We Did Not Fear The Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press)
Mrs Belladonna's Supper Club Waltz (Backwaters Press)

Selected Anthologies and Journals Nebraska Poetry A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017 (A Book 150 Years in the Making) Stephen F. Austin University Press (May 2, 2017) “We Did Not Fear the Father” “The Vagrant Hours” The Heart is Improvisational An Anthology in Poetic Form 2017 “When We First Met I Was Half-in-Love With You” Guernica Editions Publisher Green Mountains Review 2017 "The Wealthy and Worthy Men of Color" (A Villanelle) The Best American Poetry “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” Scribner 2016 The Best American Poetry “The Vagrant Hours” Scribner 2003 The Best American Poetry “We Did Not Fear The Father” Scribner 2001 “One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” “The Riderless Horse Fell On Sorrow Road” “These Were a Few of My Favorite Things“ “I Stooped and Held My Thin Wife’s Diary” “This Was My Story and This Was My Song” Green Mountains Review 2015 “Sorrow Road” Saranac Review, 2012 “How Stevens Met Crane On a Covered Bridge” “Hartford Was Seen Under a Black Street Lamp” “Stevens Walked a Yard Goat Back to the Woods” The Wallace Stevens Journal Johns Hopkins University Press 2015 “To A Young Child Waking” Villanelles Everyman’s Library/Knopf/Random House Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Annie Finch, editors April 2012 Making Arguments About Literature “We Did Not Fear The Father” 5th Edition Bedford/St. Martin’s Press 2011 Making Arguments About Literature “We Did Not Fear The Father” 4th Edition Bedford/St. Martin’s press 2008 Making Arguments About Literature “We Did Not Fear The Father” 3rd Edition Bedford/St. Martin’s 2005 Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers “We Did Not Fear The Father” 2nd Edition Bedford/St. Martin’s Press 2003 Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers “We Did Not Fear The Father” 1st Edition Bedford/St. Martin’s Press Press 2002 Mississippi Review Prize Poems and Short Stories “The Vagrant Hours” University of Southern Mississippi 2002 The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal Providence College 2000 Mississippi Review Prize Poems and Short Stories University of Southern Mississippi 2000 The State of Poetry: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry Carolina Academic Press 1999 Emily Dickinson Award Anthology Universities West Press 1996 Immortelles Poems of Life and Death by New Southern Writers Xavier University Press 1995 Letters to America Contemporary American Poetry on Race Wayne State University Press 1993 The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry Carnegie Mellon University

Book Reviews of The Town Clock Burning, Darvil, Frankenstein was a Negro, We Did Not Fear the Father, and Mrs.Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz, Afro-Formalism, The Best American Poetry, 2000, 2003, 2016, by Charles Fort

The Town Clock Burning

St. Andrews Press, 1985

The New York Times Book Review 1985 Selected by Harold Brodkey for Writer’s Choice

…Consistently interesting—often luminous poetry.

The Mid-American Review Ken Shedd

No review can adequately praise the poetic and moral victory of this collection…the refusal to assume easy answers or to merely express hate, and the difficult, earned humility of “Race War” are testaments to Fort’s power’s as a poet…it is a speech-act of authenticity and integrity…I’m also struck here by how the poem’s allusion and borrowing from Tennyson work so naturally, the sonority of Fort’s language throughout this poems, and elsewhere in the collection is worthy of comparison to Tennyson.

University of North Carolina at Greensboro Fred Chappell

The publication of The Town Clock Burning is a signal event…a body of engaging work…a fine honesty…exhilarating lyricism.

North Carolina Literary Notes E.T. Malone

The Town Clock Burning is like a fresh canvas by some, new, imaginative painter…with his considerable imagination and gift for description…something of the durability of love and the continued possibility for hope among the wasteland…warnings to society about slavery, totalitarianism, and failure to recognize the humanity of all people…Fort rises about the regional and racial to where true freedom resides-in the core of the imagination.

Darvil Backwaters Press, 1991

THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Volume 4 | 1995 David Soucy

Charles Fort’s Darvil: A Series of Prose Poems and Linda Smukler’s Normal Sex

OTHER: Existing besides, or distinct from, that already mentioned or implied; not this, not the same, different in identity. - The Oxford English Dictionary.

Who, or what, is the Other? For the homeowner, is it the homeless? For the driver of the Lexus, is it the pedestrian or the Ford owner? For the white man, is it the black man? For the heterosexual, is it the homosexual? For the I, is it If? or Thou?

The poems of Linda Smukler, a lesbian who writes about being a lesbian, and those of Charles Fort, an African- American who writes about being an African-American, confront the reader with the Other. Through their fierce, polished work, we learn what it is like to be Other. But interestingly, the poets seem also to be confronting their other selves, for both have adopted a very specific persona in their respective collections, intensifying as well as mystifying the process of discovery. Within each book, we get inside two skins, as it were, watching the writers looking at themselves.

Charles Fort similarly explores the Other through the use of an elaborate persona. "Darvil," he notes, is a "composite of devil and evil," but he gives him a noble lineage: "direct descendent of Leo Africanus." All of the poems explore Darvil's experiences, but the speaker's voice is...whose? Early in the collection, the speaker admits that Darvil's birth was "intentional and well-crafted," and that Darvil "trained early to become a wordsmith."

I can only surmise from this that Fort is examining himself as Other through the mask of Darvil, for Darvil is described as a young mulatto boy whose eyes and hair are "the color of America," but who is outside its culture, despite his being an honor student, or joining the Coast Guard, or getting married in California, and despite the plethora of images from American Culture: Chatty Kathy dolls, Dorothy's ruby slippers, Scarlet O'Hara, country clubs, cub scout packs, the Blues.

Skewering cultural icons is Darvil's forte. How else does the Other deal with being on the outside? "Rose turns to give Mayhem a final message. You can't touch me now. The rules of commandment are broken. You just couldn't separate love and power. We are living in a cave. Rose leaves behind Mayhem who now stands in his highest form, covering his face with a Goodhousekeeping towel." The poem "Darvil Meets James Brown in Harlem and New Orleans" ends with this exorbitant polyphony of American sounds: "Mississippi Queen floats on a red river midnight saxophone, like a full moon carousel of bourbon and beer baroque goat ribs alligator pie mardi gras mambo street car lizard smokes a cuban cigar five minutes to show time ain't no potatoes like blackberry jam."

In deconstructing the great patchwork quilt that is American culture, Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy riffs through Fourth of July bombast, Native American lore, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism. And his comedy is Swiftian; he is most brutally funny when he is angriest, as when he defrocks the many ministers of his college education in my favorite poem of the collection, "Darvil Meets His College Professors": Darvil entered Biloxi University and majored in English....In college he learned a few details from a few professors. One was pleasant. She wrote and presented papers to the World Court on the great literature of women and ethnic writers. One Mr. Computer. His mouth clicked like his IBM. One a Freshman essay. He directed the English faculty into the realm of rubrics and dictated methodology like processed cheese. One ex-chairperson-woman-southern-slaveowner- broad. She gathered gold dust on summer excursions. Buffalo Bob rides her saddle again....One a man without words or sex. Old World pomp and saddle soap. Creative writing. Journalism. No longer his domain. Never his domain....One a Black Professor. He is Pleased to be with the department....

I'm not sure I didn't see myself somewhere on this acutely observed list. Fort's righteous indignation is pagan and untram-meled, but it is also rooted in a continuity of sorts. But that continuity is constantly at war with the Other. That Fort sees it from behind the mask of Darvil implies that direct experience is: misleading? subjective? self- negating?

The great Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats developed a complex theory of the mask, asserting that the masks allowed the poet to say things he or she would not be able to say otherwise. The mask is the means by which the poet can "discover the self." And Jungean psychologists have argued the importance of role-playing in shaping and developing the personality. Hence, the rhetorical strategy of the mask allows Smukler and Fort a degree of self- definition, or self-discovery.

As an aesthetic strategy, the mask also gives them a detachment that allows them to shape the experience into something whole. This is especially desirable in their cases, for both Smukler and Fort deal with explosive emotional issues here, and it is only through their careful artifice that we are able to get a fix on them. The masks adopted by Smukler and Fort, however, reinforce our identification with the speaker; we are both the Other and one who confronts the Other. Through Smukler's persona of the Monkey Boy, we relive the role- playing, which is only part discovery and also part survival mechanism. Through Darvil, we can both appreciate and castigate that which makes Darvil possible. And Fort chooses to make Darvil a personification of evil because to perceive the Other is to perceive evil. Smukler similarly posits that the girlchild has been made the source of her own shame, her own self-hatred.

Charles Simic in his poem "Totemism" writes, "Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of art is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other." I have tried very hard not to present these poets as "African-American" or "Lesbian," although that is in part what they are. But their work moves far beyond those narrow labels. Their labor is universal in its implications, and their longing is altogether human.

In a review of her new novel (Called Out, NY Times Book Review, June 19, 1994. p.7), A.G. Mojtabai is quoted as saying, "[The] Balkanization of literature disturbs me. There's black literature, there's gay and lesbian literature and women's literature, and it keeps on dividing. My feeling is that literature is a human enterprise, a bridging enterprise, and one of the reasons I care so much about it is that it attempts to bring news of how it feels to live in someone else's skin." The works of Linda Smukler and Charles Fort are eloquent, if painful, testimony to that ideal.

Donald Soucy

Frankenstein Was A Negro

Frankenstein Was A Negro is a lyrical psalm--it sings the blues and has the scat and soul of the Cotton Club. It's a testament to the true working class--hands tattered and torn; eye squinting bright. Reminiscent of Baudelaire, father of the prose poem, this collection mesmerizes and haunts and becomes terrifying to its own creator.

The poems in this collection are the sort that make me want to sit and read them out loud to myself over and over again (which I did). Nobody uses language quite like Fort, nobody. In these poems he takes language and makes it do what he wants it to do, unlimited by traditional usage, meaning, structure, and linearity, and the language actually obeys. There is an inherent feeling of wisdom in these poems as well, something that makes me trust from the get go that there is something of serious import that I am about to be told. All done with a velvety, deep base richness that is not to be missed.

Absolutely spectacular. Excellent mastery of the craft. Soul. A master poet.

Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz

Charles Fort, as though the hellhound were on his tail as it was on his spectacular work’s chief spiritual presence, Robert Johnson, will take you on a hard ride here. Robert Johnson was perhaps the supreme eminence in that profoundest formal contribution to American poetry, the blues; and yet Fort’s choice of a breathless, even a rampaging prose-poem manner at once pays homage to his great mentor and encompasses a huge swatch of history – social, political, religious, familial, neighborly, generational. The reader may first imagine these poems as surreal, but in fact they are super-real: Charles Fort has found an utterly precise and moving idiom for things large and small, ones that would – before Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz -- have seemed beyond expression. He is matchless.

Sydney Lea Vermont Poet Laureate

Green Mountains Review by The Editors | Aug 11, 2014 We did not fear the father as the barber who stood like a general in a white jacket with a green visor cap . . . We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark.

(“We Did Not Fear the Father”)

http://i0.wp.com/greenmountainsreview.com/wp-‐content/uploads/2014/08/fort-‐ cover.jpg

Red Hen Press. 2012. 213 pages.

As an entity, We Did Not Fear the Father might be summed up as a collection whose concern is limits: the limits of history, of form, of the collective and the personal. Read in chronological order, the poems become increasingly longer, denser, and more assertive as time bears down on the poet, as the liminal spaces of a lifetime shift and change. If the purpose of a ‘selected’ work is meant to give a sense of the best of a poet’s career up through present day, We Did Not Fear the Father achieves its goal—and then some. This collection gives one the sense of a life lived in poetry.

“This is the clock of boundaries,” the opening poem in the book announces, “marking its descent as its final seconds / pass into history and without pause / we harm what it tells us to harm” (“The Town Clock Burning”). The poems selected from this first book inquire about history in the broadest sense, history as our collective inheritance. After all, “we are children of circumstance, slave ships and reckless stars” (“Race War”). On the other hand, the poems from Darvil, Fort’s second book, are formally different from the first. A self-‐declared “prose-‐poem sequence” these poems mark the passage of time for the poet. The sense of a sharpening of poetics can already be felt. In Darvil the poet begins to cull the poems into a more personal shape. The poems are arguably more specific, more grounded in a real person’s experience: “on this day he begins to teach his children to recognize no state no war no / bargain in the rib crackling head snapping jargon thrown down from the men of / war and fame” (“XXXXVI Darvil and the 4th of July”).

By the third selection, history—specifically the history of African Americans—begins to collapse into the personal history of the poet. Poems such as “Frankenstein Was a Negro,” “T.S. Eliot Was a Negro,” and “Poem for the Mad” embody this examination of the boundary between the personal versus the collective. These three poems use repeated phrases (and even titles, as the first two poems indicate) to further illustrate the limits of historical reality. By the fourth selection, “As the Lilac Burned the Laurel Grew,” the reader becomes aware of yet another set of limits working within the collection; that is, the limits of form.

The title poem of this selection is a villanelle, one of the many forms Fort uses in the collection. He is, clearly, a virtuoso of craft, moving effortlessly from sonnets, to prose poems, to villanelles, to sestinas, elegies and haiku, to name a few. Addressing the liminal through form seems an obvious choice, but, unlike meditations on history or his biological father, Fort uses form in this collection as a way to push back against the liminal. Fort’s many and varied forms stretch poetry to its limits. What other forms might the poems in this collection take, the reader wonders. In “New Poems” Fort drops the barrier between speaker and poet altogether, writing about his two daughters and the deaths of his wife Wendy and his brother Kenny. These poems are intimate, specific and wildly beautiful. It is no coincidence they are at the very center of the book, the heart of the collection.

The title poem of Charles Fort’s new and selected poems, situated unexpectedly in the second half of the collection, provides a deeply autobiographical lens through which to read all of the poetry in We Did Not Fear the Father. The individual lineage of the speaker is made explicit in this poem, a poem that works as a sort of bridge between earlier work and newer poems in the collection. The narrative context is that of a real father who worked as a barber, a landlord, a factory worker; one the reader has come to know well through the poems. The limits keep being raised in this poem, and are what seem to be most at stake for the speaker. The hinge of the word ‘until’ denotes such a limit. Sure, “we did not fear the father as landlord in our three-‐story tenement / who took charge of four apartments and the attic dwellers,” but by the next stanza “we did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise//our father. . . stooped in the dark.” What began as negation has become fear realized for the speaker.

As creative writing teachers are prone to say: in the particular we find the universal. How true this feels in Fort’s work, particularly in his title poem. Here “we” remember the father alongside the poet/speaker, and “we” are invited to do so with open arms. The poem, too, is a meditation on fatherhood for a poet who earlier in the collection became a father himself. Fort seems to be questioning just what marks the distinction between the public and the private, between the collective and the individual. The final poem in the collection is a summary of all that has come before it, all that history, public and private, all that formal variety in which the space any poem is given is stretched as far as possible. It is a poem worth reading in full:

Hollow Ground #2

Here at the quiet limit of the world they found the wingless sweetbird and unburied the Atlas of Eros. They fed the bird rare pearls until it sang.

There were no graves for the wounded men sent to war in search of heaven’s border and the one spoiled gift of salvation. They disappeared into the little wood.

They heard the chime in the dirt cellar and saw the glass chalice fall apart as the animals groaned in their stalls until chaumeau fog passed over them.

Here at the quiet limit of the world two daughters in their winter coats danced without music or men without history in their eyes.

KAY COSGROVE was awarded the John B. Santoianni Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2011. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, North American Review, and the American Book Review, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing & Literature program.

We Did Not Fear the Father New and Selected Poems

In his poem entitled “Race War,” Charles Fort concludes that “earth is not sufficient and earth is our only companion.” But here is a poet who can weave magic out of that bleak fact. In WE DID NOT FEAR THE FATHER, I am ever the great blues tradition not only in American music but also in American culture: Fort is one of those ingenious improvisers who can take what little the world leaves him and transform it into tunefulness, forever staying ahead of all that would destroy him in realms both human and natural. Whether meditating on his wife’s tragic death, on the innocence of his sleeping child, on the sufferings of his brother, or whatever else, this writer’s way with rhythms and cadences, his simply astonishing command of forms (from prose poem to villanelle to free verse, blank verse and haiku), his plain greatness of heart: all these remind us that to the eye that would seek it and to the voice that would articulate it, beauty is an abiding thing. Charles Fort’s readers should rejoice once again to have his testimony to that glorious truth.

Sydney Lea Vermont Poet Laureate

We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems by Charles Fort is a powerful, sometimes an overwhelming, collection. It boils with passion in its observations about social justice; it murmurs its intimate but respectful love poems, and it weeps frankly and openly in the heart-tearing elegies. Every poem, every line, is charged with feeling.

But these are not dithyrambic outpourings. There is a startling abundance of formal usages. Surrealism is employed for the musical violence with which it can color metaphors and there are jazz-rock-blues rhythms behind many of the phrasings. But there are also more traditional forms and variations, villanelles, modular poems in which lines and phrases can be transposed from one place to another so that the meanings of words, sentences, and even of rhythms change, and there are poems that build upon the words of other poets like Tennyson and Dickinson. Here is an amazing array of forms, both traditional and experimental, and these forms are forcefully expressive; they are not mere showpieces.

I have known and admired Mr. Fort’s poems for some decades now, but much of the work here is new to me. I have been profoundly impressed—and moved.

Fred Chappell

It is a good sign when a poet is hard to pigeonhole, and indeed Charles Fort defies easy categorization. He writes prose poems that declare they are sonnets, and sonnets that declare they are Psalms. His villanelles are often ludically experimental, while his free verse displays a formal rigor. These poems are in lively conversation with—listening and talking back to--the Western canon. Fort executes surreality with wry humor and political spark (“T. S. Eliot was a Negro”; “Autobiography of Nine Genres” where “There is a georgic didactic descriptive verse inside the washing machine knocking against the oak tree…”), but ultimately these poems are grounded in the real world and felt emotions, and he writes poignantly about family love and loss When a night-shift factory working father brings back ball bearings from the factory for his children to play with as marbles (“the largest on the block”), we feel the weight of those steel spheres, humble gestures of love, on which so much vast machinery depends.

A.E. Stallings

Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz

Sydney Lea Vermont Poet Laureate

Afro-formalism BY A.E. STALLINGS

Rigoberto’s shout-out to Allison Joseph brought to mind the best panel I attended at AWP, titled “Afro-formalism: Owning the Masters” (after a famous essay by Marilyn Nelson.) It was on Saturday afternoon, not the most propitious time-slot as a lot of folks were tired or packing up or winding down or just, well, hungover, and so was not the best attended, but it was electrifying and invigorating. There was a terrific rapport among the panelists (Charles Fort, Tara Betts, Erica Dawson, and Allison Joseph), and between the panelists in the audience, who would periodically burst into applause or laughter. It was also some of the smartest and most sensible and insightful stuff about form I have heard in a long time.

For one thing, it was unapologetic, without that defensiveness poets who work in form are prone too (But I also write free verse! But I am really not a formalist! I substitute! Hide the rhymes!) For another, everyone was professional and relaxed and super-prepared (not, er, always the case at these things…), kept to their time, came at it from another angle, listened and responded to their fellow panelists. Charles Fort spoke about Robert Hayden and how he had not been considered “black enough” in his time—something that in retrospect seems a bit bizarre for the author of the great sonnet “Frederick Douglas.” In America, use of form has long been an oddly politicized choice. (Women are sometimes criticized in the same way for using it—that false dichotomy of free verse = democracy and empowerment and progress whereas formal verse = oppression and elitism and kowtowing to dead white males.)

Tara Betts gave a fascinating discussion of forms invented by African-Americans (as the Bop, see below), and of how we can all use forms invented in other cultural contexts—that they are all open to everyone, and gain energy from cultural cross-fertilization. Erika Dawson, who has something like rock star status in the formal world, and who has the presence to go with it (this is a tall woman who has written an ode to high-heeled shoes…), spoke about her relationship to the tradition, tossing off some seriously dead white male influences like Anthony Hecht and James Merrill,and reminding us of just how raunchy the Metaphysical poets could be. A decade ago she was told at a recitation contest that “form was dead” but now she has served as judge at that same contest. She exuded confidence and vindication, taking on the canon in her own terms.

Allison Joseph discussed among other things how she came to form, her fascination with invented and repeating forms (and forms invented by “women with three names”), and how sonnets, say, helped her handle toxic subjects like grief, how she could say things in form she couldn’t say in her free-verse, how it actually gave you permission to say such things. Here’s her blog about rondeaus and other forms of repetition, The Rondeau Roundup.

OK, I wasn’t taking notes—this is all from memory—so this is rather a vague sketch—forgive me if I didn’t get it all straight. But at the same time, rather impressive that so much of it did lodge in the memory! I was most fascinated, I think, with the discussion of “The Bop.” Invented at Cave Canem by Aafa Michael Weaver, it partakes of the proportions and perhaps the argument of the sonnet, in stanzas of 6/8/6 lines, which all end with a refrain.

I am particularly fascinated with forms that are extensions of the sonnet tradition, and it seems to me this could be added to the Meredithian sonnet, the caudeated sonnet, the curtal sonnet. I hope to try my hand at it someday. But what was exhilarating was, I think, that what came out of this was that the tradition and form were not about exclusion or elitism or who owns or is allowed to do what. It was about inclusion and access and taking all things human as belonging to everybody, about the ongoing conversation, dialogue really, of the dead and the living, about owing the canon not an obligation of respect and deference, to put it in a museum, but an obligation to pass it forward, to add to it, enrich it, keep it alive, take it into the future.

“One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” The Best American Poetry, 2016

    My interest in poetic forms, no doubt, began with my first reading of A.E. Housman’s Loveliest of Trees as a lad at our working class city’s public library in New Britain, Connecticut. Poets might read Waniek’s Owning the Masters and find how writers often borrow, tamper, and dismiss the past, present, and future too easily. When I told a colleague I was writing 200 Villanelles, he said in a soft yet desperate tone: ”No. No. No.” Reading “One had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing” is to discover a range of flexibility the form allows to only a few expert technicians. In this example, and in the others I have seen, technique is secondary to impulse and import.” Fred Chappell “The poem might have been a sonnet-sequence, I've written two, a prose-poem sequence, I’ve written a trilogy, or several sestinas. Indeed, I wrote a letter to Stephen Hawking at Oxford, not to apply for the job opening to be his assistant, but to ask him if he had time to discern the unnknownable origin of the sixes in the sestina.The matter has yet to be settled. My last attempt was a variant-triple-sestina full of odd and relentless repetends. “Fort’s  villanelles are heart-breaking and deft. I envy his (apparent) ease with so obsessive a format, which so perfectly fits the obsessive contents.” Sydney Lea
    I walked into a cafe ready to sit, read, and write. I observed what I assumed were a mother and daughter ordering their coffee. The daughter seemed distraught. They sat down, the daughter weeping and mother not recognizing the face of her own daughter, nor the place they sat and trembled with their simple cups. Over the next few days my poem emerged out of memory and imagination: One Had Lived in a Room and Loved Nothing.

We Did Not Fear the Father The Best American Poetry, 2001

Charles Fort writes: “We Did Not Fear the Father was completed in three years. The first year of drafts took the shape of a prose poem. The second year examined the form. There were shorter lines and stanzas in quatrains. I attempted to use the line We did not fear the father as the approximate line length of the entire work. The third year defined its metaphor, rhythm, and meter. I also used a longer line length: We did not fear the father as the barber who stood, and I found the emphasis I had originally sought in the shorter form remained. I also sustained the poem’s unity and its narrative elements by using the phrase as a refrain.

There are two key transitions in the poem. We did not fear the father until he entered the tomb of noise.) The ashes in the furnace are lifted by love and fear. The son fears his father’s weariness. (We did not fear the father until he stooped in the dark and mortality even as his father lifts his sons and daughters like birds into the top bunk beds. The time clock was a pendulum inside his father’s heart that kept him half-alive. The father had a wife, seven children, holiday barbecues, summer garden, and a small black and white fox terrier named Frisky. The father was a workingman who toiled on the nightshift making ball bearings in New Britain, Connecticut (once called the Hardware City of the World) from 11:00 p.m. to seven a.m. for forty years. The father was a barber from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., depending on the head count, for forty years. The father was a landlord in his three-story tenement. He rented the second, third, and attic apartments. He was on call twenty-four hours a day. I wanted to capture the three jobs he held well as his fourth and fifth: he was our father and the scaremonger.”

The Vagrant Hours The Best American Poetry, 2003

Fort writes: “The Vagrant Hours is not a mere calendar of genres or a reckless treatise on the creative process. I attempted to meld a narrative thread within variant forms, always a wheelbarrow task for any closet formalist. Form assists the intuitive journey on the precarious cliff with a flared tongue toward heaven and hell. Form is a rhetorical vessel, a velvet bag of metaphors found in the back pocket of the drowned poet, images left on the gangplank after his last great dive, shipwrecked on the landscape of the heart’s repair. I end here with the concluding lines from my unclaimed sonnet: Salieri breeds his own cross and crown/Amadeus hears the singing of the earthmen and their ruby dolls.

References

Authority control	WorldCat Identities VIAF: 45813962 LCCN: n87132853 IATH: w6mt1q2n

↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-04-29. Retrieved 2009-10-30.
↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-07-28. Retrieved 2009-10-30.

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