"Openness," "Closure," and Recent American Poetry

ALAN GOLDING "Openness," "Closure," and Recent American Poetry SKED in the mid-seventies to comment on the term "open form," one well-known American poet responded like this: It's confusing to me. What is it, NaL·d Poetry, that whole stupid thing. You know, this country has had such a bleak battle between 'free verse' and so-called classically, conceptually formal verse or previous senses of metrical pattern. I keep wishing there was a word that was more accurate. I mean, projective verse is one sense, but that too is a kind of final cliché, it doesn't really locate very much. ... I certainly use closed forms with very decisive patterns that are very familiar. (Faas 194) This statement, perhaps surprisingly, comes from one of American poetry's most long-standing proponents of an open form poetics, virtually the co-inventor ofprojective verse, Robert Creeley. In an interview from the same period, Gary Snyder says "I have no antipathy as such to closed form. Like, anything that works, I'll use"; "I would not like to get caught between open and closed" (Faas 125, 134). A balancing of the impulses toward openness and closure, a mixing of open and closed forms, of free and metrical verse, actually occurs quite often in poets in the tradition of the New American poetry, and even in the Language writers who constitute their most visible literary descendants. Among the latter group, for instance, we find Lyn Hejinian, in a talk called "The Rejection of Closure," proposing that "form cannot be equated with closure, nor can raw material be equated Arizona Quarter!} Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610 78Alan Golding with the open. . . . the point is not to find what's closed and what's open and then all line up and play tug of war. The point is that there's a very generative struggle between the two impulses" (270, 291). In fact, responding to Hejinian's talk, Ron Silliman calls attention to the procedural similarities between her prose pseudo-autobiography M} Life and the sonnet: the prose of M31 Life, "in terms of its programmatic nature, thirty-seven thirty-sevens, is . . ., although on a considerably different scale, on the order of that which, if one could neutrally look at what a sonnet was, the sonnet is" (Hejinian 287). And in a jacket blurb commenting on the rectangular blocks of text that make up Ray DiPalma's RAiK, Steve McCaffery blurs conventional distinctions between "open" and "closed" even further: "RAlK comes as a timely challenge to the current paradigm of the open text. Avoiding the production of simple closure, DiPalma conflates obedience and transgression in his choice of an uncompromising formal restraint as the rule for composition. " Meanwhile, at the other, New Formalist, end of the current literary spectrum, Dana Gioia shares Hejinian's view of the impulses toward openness and closure as mutually generative: "In my own poetry I have always worked in both fixed and open forms. ... I find it puzzling therefore that so many poets see these modes as opposing aesthetics rather than as complementary techniques" ("Notes" 408); "free and formal verse are not mutually exclusive options; they are synergistic" ("Statement" 89). Richard Moore's plea, in an essay that explicitly associates Frost's work with closed and Williams's with open forms, is to "let the two kinds thrive side-by-side, enlivening each other with their complementary energies" (87, 103). And Robert McPhillips seeks to bridge the gap rhetorically when he uses Olson's and Duncan's language to describe "'the open field' of [Timothy Steele's] paradoxically metrically closed poem," "Timothy" (203). The stability of the distinction between so-called open and closed form, then, a distinction upon which the anthology wars of the late fifties and sixties rested, has been questioned for some years now and from a number of different perspectives. And surely it should be, when, among poets connected with Language writing, Susan Howe, in The Western Borders, moves in and out of anapaests and iambs; or when Clark Coolidge writes lush, quasi-Elizabethan quatrains; or when Steve McCaffery arranges iambic pentameters typographically as...