Formal Verse and Hard Aesthetic Choices in Revision

From the villanelle, sonnet, and sestina that I’ve been working on during the last couple of months, I’ve found that adhering too strictly to the form is detrimental to the poem. By this I mean that adhering strictly to the form just for the sake of the form is injurious. My allegiance is always to the poem, to create the best poem that I can. If you fulfill the requirements of the form too perfectly, you tend to get a lifeless, mechanical poem. This reminds me of what one of my teachers said years ago about working with iambic pentameter. He talked about how variation from the meter is welcomed and keeps the poem from being sing-songy or lulling you to sleep. As Ellen Bryant Voight pointed out in one of her essays, much of art is about pattern and variation.

I find it theoretically interesting to think about the hard choices you have to make as a poet when you revise. Often there is a conflict between sound and sense on say a word choice, or the line is too long or too short compared to other lines in the vicinity, or you’ve fudged the meter because it sounds better or says something you really need to say, or the stanza doesn’t look right on the page and makes the poem look ugly on the “canvas” of the page. It seems to me in times like this you have to have some idea of what is best overall for the poem when there no clear and perfect solution. It is also helpful if you have some idea of your hierarchy of preferences. For example, are you willing to use an inferior word in terms of denotation/connotation in favor of a word that makes the line sound better? Do you prefer sound over sense or sense over sound given a choice?

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From a fortune cookie 12/7/2005:

You will conquer obstacles to achieve success.