I confess to finding poetry a bit exclusionary. Admittedly, I'm not a dues-paying member of the Fully-Trained Poetry Dissectors and Dissenters Club, more likely to be found amongst the Nods Along To Poetry As If She Understands But Truthfully Thinks Villanelle Is Only a Villain Club.

After all, understanding poetry's form (which I do not) is the key to reading and writing it. In Stephen Fry's delightful guide to writing poetry, the pages are devoted to form and its henchmen: rhyme and metre.  We armchair critics are brutally critical of those who do not follow form. I am thinking of Rupi Kaur's first poetry collection, a diminutive short-form revamp of the famous confessional poetry of mid-century writer Robert Lowell, yet people said - shouted: 'This is not poetry, these are just words.' 

Poetry - art even - follows form! Rules!

On the other hand... remember the wildly free, unruled, mind-blowing free verse of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which, when first published, was received so poorly that the poet utterly despaired and then rewrote it again and again to become a thing of legend, a bedrock of American and Modern poetry.

College by Mark Strand. Courtesy of Mark Strand and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

It is not simply about the form of verse (i.e., free or not); it is about the form itself in creating and interpreting poetry. Can poetry be methodologically crafted and urgently exploded? Can it be formal and irreverent? Mark Strand (November 18, 1939 - November 29, 2014) provides a poetry case study in his collection of poetry-think, Weather of Words, and argues yes, it must contain formality.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist in turn within the limits of the individual poet's conception of what is or is not a poem. For if the would-be poet has no idea what a poem is, then he has no standard for determining or qualifying his actions as a poet; i.e., his poem, "Form," it should be remembered, is a word that has several meanings, some of which are near opposites. Form has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something, but it also has to do with its essence. In discussions of poetry, form is a powerful word for just that reason: structure and essence seem to come together as do the disposition of words and their meanings.

In Strand's opinion, form need not rest on the rules of poetry but instead represent an essence of craft that elevates the poem beyond craft. By 'craft,' Stand means those continuous actions that cumulate into a finished work.

Form is manifested most clearly in the apparatus or argument and image, or put another way, plot and figures of speech. This aspect of form is more difficult to discuss because it is less clear-cut; it happens also to be the area in which poems achieve their greatest individuality and where, as a result, they are more personal. That being the case, how is it possible to apply ideas of craft? Well, we might say that mixed metaphors are bad, that contradictions, unless they constitute intentional paradox, must be avoided, and that this or that image is inappropriate.

College by Mark Strand. Courtesy of Mark Strand and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

None of this pro-form argument is surprising from a poet who knows a sonnet at five paces and the difference between rhyming couplets and throuplets. What Strand says next, however, is wonderfully contradictory: "Poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules, poems whose urgency makes rules irrelevant."

Somehow, the craft of a poem, the layered action learned through rote work and perfected through excruciating self-improvement, leads to something beyond craft. 

We only know afterward what it is we have done. Most poets, I think, are drawn to the unknown, and writing, for them, is a way of making the unknown visible. And if the object of one's quest is hidden or unknown, how is it to be approached by predictable means? I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to work on a poem. The continuous transactions of craft take place in the dark.

By "dark," Strand means subconscious. Just like Annie Dillard meant the subconscious when she said she required a room with no view so "imagination can meet memory in the dark."

College by Mark Strand. Courtesy of Mark Strand and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

Strand further develops his point that poetry can go beyond craft, and to function as a vehicle of knowledge and understanding beyond language, it must.

As it is taught and discussed, craft functions clearly only if the poem is considered primarily as a form of communication. And yet it is generally acknowledged that poetry invokes aspects of language other than that of communication, most significantly as a variation, though diminished, of a sacred text. [...] Perhaps the poem is ultimately a metaphor for something unknown; its working-out a means of recovery. Though words may represent things or actions, in combination they may represent something else - the unspoken, hitherto unknown unity of which the poem is the example. 

"Poetry must exist not only in language," Strand emphasizes, "But beyond it." This short article of mine is about the dichotomy of art: what Strand calls 'craft' and its opposite, the unnamed 'unknown.' I used all sorts of words to describe the two. This was utterly inconsistent of me to do and somewhat formless. Still, it highlights the vast explosion of available words - nouns and adjectives alike - to express this nuanced issue. On the one hand, one might use 'form, rules, or craft' to imply an ordered process, while the opposition forces might be: 'freedom, urgency, spontaneous, chaotic, unknown, dark, subconscious.' What words would you use? Somewhere in this, the unknown enters, and art is born.

College by Mark Strand. Courtesy of Mark Strand and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

You might also enjoy Mark Heard on joy as a byproduct of chaos and discrimination, Marianne Moore's inventive yet assiduously belabored verse (when T. S. Eliot first asked Moore to publish, she demurred it was 'not ready'), and Joy Harjo on the spirit of poetry. Then consider your creative processes and in which sort of feeling - one of containment or chaos; form or freedom - your best work is born.