Free Form

by Annie Finch

Published in Poetry Flash, 1998

Review of Chalkmarks on Stone by Carol Moldaw, La Alameda Press, 1998, 121 pp, $12.00 paper, and Taken from the River by Carol Moldaw, Aleph Books, 1994.

It becomes increasingly clear that we are in the process of a major transition in poetry. A flourishing, and growing, group of poets already forms what I have taken to calling the post-division generation: they matured during a time when the passionate divisions between workshop free verse, formalist poetry, and Language poetry were breaking down. Primary allegiances in one or the other of these directions are still usually clear, but for an increasing number of poets, it is possible and worthwhile to mix together the aesthetics of one or more of these erstwhile utterly polarized camps.

Carol Moldaw is a case in point. Her first book, Taken From the River, can be analyzed like a core sample of late twentieth-century poetic deposits: a layer of Williamsesque free verse, with heavy attention to linebreak and image, overlaid by significant deposits of formalism, a scattering of Beat hyperrealistic imagery, and an occasional sprinkle of Language-influenced syntax. Luckily, the overall effect generally coheres into a distinctive voice that can express Moldaw's unique, fertile, and archaic dreamworld. But it seems evident that in this book Moldaw is still negotiating her position among these conflicting aesthetics, with the result that some of her natural-born poetic power can slip out between the layers.

Taken From the River is a book about the poet's imagination, not about her life, and it creates a world with distinctive moods and voices, images and concerns. The collection contains an impressive number of free verse and formal poems which genuinely compel rereading and rerereading. Most of the poems look rather "formal"-with regularly sized stanzas, for instance-though metrically they range from free verse to heroic couplets. The reason for Moldaw's attraction to form is clear; her sensibility blooms most richly under tension. But her experiments with fixed form have mixed results. The heroic couplets of "The Window Box," for example, are too rhetorically powerful for this slight poem, and the result sounds quasi-comic: "Packets of seeds, lobelia, cosmos,and phlox / meant for a bedroom's redwood window box." This longish poem only contains one couplet-an excellent one, which ends the poem-where the metrical power seems fully harnessed: "and not to laugh till you're through sketching me - / a charcoal flagrant with expectancy." The rest of the time, the meter seems dilatory, floating above the poem without really adding much to it.

But Taken From the River clearly shows potential for working with form. The long narrative poem "Reb Shmerl and the Water Spirit," a retelling of a Hasidic tale, uses folk stanzas with a genuinely distinctive light touch:

He grabbed up sins at all his stops,

carted them home without a thought,

tossed them down the cellar steps,

slammed the door, and let them rot.

And several other poems, like the mysterious "Near Assisi," with its captivating rhymes (torches/churches, basilica/Africa), are energized by the proto-verbal compression of excellent formal verse:

Awakened, lovesick,

to tribal drumming

in my Umbrian attic.

Clear synchronicity -

and then more static.

I have been dwelling on Moldaw's use of form because I think its tension almost always brings out some of her best qualities. Nonetheless, the most completely successful poems in her first book are in free verse, free verse hovering at the edge of form. Here is "To-" in its entirety:

Birds all about me -

none knows which way to flock.

If only, having read my letter,

she would call -

Should I leave another message?

Say, this is how it is with me,

my heart, the letter fluttering in my hands?

This fragmentary free verse, reminiscent of early H.D. or even of translations of Sappho, is heavily rhythmic, almost ceremonial in its progress. It is the free verse of a naturally formal poet who carves her words out of a heavily freighted emptiness and needs strong rythmic energy to do so. It is the kind of poetry that shows Moldaw at her best: charmingly archaic, compellingly fragile, and a touch insouciant even in her deep seriousness.

Not that Moldaw would be unable to develop these qualities in formal verse; in fact, formal verse would probably be the best vehicle for the full development of this evocative side of her voice. But in the first book, Moldaw doesn't take formal verse seriously enough to reap its full benefits.

Her natural way with rhyme, her skill with rhythm, have not been tested enough to be able to bear a lot of weight; sometimes formal devices are treated as toys, used irregularly or mechanically. And sometimes, on the other hand, Moldaw's free verse lacks the tension of "To -," relying on rhythmless lines with melodramatic breaks, as in "Moorish Baths": "ankles of a eunuch / who brings wine / and pillows. "

In spite of, and in part because of, its weaknesses, Moldaw's first book left me deeply curious to see how she would end up negotiating the ground between free and formal verse, as well as how she would develop her landscape of history, travel, settling, and incantation. Her second book, Chalkmarks on Stone, has just been published, and it shows that this poet is finding creative solutions for the dilemmas that many poets today are facing. True, Moldaw's poems in this collection do end up sacrificing some of the power of form. On the other hand, they have also attained a new unity of effect that has the potential for flexible exploration, and begin to chart new formal territory that looks as if it can resolve many of the aesthetic conflicts evident in the first book. The quirky tension between showing and hiding that marked the first book is almost entirely gone, replaced by a generosity of subject matter and a lighter touch overall. The dreamlike sense of peeking into a private world has dissipated, and a wise calmness infuses the second book in its place. An unusually readable book of poems, Chalkmarks is not only accessible enough to interest a general browser easily; it is also crafted enough, and varied enough, to reward serious aesthetic attention.

Chalkmarks is much more unified in style than Taken From the River; though form remains one of her most distinctive trademarks, now it has been incorporated more seamlessly into her subject matter. For Moldaw in Chalkmarks, form's primary use is to provide a dignified distance from the poem's subject. The control afforded by regular structure allows her to be more candid than in her first book, at the same time lending a measure of mystery and shape to her themes. This use of form as a tool in the service of subject does come at an aesthetic cost, to those who appreciated the formal tension in Taken From the River: in much of Chalkmarks the form is rendered a transparent vehicle rather than an equal partner in the poem's mystery. The seven-part elegy "Eclipse,' for instance, uses a different subtle form for most of the sections: rough syllabics; loosely rhymed stanzas; unrhymed free-verse stanzas of patterned length. These forms are obtrusive enough to be noticed, but so unobtrusive that they don't lend much energy to the poem. Nonetheless, form with a light touch proves a tasteful choice for such a potentially sentimental subject, and Moldaw's instinct for subtlety remains sure as she moves towards the blatant rhyme of the concluding iambic pentameter couplet:

A twenty year's hoard of browning roses clipped

and poured like chianti into a liter carafe-

spilled out and crushed, to scent this cenotaph.

If "Eclipse" walks the line between form and free verse with some success, Chalkmarks also includes other poems that show the dangers for Moldaw of falling too far away from the line. It is in the purely free verse poems that Moldaw tends to lose her distinctive "sound" and slip into generic mannerisms. "Winged Victory," for instance, is much more tepid in every way than is usual for Moldaw, a disappointing compilation of random linebreaks and easy generalizations:

wasn't that hair of a second in total

quiet and darkness, though fleeting,

one of the best moments yet? . . .

The world has so many ways to woo us,

so many unexpected vistas . . .

Fortunately, in most of Chalkmarks Moldaw steers well away from such dangers. Many of the poems in the book show her experimenting with new kinds of forms, and often these provide just the kind of quirky and subtle opportunities that maintain the unpredictable sound of her wry and individual voice. For a poet who seems to be uncomfortable with using form too obtrusively, but who is not at her best with no form at all, the use of subtle forms, free forms, has proved a happy solution. The unrhymed four-beat line of "Cafe Mediterranean" (a tribute to a Berkeley cafe that includes a cameo appearance by the Bay Area's own Julia Vinograd) provides an energetic core that keeps the poem from bogging down, as does the chant-like repetition in "Our New Life":

if we go away for a week

and miss the crab apple's blossoming,

the sheep shearing,

if it turns out I am allergic to Russian olives,

to chamisa, to rabbit grass,

if they pave our dirt road . . .

Similarly, Moldaw brings off-rhyme to new heights in "North Thailand Trek" and "Drumming for the Matryoshka":

"While Isabelle plays hide and seek,

her mother and I try to talk,

though it doesn't really work.

She wants to play "Joan of the Ark,"

Of course, these are all amusing poems to some degree (and Moldaw's sense of humor is one of the most truly satisfying qualities of Chalkmarks). But her formal inventiveness is at work in more serious poems as well, notably in "Another Part of the Field," a long sequence based on the I Ching that fills the last third of the book. For this sequence Moldaw has devised a six-line stanza of three beats per line based on the ancient hexagrams, and composed a series of poems inspired by the throws of the coins. The result is a very rich poem, whose cumulative effect is paradoxically peaceful, cathartic, and unexcerptable, like the experience of lying in a field of very tall grass. The work that Moldaw did to develop her craft in Taken From the River pays off here, as she takes her trained instinct for pattern and ceremony and transforms it into a new arena for discovery. It is good to see a poet, her formal foundation established, start to make form her own.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch