"It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape"
About this Quote
Strand’s jab lands because it’s delivered with the weary patience of someone who’s had the same argument too many times: yes, we can all see the stanza breaks, thank you. The target is a species of “practitioner” (teachers, critics, workshop dogmatists) who treat form like packaging - a sonnet as a 14-line container, a villanelle as a rhyme-scheme hat you can try on. Strand calls that “shortsightedness” not as a mild insult but as a diagnosis: a failure to perceive form as the poem’s engine rather than its outline.
The sentence’s architecture mirrors the point. It’s long, slightly formal, and deliberately circuitous, enacting how thought in a poem moves by modulation and pressure, not by mere silhouette. “Merely” does heavy lifting: it concedes that shape exists, then refuses to let shape be the whole story. Strand is pushing toward a richer idea of form as a choreography of attention - pacing, recurrence, hesitation, tonal shifts, the way syntax can speed up desire or slow down dread. The “shape” is what a poem looks like on the page; form is what it does to time, to breath, to expectation.
Contextually, Strand is speaking from the late-20th-century hinge where workshop formalism and postmodern “anything goes” were both available temptations. His line resists both the paint-by-numbers fetishization of fixed forms and the lazy assumption that abandoning them equals freedom. Form, for Strand, isn’t a costume. It’s the poem’s way of thinking.
The sentence’s architecture mirrors the point. It’s long, slightly formal, and deliberately circuitous, enacting how thought in a poem moves by modulation and pressure, not by mere silhouette. “Merely” does heavy lifting: it concedes that shape exists, then refuses to let shape be the whole story. Strand is pushing toward a richer idea of form as a choreography of attention - pacing, recurrence, hesitation, tonal shifts, the way syntax can speed up desire or slow down dread. The “shape” is what a poem looks like on the page; form is what it does to time, to breath, to expectation.
Contextually, Strand is speaking from the late-20th-century hinge where workshop formalism and postmodern “anything goes” were both available temptations. His line resists both the paint-by-numbers fetishization of fixed forms and the lazy assumption that abandoning them equals freedom. Form, for Strand, isn’t a costume. It’s the poem’s way of thinking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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