Creepy, Stately 2: No Man's Land

While various contingents in American poetry might or might not find both the sonnet, and formality itself, interesting, the sonnet remains common ground. Everybody knows sonnets, and no one is surprised to find them cropping up all over the place. In comparison, the unique form John Keats invented for his odes, vaunted though they are, is obscure, tangled, and difficult: the literary equivalent of no man's land. There they are: ten-line stanzas, boasting ABABCDECDE, and no ode less than thirty lines. The problem is, in the early Aughts I fell madly in love with this form, and compelled by the idea that I might employ it with some mastery myself. Even as I got the sense that minor poets might consider it a permanent vacation in no man's land. Early attempts, like On Love, which wound up in Hinge and in this 2003 reading (embedded) on PennSound, got caught on the double snag of Keats imitation and underdeveloped thematics. When I returned to make another attempt in the mid-Teens, I had better luck integrating the form into an impulse to confess which was part and parcel of my life then. The Exile Ode, written in 2015 and published on P.F.S. Post in 2017, achieves for me the goal of revivifying an obscure form with an original set of vignettes, impulses, and images. Keats' odes, especially Melancholy, famously fulfill themselves as odes oddly, and celebrate what usually is not celebrated. Exile takes that particular game one step further. It's a pretty picture that's not pretty. The no man's land form bleeds over into being a no man's land theme. And it is, to my way of thinking, the one time I manifested, in complete fashion, the Keats odal ideal, if there is a central ideal there. In 2021, I wandered over into toying with it again in this piece in Otoliths. It's a textual experiment which doesn't attempt to be representative. In 2022, I found a skeleton key to transmute odal equipment into building blocks for elegies, as well. I thus did the unique textual trick of wandering from a center or centralized sector of no man's land into even murkier wilderness. Yet that movement, from mystery into greater mystery, is supposed to be the heart and soul of Negative Capability, isn't it? One would hope.