Avant-garde poetry is generally seen as a contrast to, or alternative to, formal poetry. New York school poets, though, often poured avant-garde content into traditional forms, and/or bashed traditional forms into avant-garde shapes.
One of the most famous examples is John Ashbery’s giddy 1966 exercise in nonsense, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” which uses the Italian sestina to tell a lengthy, garbled fable about Popeye the Sailor Man.
Here are the first two stanzas:
The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach
And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”
It goes on and on like that, the same end words and characters repeating and returning in a narrative that has a lot of motion and action and yet never manages to get anywhere—mimicking, and parodying, the way E.C. Segar’s Popeye comic strip itself revels in chaos, nonsense, and the replication of images of Popeye, Wimpy, Sea Hag and all from panel to panel, week to week.
The conflation of high art and low art, and particularly of comic book imagery, nods to Lichtenstein. Where the painter copied comic-book panels on canvas, enlarging the Ben Day dots as abstract formal elements, Ashbery uses the sestina’s formal demands to abstract plot. The result is an “undecoded message” from some odd country—poetry as a spray of comic-book goofiness, nostalgically mourning its own distance from its own ridiculousness, or perhaps ridiculing its own goofy nostalgia.
A less well-known example is Berandette Mayer’s wonderfully succinct 1968 “Sonnet”
Sonnet
name address date
I cannot remember
an eye for an eye
then and there my
this is
your se
cond ch
ance to
h i s t o r y
r e p e a t s
i t s s e l f
and a tooth
for a tooth
is a tooth:
Mayer’s sonnet makes less narrative sense than Ashbery’s sestina. It’s not even trying to tell a story or make an argument or follow a single throughline. Instead, the 14 lines of the sonnet—the most clichéd poetry form in English—are used to string together a series of clichés and everyday phrases so tired that they don’t even manage to qualify as clichés.
Mayer starts off declaring “name address date/I don’t remember”: a statement of forgetting, or losing oneself in identity, space, and time. The poem then proceeds to lose any coherent self, instead musing, “an eye for an eye/then and there my.” There is no “I”; only an “eye” plucked out and a “my” which falls off the end of the line.
The gesture towards the rhymes which usually define a sonnet (eye/my) are in turn abandoned for a stanza which fragments the phrase “this is your second chance to” with arbitrary spaces and line breaks. Then the next stanza (a tercet) declares “history repeats itsself”, with additional spaces between the letters, and the last word misspelled. The final tercet picks up “the eye for an eye” from the initial stanza, insisting, “and a tooth/for a tooth/is a tooth:”—ending on a colon that leads nowhere.
Ashbery’s sestina sort of imitated the comics page. Mayer’s sonnet, in contrast, imitates the sonnet not as formal exercise, but as a kind of trope of itself (or i t s s e l f). Just as “an eye for an eye” and “name address date” hang there in the poem as disconnected catchphrase gibberish, so the sonnet form itself is there to signal that this is in the tradition as the tradition disintegrates. It’s history, or form, repeating itself as dissolution, or as a loud wet raspberry.
You could squint and see this as a kind of relationship end/revenge poem, in which the pain of loss leads to a kind of fugue of forgetting, anger, displaced violence. Second chances are shredded, trauma repeats itself, the tooth bites forever.
For both Ashbery and Mayer, traditional form is treated less as a tradition, and more as a meme or a pratfall. As in pop art, words and forms are chosen not to reveal inner truths, but to create a palette of references and associations—to comic strips, slogans, Biblical injunctions, or the history of poetry itself. Part of the joke in Mayer’s sonnet is that it’s a sonnet, just like a tooth is a tooth, even when it falls out.