BORROWING, and INNER NECESSITY

I have sometimes in the past been puzzled, or more accurately, annoyed, by people who question the borrowing of form or process from another poet. Most often that questioning has to do with forms that have been, sometime in the last hundred years or so, considered avant-garde or experimental. In other words, the claim has been, it’s not OK to use a form that looks or sounds like a Gertrude Stein stanza in meditation, or a Jackson Mac Low deterministic process, or a John Cage mesostic; yet it seems perfectly all right, with critics who don’t like such borrowings, to write a sonnet or a sestina or a villanelle. So maybe this is just a case of what Charles Bernstein calls official verse culture dismissing what is outside its veins and arteries. Yet I’ve even heard poets I consider experimental proclaiming that they can’t do a certain thing in a poem because it sounds too much like Stein, or because Charles Olson did that, or some such thing. Don’t forms created in the last hundred years deserve as much chance to become a part of the received tradition, there for use, as forms developed in the Renaissance or 18th Century or some other period in the more distant past? Doesn't one use a particular form because she or he feels the writing in process has a great need to use that form? And why is such a repository of forms and processes important, anyway? Well, maybe it’s not, or maybe the question isn’t the form, whether experimental or “traditional,” maybe it’s the spirit in which the form is used. This is why I was glad to come across, in this weekend’s reading, the following by Wasily Kandinsky, from “On the Question of Form,”

To use a borrowed form is called a crime, a deception, by the critics, by the public, and often by artists. In reality, however, this is only the case if the “artist” employs these borrowed forms without internal necessity, thereby creating a dead, lifeless semblance of a work of art. If, however, the artist makes use of one or another “borrowed” form, according to inner truth, in order to express his inner emotions and experiences, he is exercising his right to make use of any form that is internally necessary for him—no matter whether it is an object of everyday use, a heavenly body or a form that has been materialized in art by another artist.

This whole question of “imitation” is in any case far from having the significance that criticism attaches to it. The living remains. The dead disappears.

Indeed, the further we look into the past, the fewer imitations, sham works we find. They have mysteriously disappeared. Only the genuine art-objects remain, i.e., those that have within their bodies (form) a soul (content).

Further, if the reader looks at any object he pleases on his table (even if it is only a cigar butt), he will at once notice the same two effects. No matter where and when (in the street or in church, in the sky or the water, in the stable or in the woods), the same two effects will everywhere become manifest, and in every case the inner sound wll be independent of the external significance.

The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit.

(Lindsay, Kenneth C., and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. De Capo Press, 1994. pp. 249-250.)