In the lofty and ethereal world of poetry, the rhetoric is mean and the camps are divided. One vocal camp believes that great poetry is only achieved by those who excel at traditional poetic forms: therefore, the ability to write metered and rhymed verse remains the contemporary poet's duty. Rebuffing the "formalists" are those who insist that traditional forms are not only outdated, but that they thwart the spirit and mood of contemporary art.
The arguments are as much political and social as they are aesthetic. Though there are some exceptions, the formalist camp tends to be college-educated (though not necessarily academic), conservative, middle to upper-middle class, and white. The anti-formalist camp comprises diverse groups--from the academic poetry elite employed by MFA programs (which controls a large percentage of literary magazines), to inner city minority poets who perform at open-mike poetry slams.
Adding dynamite to the polemical fire is the existence of graduate Creative Writing Programs. Many poets--notably Dana Gioia, who launched a famous attack in his controversial book on the state of contemporary poetry, Can Poetry Matter?--contend that MFA programs do the art of poetry more harm than good.
Into these debates storms Indiana poet and critic Felix Stefanile, a distinguished voice expressing radical views. Stefanile has declared editorial war on unrhymed verse. He has dedicated the poetry pages of the literary magazine he founded and edits, Sparrow, to sonnets.
Born in New York City in 1920, B.A. '44 (City College of New York), Stefanile is the first-generation son of Italian immigrants. He and his wife, Selma, were civil servants in New York in the 1950s when they decided to change their lives by founding Sparrow Press. Stefanile's success as a poet and editor led to an invitation from Purdue to teach for one year as a Visiting Professor. Stefanile ended up staying at Purdue until 1987, when he retired. He was appointed Full Professor in 1970, and, in 1973, received a Best Teacher award from Standard Oil of Indiana (now the Amoco prize). He chaired the editorial board of the Purdue publishing program for 5 years.
Stefanile has published ten books of verse (three of them translations of Italian poets), and has won numerous prizes, including awards from the NEA and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His 11th book, The Dance at St. Gabriel's and Other Poems, was published by Story Line Press in Spring 1995.
GGB: One seldom thinks of poetry as a good business investment. What prompted you to found Sparrow Press in 1954?
FS: My wife and I founded Sparrow to lead the life of poetry. Selma and I were not university-connected; we were both full-time employees of the New York State Department of Labor, and we were living in Queens, far from the cultural center in Manhattan. Sparrow did just what we hoped it would.
The best explanation of how Sparrow Press came about is contained in a piece I wrote for the New York Times Book Review (2/17/80), originally titled "A Revolution of Twerps," but changed by James Atlas to "Confessions of an Editor." It is a light-hearted piece, but basically accurate.
GGB: Has rhymed verse always been Sparrow's mission?
FS: Sparrow has had a protean life. We started as a miscellany, eclectic and wide-ranging. We published poets as unlike as William Carols Williams, Leah Bodine Drake, Charles Bukowski, Robert Creeley, Judson Jerome, and so on. The encouragement we received was heartening. We also published the Vagrom Chap Books. Again, the encouragement was great; we had nice reviews in places like The Nation, American Scholar, Poetry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Over the years, we have actually published over a hundred items in our idiosyncratic odyssey. We have published over 20 chap books, and a score of ancillary things, such as Black Rooster. One of my essays in there created a little storm, and was reprinted in an early Pushcart Press annual, eliciting comment in the New York Times, and an irate letter. But we no longer publish books; we can't afford to now.
GGB: How did your poetry career in New York lead you to Purdue?
FS: I came to Purdue, by invitation, for the academic year 1961- 62. At the close of that year, the administration asked me to stay on as an untenured assistant professor. I was at the right place at the right time.
The late 50s and the early 60s saw the universities scrabbling for the poet on campus, the "poet-in-residence." The exemplars of this movement were poets like Lowell, Berryman, Ciardi, and so on. Even if I say so myself, we were a brainy group, children of the New Criticism, hard readers, good bibliographies, familiar with languages, steeped in the classics. It's amazing how many of that crew were also successful translators.
I'd hate for readers to confuse the old-line poet-in-residence with the MFA crowd running things in the schools today.
GGB: Are MFA programs ruining contemporary poetry?
FS: Creative writing programs do not encourage the writing of poetry, but of poems that will "work." Poems that are suitable to the role this small community has assigned them. They're writing poetry once removed from poetry.
Still, considering the fact that poetry has endured since the invention of writing, maybe 3000 years ago, I would say the chances of poetry's survival are pretty good, even today.
GGB: Sparrow boldly states that it is "a politically incorrect verse magazine." What's politically incorrect about sonnets?
FS: Sparrow is politically incorrect because we publish sonnets in the age of the free verse orthodoxy. You'd be surprised to know how many creative writing program people are upset.
When I was at a Indiana University writers' conference some years ago, there was a very prominent editor from a very prominent magazine who stood up and said, "When I see a poem on a page that looks like a box, I know it's a sonnet and I stop reading it."
GGB: Why do you think people take so virulent a stand against formal verse?
FS: There's a hatred of art in the world. People hate art because they suspect it contains some kind of secret information which is being denied to them.
GGB: Why did you single out sonnets as your cause, and not, say, pantoums or triolets?
FS: I love the sonnet; I'm devoted to it. That's the main reason. It's also an air-tight editorial alibi: I don't have to wade through reams of submissions. Furthermore, it's a form that is a paradigm of the genuine writing experience: closure, constraint, contrast, accuracy of expression, focus, architectonics of syntax.
If you write a bad sonnet, people know it immediately, and you learn something from the experience: be honest, don't pad. This is what writing is about. The sonnet is also culturally eminent in ways that the pantoum and other fixed forms are not. Of course, I'd publish a good pantoum anytime.
GGB: I can't help noticing in East River Nocturne (The Elizabeth Press, New Rochelle, NY, 1976) that you have only one sonnet, "In That Far Country." Are you are more of an advocate for the sonnet editorially than personally?
FS: I am not primarily a writer of sonnets; neither are most poets. Even Petrarch left a vast body of work that is not in the sonnet form, and so did Shakespeare and Ronsard.
The sonnet presents poets with the challenge of emulation, and of showing their stuff. They want to become a part of the great monument the sonnet has become.
GGB: How important is that monument to contemporary writers? What tribute do they owe their literary antecedents, and what roles should classical allusions play in a contemporary work?
FS: Poets pay tribute to their ancestors whether they mean to or not. Catullus was a confessional poet long before Robert Lowell. Homer wrote his epic long before Dante. Imagine composing a haiku about Mount Fuji: it would immediately remind Japanese readers of a hundred other haiku about Mount Fuji.
Allusion and echo are embedded in language, all language. Only the free-verse poet, chained to a dream of originality, strives consciously to avoid the melody of history and the mastery (mastery) of traditional craft. Such a poet is abandoned to denotation, to space without echo.
The poet who is aware of the past is nourished by tradition. Tradition teaches that how a poem says something is more valuable than what is said, and that poetic veracity is based in the groundings of the past. The free-verse poets resort to wild imagery. It consoles their loneliness in their arid novelty.
GGB: Do you have anything good to say about free verse poets?
FS: I admire the "freed up" verse of poets like Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, and poets of that stripe. Theirs is an art that knows measure, pattern, music, and word play, and shows a profound consciousness of the writers of the past. This art bears little resemblance to the hack work most creative writing programs today are turning out.
The average creative writing (graduate) student that I have encountered in my many travels, and not inconsiderable experience, is ill-read, has no foundation in literature earlier than 1960 or so, possesses no language except his or her native one, and is adrift in a sea of academic pap.
It is interesting to observe that when Robert Bly and Brad Leithauser had their famous debate at a Poetry Society of America symposium about 3 years ago on the subject of contemporary poetry, they could agree--though they are poles apart in aesthetic--that the teaching of creative writing today is mediocre.
GGB: Whose work do you keep on your nightstand?
FS:: I keep Sparrow there--in case I get ideas!
GGB: In Sparrow 59, you have an essay entitled, "The Fascination of the Difficult," after a line from Yeats. What do you find fascinating about "the difficult"?
FS:: The difficult, as I mean it in my essay, is the challenge of and allegiance to discipline which can sometimes lead to inspiration. Athletes would know what I mean, and contemplative monks. Picasso painting all that blue. Inspiration is the fulfilled trajectory of aspiration. Like all home runs, it doesn't happen every time, but when it does, you know it. It is not fine feeling, or mood, or a cozy daze.
GGB: What is the most radical act a poet can perform (on paper, that is)?
FS: The most radical thing a poet can do on paper is to speak to himself or herself, and to imagine another person listening. This keeps one's mind chaste and honest.
GGB: Speaking of chaste and honest, do you think government funding of the arts serves the arts well?
FS: Today, poets dream of grants and fellowships, not of heaven. The little magazine is a classical American impulse which, in our national context, dates back at least to Emerson's The Dial. It has been all but gobbled up by NEA largesse.
As for the question of patronage, the government as patron-- whether federal, state or municipal government--bears no resemblance to the Medici of the past. The Medici knew, and practiced, art. Bureaucrats don't.
GGB: As a society, we've entered a world of merging communications technologies, where speed is paramount and information is exchanged in matters of seconds. The skills needed to function in this world seem to run counter to the skills poetry readers and writers once had to acquire--the skill of reading slowly, meditatively, and critically. Will America forget how to read poetry? Will technology encroach on the character and quality of poetry and little magazines?
FS: Books are in danger today because of the electronic and communication revolutions. I don't think anyone knows how this will turn out. Plato worried (in Phaedrus) about writing replacing Memory. I worry about pictures replacing writing.
What all of us worry about today is that image has supplanted text. Children are beginning to think in pictures, images, not words. We seem to have moved into a visual culture--not only television, but computers, advertisements, and so on. Anthony Burgess talked about the visual vs. the real worlds.
But history proves that nothing can ruin art for long. This statement is not an article of faith, but a matter of record. Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, and Elizabethan England were not perfect times, but brawling and confused times. Thousands of years of history show that there will always be a poet around who survives by the joy of making.
It is this conviction that keeps magazines like Sparrow publishing sonnets, serious criticism, music scores. We keep the memory thriving, and our public finds us despite the noise of academic advertising.
GGB: Is capitalism ruining art?
FS: In some ways, art has always been a commodity. The problem in modern society is advertising, not buying and selling. Advertising drowns out the competition, and our creative writing programs are so much advertising.
To read some of Felix's poetry, visit THERMOPYLAE.
Are you a Hoosier? For information on Arts Indiana, contact:
For information on SirS (Social Issues Resources Series) Renaissance, an electronic database of interdisciplinary scholarship available to public libraries and educational institutions, contact:
copyright © 1995 & 1996 Gloria G. Brame
brame@gloria-brame.com
design by: Masterpiece Media
72074.1104@compuserve.com