The following is an excerpt of the lecture I'll be giving next week at the 2009 Literatures of the West Coast Graduate Conference at the University of the Victoria. The working title is "Reservations: Identity and Poetic Form" and it mostly tells the story of how I came to think of poetic form as being both customs agent and traveller, local and global.

From "Reservations: Identity and Poetic Form"

       In Ireland, the word "form" commonly describes the flattened nest of grass and mud a hare rests in during the day and in which she bears her young. Unlike rabbits, whose offspring are born blind and hairless in the dark of a burrow or warren, the infant hare arrives fully furred and with its eyes open and thus able to protect itself at an early age--seeing danger coming, combined with the hare's exceptional speed, is the hare's primary defencive strategy. A form, then, provides the hare with a compromise between safety from the elements and, because hare's have eyes high on their heads, a good view of approaching predators.
       In poetry, the word "form" commonly describes the patterns and strictures of technique each poem possesses such as line length, stanza organisation, measure, and rhyme. We talk of traditional form, received form, and closed form, and we mean the patterns and strictures of technique in a particular poem recognisable and describable in terms of preexisting patterns and strictures. We talk of free verse and we mean poems not immediately recognisable and describable in these terms. But we do not mean formless, or less formed, or under-formed. The free-verse of "The Waste Land" is no less "fully-furred," to return to the hare, than Frost's sonnets. And in "The Waste Land" in particular we can see that the "formation" of poems outside these patterns and strictures is contingent on the very patterns and strictures it has "freed" itself from: the rhyme and meter and rhetorical devices in Eliot's poem draw from the same traditional sources as Frost's poems and we recognise Eliot's deviations and variations only in light of those sources. In short, free verse is not a break from traditional form but simply a new stream with its own historical patterns and strictures. All poems have form. What form means however, how poems leverage and deploy form and forms is the question and it is at once both an essentially local and essentially global one. 
         Now morning comes and the hare crouches in its grassy form to sleep. The voice of David Attenborough begins to narrate the world. Or Lorne Greene, for those of you who grew up in the 1980's as I did. The hare's belly touches the ground where she slept the night before. The form has her scent. For now, it's her part of the world, the spot of earth she returns to each morning. Soon she'll birth a litter of wide-eyed, fully furred leverets--that's what we call a hare under one year of age--and just for fun, a group of hares is called a down or a husk. The big prairie sky floats overhead, an unnameable sea that surrounds everything. And just as the hare begins to lower her eyelids she catches a flash of something moving through the grass in the near distance, an insomniac fox perhaps or a photographer crouched closed to the earth and bearing down on her with his telescopic lens. Her ears twitch. She rises just slightly to get a better view. Another flash of sunlight off metal and a man stands up and begins walking towards her. Already the hare's heart beats faster. Does the intruder see her? If she bolts too early she may alert him unnecessarily. If she waits too long she may not get away. How long can the form protect her? How long before the form imprisons her for good?
        Just to be clear, the analogy here is poems to hares and forms to poetic form and forms. The best part of those old Lorne Greene shows or Attenborough's Planet Earth or Steve Irwin's Crocodile Hunter or any of the other man stalks animal with a camera television programs is when the animal being observed finally makes its move, dashing into the muddy river water, or cracking like lightning over the grassland. The camera or the man must react immediately to capture it. In the poem, the tension, it seems to me, is always, even in free verse, about the moment the poem chooses to slip from its own form and make a break for it, to choose its own internal strengths over the strength of the form. Go too early and it will be easily spotted, scoped and brought down by the reader-hunter who sees it coming. Wait too long and the reader-fox will be upon it and ready to make the furr of predictability fly. In other words, the form can both augment and weaken those internal strengths (shortly I will argue that these internal strengths and the strengths of the form are so intimately linked that to separate them is of very limited usefulness). By choosing the right moment, the moment just before the form has exhausted its strengths, the poem can get away while still giving the reader a good, long glance at the beauty and elegance of its body. And getting away is important. Not getting caught. A poem that wants to be heard from again must never be captured, some part of it must always allude. What makes Attenborough's show superior to Irwin's is that nothing is ever really "captured." The glimpse of the other our eyes afford us or the camera affords us or the poem affords us is the prize, not real physical possession.