To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme--That Is the Poet's Question : Literature: Many modern bards say the traditional style is dead. But Timothy Steele is a man who appreciates form. He finds beauty in the structure that others can't see.

By DEBRA J. HOTALING

Jan. 19, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Timothy Steele doesn’t look like the kind of person to ignite a literary holy war. Yet, this soft-spoken poet and Cal State Los Angeles professor has become the unwilling poster child for formal poetry--that is, poetry that employs meter, rhyme and form as its tools of expression.

The 20th Century has not been kind to poets working in rhyme and meter. In an age where blank sheets of paper and high-decibel monologues pass for poetry, works written in sonnets, tercets and terza rima strike some writers as aesthetically, even politically, suspect.

In 1979, when Steele’s first book, “Uncertainties and Rest” was published by Louisiana State University Press, critic Richmond Lattimore proclaimed the book “desperately and delightfully unfashionable.”

“I was really happy that he found the book delightful,” recalls Steele, 46. “But the desperate part really did seem characteristic of the times because there seemed to be no one else at that time who was writing, or at least publishing, in my generation in form. I remember feeling guilty for teaching form, worrying that if you converted students to write in form, you were perhaps narrowing their chances for getting their work published.”

Although he is not well-known in Southern California, Steele is considered by many to be one of the most important poets living in Los Angeles. Along with David St. John, Carol Muske Dukes and the late Ann Stanford, Steele is one of only a handful of Los Angeles-based poets featured in the newly released “Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poets.”

His literary honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter A.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry and the Los Angeles PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry. His third book of poetry, “The Color Wheel” (Johns Hopkins University Press), hit bookstores in December.

Before “The Color Wheel,” Steele published “Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter” (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), a 340-page treatise that traces the history of formal poetry and why 20th-Century writers have chosen to abandon traditional verse. Although the book received considerable critical praise, it also resulted in a number of estranged friendships with other poets.

“I address fewer Christmas cards since ‘Missing Measures,’ ” Steele admits.

Among his critics is Kate Braverman, a Los Angeles-based poet and novelist who teaches writing through UCLA Extension. Braverman contends that poetry in form is a thing of the past.

“I love writing the new poetry,” she says emphatically. “And the newer, the better. Form is dead. I think this interest in formalism is just an aberrational moment. It only appeared fashionable because nobody is really reading poetry anymore.

“I don’t think we can pretend that Freud didn’t happen,” she continues. “I don’t think we can pretend Einstein didn’t happen. (Formalism) is a kind of intellectual game, but it doesn’t serve the purpose of women. It doesn’t serve the purposes of, oh, shall we call them issues of freedom that have defined this century. (Writing in form) is the same tyranny as that of the patriarchy. And I despise it. And I despise the people who practice it. To go back and straitjacket poetry into forms that never worked to begin with and pretend that they work now is an absurdity to me.”

For Tosh Berman, artistic and executive director of Beyond Baroque, a Venice-based poetry foundation, poetry in form is secondhand news.

“The message is the important thing,” Berman says. “I don’t have anyone coming in here for a reading, saying, ‘Oh, good, the poet is going to read poems that rhyme.’ Poets should be able to write in whatever form they want, sonnets or free verse.

Still, he adds, “You really can’t go home again.”

But coming home is exactly what some Los Angeles poets say they feel when they began writing in form.

“Working on poems in form felt vital and healthy, like going back to visit the farm,” writes Leslie Monsour, an L.A. poet and former student of Steele’s, in an essay for an anthology of women’s formal poetry called “A Formal Feeling Comes” (Story Line Press, 1994).

“Instead of rambling through a rocky field, scattering seeds at random, we paced off our parcels, stood behind the plow and team, took up hoes, spades and trowels, and planted evenly spaced seeds in regular, cultivated rows, arriving at far better results.”

All this controversy about writing poems that rhyme may seem absurd to people not involved in the politics of poetry--indeed, it seems so even to many poets. But poetry’s diminished presence in American intellectual life seems to have made these kind of turf wars inevitable.

“I’m often asked what I think will be the future of poetry,” Steele says, “and I have to say I honestly don’t know. People who, in the 19th Century, would have read Longfellow, Dickens and George Eliot today are spending more time around the television, watching videos or going to films. And this is something poetry can’t compete with.

“Moreover, much of modern poetry is so difficult to read, it’s hard to imagine that anyone except a specialist in poetry would find it engaging,” he says. “Many of the things that were said about new art in the first few decades of the 20th Century--that it would become as accessible and comprehensible as the older art--hasn’t come true.

“People haven’t found ways of reading ‘The Cantos’ or ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ in the ways that a former age found it possible to read, say, Jane Austin. And I think one of the reasons formal poetry is making some kind of a comeback is that the tricks of modernism have been played out. For all its admirable vitality, much of modernism has been an aesthetic dead-end.”

“I try to read poetry,” says novelist Mark Salzman, who admits being poetry-challenged. “But I read the first few sentences and start to feel like I’ve been assigned a high school algebra problem--a boat is moving at X speed and the wind is moving at Y and the boat leaves at Z time. So you strain your brain to fill in the things that were left out. In the end, you come up with some banal answer like 12 miles per hour.

“A lot of modern poetry is like elaborate versions of crossword puzzles. So much of it is stream of consciousness, and I think stream of consciousness is vastly overrated. I believe a writer’s first responsibility is clarity.”

But Braverman maintains that the very Zeitgeist of Los Angeles demands a new kind of poetry.

“Los Angeles is the first port on the Space-Age trade route,” she says. “And what is so terrific about Los Angeles is that it’s the end of the old trail. The color, the vegetation, the texture of L.A. is so much different from Eastern seaboard cities, traditional Anglo cities, the sort of city where this kind of verse began to try to re-establish itself that to try and practice (writing in form) would be to learn a language not only non-indigenous, but anti-indigenous.”

And yet, a handful of Southern California poets--most notably Steele, the late Charles Gullans and the late Henri Coulette--have managed to capture something of Los Angeles using rhyme and meter.

“I haven’t set out to be a Los Angeles writer,” Steele says. “Although poetry must be rooted in a particular place, it should ultimately say something of general relevance to the human condition. I want my verse to reflect my community; it would be disappointing, however, if the work somehow combusted into irrelevance once it crossed out over the county line.”

Regarding the assertion that formal poetry is the last bastion of white males, Steele points out that metrical composition includes Sumerian, Chinese and Sanskit influences that predate European literature.

“And in our own century, the free-verse revolution was led principally by white males such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, whereas many women poets like Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan and minority poets like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson stayed with the tradition.

“Today, you have Pan-African American poets like Derek Walcott working in form. You have post-colonial writers like Vikram Seth, feminists like Wendy Cope and gay poets like Marilyn Hacker. Meter is an invention of language itself and belongs to no particular group.”

Regarding the notion that formal poetry is inherently repressive, writer Eric Priestly swiftly responds: “I think this sort of ideology reeks to high heaven of political correctness. It is the highest form of racism and anti-feminism that exists. When I was part of the Watts Writers’ Workshop under the direction of Budd Schulberg, we learned the basics of poetry--that meant we learned about form and meter. We learned the parts of the plane and then we learned to fly. It’s all about having respect for the structures involved.”

Even though Steele has taken up the task of defending formal poetry, he shakes his head in disbelief that this kind of ombudsmanship is even necessary.

“Being labeled as a ‘formalist’ troubles me,” he admits. “It’s sad that we’ve reached a point where a poet who uses meter, rhyme and stanza is regarded as an oddity and is praised or damned on that basis. It would be risible to call Shakespeare, Keats or Dickinson a formalist.

“When I sit down to write, I don’t say ‘Iambic pentameter, here I come!’ The traditional instruments of poetry are merely means to an end--that end being to say something moving or interesting in a memorable and compact manner.”

December in Los Angeles

The tulip bulbs rest darkly in the fridge

To get the winter they can’t get outside;

The drought and warm winds alter and abridge

The season till it almost seems denied.

A bright road-running scrub jay plies his bill

While searching through the garden like a sleuth

For peanuts that he’s buried in the soil:

How different from the winters of my youth.

Back in Vermont, we’d dress on furnace vents.

A breakfast of hot cereal--and then

We’d forge out to a climate so intense