Open Form Frog
Artists and writers utilize all manner of devices to attract their readers' attentions. Vladimir Nabokov, in his tome "Pale Fire," framed a novel in the form of a poem and its associated criticism. Nabokov publically stated that he attempted absolute mediocrity in writing the poem "Pale Fire," but this only showcases the unerring genius in the remainder of the work -- and as some critics would have it, genius in the poem itself despite Nabokov's own disclaimer. Thomas Pynchon, in his epic "Gravity's Rainbow," used all manner of attention-getting including various songs that the reader automatically sets to music in her head.
In the anonymous poem, "What a wonderful bird the frog are," the author uses several attention-attracting styles in the six line poem to set the work apart in the reader's mind. Primarily, the poet uses open form style as defined by Michael Meyer, but she (if we arbitrarily assign the poet a female persona) also uses techniques of startling the reader and repetition to drive home the uniqueness and the concept of the poem.
Michael Meyer defines open form poetry as:
an intense use of language to establish rhythms and relations between meaning and form. Open form poems use the arrangement of words and phrases on the printed page, pauses, line lengths, and other means to create unique forms that express their particular meanings and tones. (Meyer)
The immediate striking example of open-form style in the poem lies in the line lengths. The line lengths decrease until the third line at which point they begin to increase until the last line, which is by far the longest: "When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got almost."
The effect of the line lengths is to lull the reader into an acceptance of the tone and meaning of the...
Like a pitcher who works quickly to batters in baseball, the poet gets into a certain rhythm early in the poem and reduces line length to render this rhythm second nature to the reader. When the reader has been coaxed into accepting the poet's tone -- by the third line, the shortest line -- the poet slowly begins to expand the line length and pushes the boundaries of what the reader is willing to accept. Again, to tap our baseball analogy, a pitcher will throw a borderline strike and then continue to try to expand the strike zone on the batter, until the umpire stops giving the pitcher a strike call.
That is precisely what the poet hopes to accomplish with line length. She knows her poem is not conventional, so she fights for the reader's acceptances -- or rather, connives for the reader's acceptance -- before pushing the envelope and subverting the reader to the poem's purposes in tone and meaning.
Open form poetry stylistics are also evident in the poem's dialect. The poet uses words like "ain't" and improper grammar to convey a more colloquial style. The author resists the trappings of high-speech in favor of the speech of familiarity and identification. The resulting grammatical patterns wax endearing and further win the reader over to the author's viewpoint and perspective.
Pynchon and Nabokov, mentioned earlier, also use this same form of open form writing to accentuate their points. Pynchon often uses dialects to convey what certain characters are thinking. Though other stylistics may change throughout "Gravity's Rainbow," each character's individual manner of speaking or thinking stays constant, providing both a point of grounding for the reader and a reason to identify more with each individual character. Nabokov employs the same method, but he stays away slang…
