Michael, I find your writing on the turn quite interesting BUT have disagreements with some of it. That may be due to my being new to your slant, and not having investigated very much of it. I’m too impatient to wait until I feel I’m on top of your view not to make an exploratory comment or two, though. Here’s the first:
I have trouble with your severing “structure” from “form.” How can the form of a poem not be structural? It seems to me you are simply distinguishing formal structure from . . . I haven’t a good name for it, but for now, how about, “depictive structure?” The patterning of a poem’s depiction of the story it is telling, if it is a narrative poem; or the scene or subject if lyric; or the idea if it is meditative; and so forth. Not that this isn’t a valuable thing to do. (I must confess that I hadn’t thought about any other kinds of poetic structure than formal structure until reading your thoughts on the subject.)
Moreover, your definition of structure as “the pattern of a poem’s turning” suggests that what happens in a poem before and after its turning is not structural, which seems loopy to me.
Hence, I would focus on the kind of structure a poem has rather than the kind of turn it has. The latter, in fact, would be determined by the former. I don’t think this should cause much change in what you’re asking of poets and engagents of poetry. They would still be keying on the turn at the heart of a poem–except that they would get to it only after determining what kind of structure the poem had. And “structure” would retain its general meaning.
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