An Experiment With Form: Disclamor - "Battery Mendell"

Hey folks,

My English class has moved on from poetry of witness in Against Forgetting, to post-modern poetry with Disclamor by G.C. Waldrep.  I am going to post some of my initial analysis and reflection on his poem "
Battery - Mendell".  Waldrep's nine battery poems are written about a series of military forts (batteries) built along California's coast in the early 20th century. 

The first element of "Battery - Mendell" that caught my attention was the form.  The poem isn't grouped into stanzas; the lines are short and spaced unevenly along the page.  When I come across poems with forms so different from the norm, I usually think about why the author felt the poem couldn't be conveyed with a typical form of quatrains or something similar.  As an experiment to see how the poem was affected by form, I decided to type up Waldrep's "Battery - Mendell" and alter the form into a more traditional design.  I understand that the author's message may be warped by changing the form, but that is what I hope to accomplish.  I expect my interpretation of the poem to change after altering the form, but would be delightedly surprised if I feel the poem doesn't read differently after its form is changed.


When I read the poem as it was formatted by Waldrep, I find myself adding pauses in places I wouldn't normally.  This is a result of the lines being shifted left and right, but I wonder whether the same effect couldn't be achieved through typical enjambment and punctuation.

Waldrep uses an ornamental symbol every ten lines or so as a sort of separator.  I have used as similar symbol as I could produce.  I'm also sorry for the squiggly green and red lines.  I hope you'll understand.

The act itself of rewriting the poem shed some light on the importance of form.  I found myself having to decide how best to break up the stanzas and lines, and I made those decisions based on what I thought the poet was trying to convey in those lines.  For example, in the fifth stanza I joined "Let us imagine" and "these shrines" onto one line.  In the original they are split by a line, and "these shrines" is moved to the right of the page.  I feel Waldrep used the spacing of words to convey a disjointedness between the shrines in their present state, the shrines as they were initially used, and the shrines as they have been changed by visitors' graffiti.  The next lines, "superalter, amphitheater, ERIC + STACY. GINA L/S WADE." are spaced out vertically and horizontally in the original poem, possibly to highlight the multiple ways the battery is used today.
  While I initially felt perturbed by the form of the poem (I too quickly judge poetic devices that appear odd to me), the process of reformatting it helped me understand the importance of the author's stylistic choice.  Oftentimes when I read poetry with odd forms, I feel the form is odd for the sake of being odd.  In the case of this poem though, I feel the odd alignment of text mimicked the winding paths through the batteries.  The poem can be read in typical stanza form, but it loses the feeling of wandering that Waldrep initially conveyed through structure.