Plain Style, an essay
I had an instinctive sense of a foundational aesthetic from the time I began to write seriously, though I would never have presumed to call it a style. It issued from a belief that pure lyric infused the words that we use daily—that simplicity can honor complexity, that poetry should speak to any reader. I’m a Midwesterner from the rural farm-and-factory stretches of Ohio, from a tiny town where one did not put on airs and where what we had to say mostly was kept unsaid; I wanted minimalism and stripped-down-ness and hard clear edges, and I wanted it all to sing.
When I entered an MFA program decades ago, there were two primary stylistic camps—the intellectual, largely formalist poets of the Academy and the “plain-style” poets, heir to the confessionals and the Deep Image school. But the range of work being done under these loose headings was considerable, and everything fed my apprenticeship. If I had obvious models like my fellow Ohioans, James Wright and Sherwood Anderson, I also drew from countless others whose impact was likely in no way evident– Zbigniew Herbert, Tranströmer, Dickinson, Hopkins, Old and Middle English and T’ang Dynasty poets, Glück and Jorie Graham. I’ve always viewed influence, and encouraged my students to welcome it, as a recognition of kinship, of some future version of our own work, there to illuminate the way forward.
In his 1926 essay “A Profession of Literary Faith,” Jorge Luis Borges offers a droll parenthetical observation that “plain style” is an oxymoron. “Plain style is doubly metaphoric,” Borges wrote, “because ‘style’ means, etymologically, a pointed instrument, and ‘plain’ is akin to a flat plain, smooth, without cracks. A plain style: a pointed instrument similar to the pampas. Who can understand that?” But I’m drawn to the disconnect of that juxtaposition, a flatness that punctures. How a landscape itself inscribes. A style whose aim is not to call attention to itself can nevertheless be a pointed instrument, and a foundation both for and open to change, which has certainly been my own trajectory over the years. Where I’m from is not where I am.
Still— style is very much a product of nature and nurture; it’s an evolving amalgamation, of origins and influences and unbidden shifts and elected reinvention, of forces within and without. Charles Wright said, somewhere, that style was ultimately an absolute manner of seeing things, and that aligns with my thinking – it evolves as our perspectives and intentions, the plains of our writerly landscapes, are reshaped by experience, by the altered weather and features of a changing aesthetic, and by the winds of other voices sweeping through.
Debra Allbery
Debra Allbery is the author, most recently, of Fimbul-Winter (Four Way, 2011), which won the National Book Prize in Poetry from Grub Street. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, a Hawthornden fellowship, and other awards, she joined the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as the program’s director from 2009 until her retirement in 2023.