Heading into this week — when you’re challenged to experiment with form poems — has me thinking about how I always encounter resistance when I incorporate the study of conventional literary poetic forms. Here’s why I think they’re important in the practice of writing poetry:
- There is continuity and dialogue between the traditional & the contemporary. What makes free verse “free” depends on knowing how conventional forms of verse function and evolve and influence the field of poetics across time. What is “free” may be defined as the rupture or subversion of what is not free. To understand our choices in free verse, we must experiment with formal verse, we must inhabit the form to break from it.
- Forms teach us to listen more closely, not only to the conventions of language but to the presence of a specific musicality or metricality inherent also to free verse, for even free verse has its own formal laws as it constructs a soundscape.
- Creating constraints, limits, and formal demands can create freedoms. Instead of focusing on the confinement (or burden?) of a form, think about how you might use it, even if the end result is only a partial adherence to rules (impurities of form are ok, as long as they have purpose). Consider how certain contemporary forms recreate original forms into new shapes (ie. Danez Smith’s “The 17 Year-Old & the Gay Bar” as a sonnet).
- Rhymes don’t have to default to Hallmark poems, but rather can be subtle, internal, hidden, elegant, enhancing the texture of a poem in unexpected ways. If you are anti-rhyme, there are several forms, such as the pantoum, that are really fun and do not contain any rhymes.
- The true success of a form poem occurs when the form is not recognized or obvious (read Addonizio’s form poems), when you are not as a reader aware that you’re within a constrained universe of poetic laws. This is also how you might realize that your poem is at home, in its most organic state. (I once wrote a sonnet, and a professor of mine responded: “The people in your poem don’t want to be in a sonnet. Set them free.” This was such a helpful lesson, one I’ve never forgotten when listening to how my poems necessitate their own shapes.) Forms cannot be forced; they must derive from the content and theme and meaning of your poem. (Remember, too, that many forms originate from particular thematic directions: the villanelle is traditionally about loss, the pantoum typically evokes the past, the sonnet is a love poem). Furthermore, a failed sonnet can become a successful free verse poem through revisions, as you deconstruct it out from its original point.
My hope is that you’ll have fun experimenting with forms this week, and that readings of contemporary poets using forms to address modern themes will open your own possibilities for bridging convention and invention.
Feel free to share some of your experiences of writing form poems here, and share the poems themselves…
I used to write only in ballads and limericks and odes and other structured forms, but now found it very difficult to return to that inflexibility for some reason. I just tried three times to write in form and “failed” twice. The first two were list poems (inspired by Parker’s wonderful “If You Are Over Staying Woke”) that I got too carried away with and that ended up being less of a list and more of something else. I still like them but they are not what I was going for originally. I finally succeeded in writing a ballad. Here are the three in the order that I wrote them:
-Ghost Stories-
The night isn’t quite so scary
When your eyes adjust
And you let your ears hum
With cricketsong.
The wolves in the dark—
They’re not here for you.
It’s the ones that hunt
When the sun’s rays shroud them
In long afternoon shadows
That you should be looking for.
The creaks on the staircase
Don’t mean the house is going to
Fall apart.
It will, but the staircase has nothing to do with it.
The wolves won’t
Disappear
And the house won’t
Hold itself together
Just because you’re
Seven
And they should probably wait
Until you’re at least eight
Before they swallow you whole
And spit you out again.
But one day the old wolves
Will stop trying to rip you
To s h r e d s
And you’ll wonder why
Until the mirror-ghost catches your eye
And you realize
They don’t have to.
You’ve done it all on your own.
-Life Hacks for the Waterlogged / Things I Wish I Knew at 15 –
The sky won’t take over
Crying for you
Every time you feel
Like you’ve used up every last drop
Of salt and water
You have left in you.
But if you let them,
Someone else will.
If the cabin pressure drops,
An oxygen mask will appear
Above your head.
Place it over your mouth and nose
And pull to tighten.
Remember to fasten your own
Before helping others with theirs.
Sometimes “okay”
Is just “okay.”
The world won’t wait
For you to realize
You’re worth more than
Apathetic steel and the coppery
Scent of something thicker than
The watery depths you’re drowning in.
That’s on you.
The Universe won’t throw you
A life raft
Every time the water
Inches past your flared nostrils
And over your eyes
And over the tips of your flailing fingertips.
It has better things to do
Than wait around
Until you realize
It gave you gills.
The found family you look for
With tears in your eyes
And twenty long-rusted daggers
Sticking out of your damn aorta
Won’t wait for you to find them –
But you will.
Besides,
They’ve been looking for you too.
– Poetry 101 –
So you have to write in form
I see you’re getting stuck
But in this hour of need I think
That you might be in luck.
A ballad’s pretty simple, but
Now listen carefully;
You should rhyme two and four for sure
And maybe one and three.
You might find at first
That your rhymes will really suck
But with some trial and error
And a little bit of luck
You should have something fabulous
But if it sounds like muck
Channel your frustration
And just end with what the