Author: Cassarino

Favorite Poems

by Cassarino

Please link here to 1 poem NOT assigned this unit (can be a poem from a poet we’ve read) that you’ve discovered independently and want to share with everyone because it’s that good.

Why Form Poetry?

by Cassarino

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…

Onwards to Poetry / Reading Responses

by Cassarino

As we move into the poetry unit, I’d like to open a similar discussion to the one we had when transitioning between the genres of nonfiction and fiction: What are your fears / anxieties / excitements about writing poetry? Please share. What is “poetry”?

Here is Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. In Robert Frost’s beautiful essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” he writes of the poetic form: It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. For Marianne Moore (see “Poetry”), a poem contains imaginary gardens with real toads in them. What poetry requires: the cultivation of a gift for listening to language before you make language listen to you.

How do we read poems differently or come to poetry differently than we do other genres? Does poetry require a different state of mind / different expectations? What must a poem do to make it a poem?

Look at a prose poem such as Robert Hass’ “A Story about the Body” and consider how it gets categorized as a poem rather than a story? Check out his other poems listed on the syllabus (“On Squaw Peak,” a narrative poem, and “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a lyric poem) to see how one poet experiments across different styles of verse. My hope is that by the end of this unit, you’ll have tried out several poetic forms.

Let’s also use this space to post reading responses for the unit — select poems that especially resonate with you. If you read a poem, or a line in a poem, that you love, please share it, and tell others why they should turn to it too.

Finally, look at Marianne Moore’s original and revised versions of her poem “Poetry”: Poetry (1967) / Poetry (1919) to see the long life a poem can have, its evolution 48 years deep…one’s work is never finished or perfected…

Exiting Fiction

by Cassarino

As we finish up the fiction unit, I’m curious to hear brief reflections/takeaways. Who is the fiction writer that most influenced your writing? What is the story that most influenced your writing? Did your ideas for what makes a good story change? What’s the most important thing you discovered about fiction / the process of writing a story? Anything else?