on form (i)
It feels like cheating to write another sonnet, then it feels like cheating to write another poem in terza rima, then it feels like cheating to write a sestina.
I like voice-driven poets like Frank O’Hara or Robert Sullivan or Eileen Myles who can write anything and it is a poem.
When I first read Frank O’Hara I thought, well then, anything can be a poem, and I started writing anything, and I was right, anything was a poem.
I had found a writing voice that turned anything into poetry, so I just wrote all the time instead of talking.
I think even then what I had really found was form, an idea of what size is a poem-sized thought and how to move from one thought to another at a poem-paced rate.
Form is like voice in that it it turns anything into poetry.
Some poets can keep going but I keep running out. The voice runs out, the form stops being the form in which anything can be written.
For a long time I cannot write at all, and then I find a form which is the right form for something I want to write and I can write faster than thinking, and then it is written.
I think I have written one poem, but I keep wanting to take up the form again, and anything I think of can only be written in that form.
I try not to write another poem in the same form. It is cheating, to write another poem in terza rima. I do not like sestinas.
I write poems in no form at all as a way of resisting the form I want to write in, or to space it out.
Or I go with it, and think, if I am writing sonnets, I will write fourteen sonnets. There will be a turn after the first eight, or the last two of them will offer some surprising resolution.
Then I want to write nothing but sonnet sequences. But this is cheating!
At the moment, I can only write in paragraphs of a sentence or two long. Is this prose or poetry?
I am the same with clothes, there is always only one thing I want to wear every day.
Then I don’t like it anymore, and I don’t know why.
anna jackson
o
My preferred approach to writing poetry is wildly unpredictable and generally characterised by the absence of a pellucid objective. I am frequently inclined to question my penchant for chaos, mostly for fear of not being taken ‘seriously’, but I am more frequently still in awe of the poetic freedom I experience when I relinquish control and just let whatever wants to happen happen. For the poet whose poetry hinges on chronically complex patterns of thought and behaviour, some degree of chaos is surely critical, a compulsion, even. If the poet refuses to honour, in their practice, the truest nature of their content, how are they to produce material with the kind of depth and resonance they, or anyone, can trust?
I usually know when a poem is ready to be written without knowing much about the shape or direction of that poem, almost like remembering the feeling of a dream but very few details. In terms of the writing of the poem itself, I begin my writing quite casually, often in the style of a diary entry, and eventually I will pick up on particular associations and resonances and have to decide what makes sense in that moment to pursue, usually it is some sort of dichotomy as I take a scandalous amount of pleasure in challenging and experimenting with the ‘mutually exclusive’. I also enjoy playing around with line breaks sooner rather than later as I’m always thinking about sound in poetry and have found the punctuating role of line breaks to be a very effective way of developing and navigating rhythm.
Given my preoccupation with sound, one might assume an appreciation of traditional poetic form, especially those forms calling for metre and a regular rhyme scheme. Yes, I am fond of this kind of poetry; however, I much prefer poetry that has seemingly created its own set of rules on the page, the sort of formula that emerges without premeditation, during the act of writing. I absolutely love it when I feel as though the rhythmic qualities of a poem in particular could be as much of a surprise to the reader as they were to the poet, perhaps on their first reading of the poem aloud. I suppose if I am interested at all in traditional form, I am interested in all the brilliant ways contemporary poets are reimagining constraints, just as I am interested in the reimagining of song lyrics by contemporary songwriters such as Aldous Harding and Cate Le Bon. To quote Harding’s own description of her writing process: ‘Yeah, I wasn’t constructing it. I was inviting it’.1 I really like that.
1 Bloom, Madison. ‘Will the Real Aldous Harding Please Stand Up?’ Pitchfork, 8 Mar 2022, pitchfork.com/features/interview/aldous-harding-warm-chris.
amy marguerite
o
A quick internet search using ‘poetic form’ comes as a shock to me. In my naivety, I expect a couple, perhaps three, dozen entries. I find over one hundred before stopping, with variously numerous references to lines, rhyme structures, rhythmic form, specifications of stanza divisions. And all that before looking across different languages. So I turn to physics and, before long, I am thinking about waves and harmonics. All these oscillations are based around a simple structure of addition, subtraction and corrective feedback. You add something, or remove a factor. You shift something, and it responds in the opposite way to correct itself. New state = Old state – response to change in state. Waves with harmonics, rhythms, regular beats.
Of course, applying mathematics to poetry is a risky business. I’m not a huge fan of pyramid forms, or Fibonacci series. I see their point – pyramids describe stacking in nature, Fibonacci series are characteristic of growth and division. But some non-mathematical forms strike me as equally artificial, like the combinations of words at the line endings of sestinas. Some forms are excessively virtuosic, as found in Norse and Tang dynasty works, even if clever and elegantly beautiful. But I love the more disorganized combinations found in Yao’s ‘831 Fireplace Road’, for example.
Rhyme in poetry deals with similarity – similarity of sound, similarity of appearance – and dissimilarity. Similarity aids the memory. Slant rhymes and homophones disturb regularity and stimulate the senses. Repetition of phonemes, assonance and alliteration play their part. Rhyme brings a pleasing harmonic to my ears. Similarly, rhythm. Ordering words in a rising and falling pattern is pleasing to my ear, but less important to my eye. Anaphora uses familiarity of sound to give structure, acrostics structure using pseudo-arbitrary order, and Cage’s mesostics offers a less obvious, but more structured, structuring.
In some ways, I see fixed-number-of-lines forms as extensions of these ideas. Four lines rhyming abab makes memorizing easier, abba perhaps more reflexive with that nice reflection about the centre. Repeating these units allows for formal complexity to be reduced when the conceptual complexity is extended, and allows boundaries to shift and variations to be examined under more controlled conditions. Variations in this structure can be used to highlight points. Argument, counter-argument, conclusion – could this be a sonnet? Sometimes I wonder how far this can be extended or removed. For example, the use of repetition over multiple translations, as Bergvall does in ‘Via’ or across parallel pieces as Nakayasu does in ‘Some Girls Walk into the Country They are From’.
Physics has a tendency to throw up problems, though. New state = Old state – response to change in state. This feedback mechanism can create mathematical unpredictability or chaos as well as harmony. This is the risk in experimentation at the limits. Playing along these boundaries is the substitution of these syntaxes with new, but still rigorous, rules of word choice and placement. Mac Low does with his ‘Vocabularies’, producing pieces which are eerily pseudo-structures to listen to, difficult to read on the page and ‘performed’, rather than ‘read’ aloud. This, of course, might be moving over the frontiers into a different genre. Occasionally I wonder what this genre is, if not poetry, and whether the designation really matters.
martin porter
o
If forms are bodies.
Lately, I haven’t been thinking of closed poetic forms when I’ve been thinking about form. I’ve been thinking about syntax, (arranging, putting together), and about fragments, lists, interruptions, weird clauses; about punctuation.
For a very long time, I’ve been thinking about form as aporia, conundrum, juncture, disjunction, and obstacles: the river at Hagley park when I walk directionless and aimless, the sudden contact with running bodies.
If forms are multiple bodies.
The last few weeks my conversations have been peopled by bodies: student bodies, gendered bodies, aging bodies, bodies of work, constrained bodies, organic bodies, bodies of risk and scatter; book bodies at the Macmillan Brown Library displayed for our class on Materiality, by way of collage.
I’ve been thinking that collage is the form I can’t ever walk away from.
In the reading room.
Caroline Levine – ‘The Affordances of Form’:
- Forms afford movement across varied materials.
- Literary forms reflect or respond to contemporary political conditions.
- Form is disturbing.
In the mouth.
‘The page has never solved my troubles, but the page has let me know them better, let me know the body of myself better through those troubles. Maybe’.
– Natalie Diaz (Mojave Nation)
If the body politic is a form.
No form or syntax makes sense when there is Gaza.
Last weekend, we walked from Latimer Square to the Bridge of Remembrance. It wasn’t enough. The placards, the chants, the maps, the numbers: they weren’t enough. The shops were teeming though; the bars down Riverside.
We were all of us materials. Hugh Latimer (burned at the stake), mortar (‘Palestine’, ‘Egypt’, ‘Gallipoli’).
In the reading room. Or, if forms are bodies, are objects.
‘Objects actively produce meanings, whilst also speaking of silence, absence or contradiction’.
– Rachel Robertson
If forms. Are ecosystems.
Rambling, wrestling, leaning: as grammar, as form. My gerund use in English always irritates me. But I can’t help it – the gerund in Greek is not used as a noun. It signals a cause before an effect. Or is used as an instruction. For example: going outside, finding soil, a body of water, your own body: approach.
A proposition then, or a nearing. (Then?) Ukrainian American sculptor Louise Berliawsky Nevelson said: ‘I make collages. I join the shattered world’.
vana manasiadis
o
Sonnet, sonetto, little song; a poem as a kind of score for voice. Well, definitely I want to lean (as though on a crutch) into the aesthetics and associations built-in to the genre of the sonnet. I would just love for you to sound my poem aloud, excavate its rhymes, make its music; to sing or whisper it to somebody in need, or to sext it under the dinner table to a latest boyfriend.
I do think form is something that happens to you, naturally. You start thinking in a particular way; the phrases that snag happen to have this or that sort of pulse; the sonnet is felt, dreamt as a kind of sound or shape first, before actual poems come… as though they could have come from somewhere beyond my mind… And so form is a way to dramatise this relationship you have entirely with yourself, a way to get outside yourself and ask for guidance. You write into or against formal constraints as though writing were really a conversation between you and a more talented friend; or a mystical force (the Muse, God, Inspiration itself?); or at least two different versions of yourself: the dogged writer you are and the exalting bard the sonnet demands you be.
But I mean, come on, is a sonnet really that demanding? Is it even useful to think of form as a demand? Isn’t it more like a gesture, a conceit, an orientation; and therefore open to variation and permutation? My sonnets (confession) aren’t metered, and they barely rhyme. I was getting lunch with my friend Goose the other day and I was like, well, a sonnet is kind of like a sandwich, really; it’s layered, compact, portable — you can hold it in your hand, your imperfect hand as it gestures toward perfect love!
jackson mccarthy