It wasn’t until I went to graduate school in my forties that I began to experiment with poetic forms.
One of the things that previously turned me off to writing in forms was the practice of rhyming end lines. It’s hard to rhyme words in English; according to Flocabulary, “orange” is just one of a list of English words that have no rhymes. Others are “silver,” “purple,” “month,” “ninth,” “pint,” “wolf,” “opus,” “dangerous,” “marathon” and “discombobulate.”
Rhyming in English is so challenging that poets had to invent “slant rhymes,” or words that sort of rhyme with each other, to overcome the problem of rhyming. Shakespeare used slant rhyme; so did Emily Dickinson:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him – did you not
His notice sudden is –
The Grass divides as with a Comb –
A spotted shaft is seen –
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on …
Shakespeare used the English sonnet for his poems, and Dickinson’s poems are mostly written in a loose ballad form. Both poets also used assonance as a substitute for rhyme.
When I started to experiment with form, I found it, paradoxically, wildly liberating. The constraints of a poetic form forced my imagination to carry out new (and sometimes painful) gyrations. I decided to ditch rhymes—it would be fantastic if any interesting bits of assonance or alliteration showed up in my poems, but I wasn’t going to force them.
I tried a lot of different forms, and even spent a few months attempting to write poems using each of the forms in the Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (every writer should have a copy of this book). I went through a ghazal-writing binge, tried a few cantos, struggled through a sonnet or two, forced myself to write a rhymed terza rima, and finally settled on three favorite forms: pantoum, villanelle, and abecedarian (the abecedarian is not in the Handbook. Here’s a description at the Academy of American Poets). Only the villanelle is rhymed, but I decided to write mine unrhymed.
If you are attempting to use formal poetry to expand your creative practice, I suggest you follow the same path: find a good reference with examples and write your way through the book, trying out different forms until you find the ones that work best for you.
All three of my chosen forms have been around for a very long time. The pantoum is an ancient form from Malaysia, the villanelle dates to 16th century France, and the abecedarian is found in the Hebrew Bible. I like to think of poets of yore mapping out their poems, scratching their heads over the requirements for the various forms in French, Malaysian, or Hebrew.
Working in a form doesn’t mean that you can’t change things about it. As I referred to earlier, I decided to do away with rhyme in the villanelle while adhering to the rest of its rules. Other poets have stretched forms in new and interesting ways. Michael Kriesel, for example, wrote an entire collection, Zen Amen, in abecedarians (my review is at The Pedestal). He wrote double and reverse abecedarians as well as regular ones.
One of my favorite pantoums is “A Painter’s Thoughts” by John Yao, which also happens to be an ekphrastic poem. It’s fascinating how Yao uses the form in such a way that it seems to disappear, its repeating lines only obvious after several readings. This is one of my favorite qualities of the pantoum: its flexibility within the constraints of the form allows for surprising revelations. “Pantoum,” a poem from John Ashbery’s 1956 book Some Trees, introduced the form to American poets.
The villanelle is a form I’ve have quite a bit of success with. I started tinkering with it a few years ago, and I found it unexpectedly rewarding. Like the pantoum, it has a pattern of repeating lines; unlike the pantoum, it does not possess the possibility of going on forever, but ends after six stanzas. This requires the poet to be succinct—it’s not the best form for epic or narrative poetry, but lends itself to short observations about love, Nature, or some internal reflection.
I’ve published a few villanelles:
“Portal” at Verse Daily (first published in Redactions)
And a couple of abecedarians:
“Un Día Ordinario” at Eucalyptus Lit
“Unbeliever Abecedarian” at Whale Road Review
Two ghazals:
“To the Border Guard Who Found Aylan Kurdi” at Collateral
One of my pantoums, “Big Trees and Rain,” is forthcoming from Two Hawks Quarterly.
Do you write in forms? If so, which ones have you used? Why? Please share in the comments.
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