[Maryann Corbett]

Over on the DG board, a couple of us have mentioned an interest in new forms. I'm one of them, so I thought I'd try to start a thread that gathers people's thoughts about novelty in form. It's a wonderful kick to discover a clever new construction in which the design of the poem is a perfect fit for its contents. Perhaps we might collect some of people's great finds here.

One that I found recently, and that I'm sure many of you also noticed, is "Alice in the Looking Glass" in A.E. Stallings's Olives. It appeared first in Linebreak magazine, so here's the link. Notice that it's a form constructed of opposing meanings rather than sounds, in a shape that we'd call envelope rhyme if it were made of rhymes. The reversals of meaning match the looking glass idea.

In a similar vein, a few months back we took note of Annabelle Moseley's mirror sonnet.

To a lot of us, these might no longer be new, but they will be to some: Greg Williamson's double exposures

What other novel forms have you found and loved?

[Chris Childers]

Hey Maryann,

Good of you to put up this thread, and hopefully it will attract plenty of responses. You have your eye on even more abstruse or eye-catching examples than I was thinking of when, on DG, I said I would like to see more nonce forms, and a more thoughtful relationship between form and content. I had in mind though less nonce forms than nonce stanzas, with varying numbers of lines and varying lengths. For example, Wilbur's great "Hamlen Brook" is written in a nonce quatrain--3, 4, 5, 3, with envelope rhyme. Surely this isn't the only poem in the language that uses this quatrain, but it doesn't have a name (does it?), & it seems to me to fit the movement of the poem: the poet's eye is caught at first by something small (the trout); it follows it out towards ever-expanding vistas that eventually contain mountains and trees and the "azures of the zenith," and then pulls back into the recognition that immensity is too immense, and cannot be all swallowed. The line length (from tri to tet to pent and back to tri) mirrors this movement, of gradual expansion followed by immediate contraction, as do the rhyme scheme and the syntax: envelope rhyme is a kind of container, and suggests how the poet's cupped hands strive to contain the immensity he witnesses; but, just as the water falls through his hands, and joy leaves an unsatisfiable ache, so the enjambed syntax breaks through its stanzaic containers and mimics what slips inevitably from our grasp. To me, this is the kind of thing we should really be trying to do with form.

Of course, not all "nonce" or heterometrical forms have such subtle relations to their subject matter, & that's fine. A poem like "Whitsun Weddings" is written in a big 10-line stanza, with a quatrain-sestet rhyme scheme, and all the lines pentameter except the second, which is dimeter. An essay on Poetry Foundation suggests that the 10-line stanza is meant to invoke Keats' big odes, which may well be right, though I can't think of a subtle reason for the dimeter line. Whatever the point of it, the dimeter line, and the fact that he repeats it, makes it a nonce stanza.

Recently I've done a lot of thinking about stanzas, and find it helpful to think about several different types: 1) stanzas all in the same meter; 2) stanzas with a shortened last line (which I think of as "curtal" stanzas); 3) stanzas with lines of varying length, in which lines of equal length are rhymed (in my head, I call this "rime couée," expanding the meaning of that term from a 4-4-3-4-4-3 stanza that rhymes either aabaab or aabccb; the Burns stanza is a slightly tweaked version of rime couée); 4) truly nonce stanzas, in which lines of unequal length are rhymed (like the Wilbur below). This classification isn't perfect, and I would welcome tweaks if anyone has suggestions, but I do think it's worth distinguishing between the rhyming of equal and unequal lines, and that it may perhaps provide a decent, if somewhat arbitrary, way to think and talk about stanza construction.

Well, enough! I'll leave off with Hamlen Brook, a great poem most people will know but that is hard to see too much of.

Hamlen Brook
Richard Wilbur

At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

[Janice D. Soderling]

What a good thread idea, Maryann. I am always looking for new forms, nonce or otherwise, sometimes I don't know the difference.

I often try my hand at forms (or shapes) that in some way reach out to me--just as a theme or a phrase or even a word, can reach out. I discovered the pantun via a kinneret in a John Hollander book a while back and experimented. A form of Louise Glück gave rise to a poem that later appeared at The Centrifugal Eye. (I'll try to find LG poem today and add it here.

I wrote a poem a few years ago based on Paul Goodman's The Lordly Hudson which no editor has ever liked. Maybe I should ask the Spherians what is wrong with it? I think I'll put it up today and find out.

Other forms I found challenging and tried out aren't new to experienced poets/readers here: ovillejo, chained haiku. Sometimes I make up my own. Sometimes I go back to the old masters and form-copy them for practice. Such as Song (John Donne) first verse only here. Not as easy as it seems:

Go, and catch a falling star;
xxxGet with child a mandrake root;
Tell me where all past years are
xxxOr who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear Mermaids singing;
Or to keep off envy's singing,
xxxxxAnd find
xxxxxwhat wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Borrowing is an old and time-honored occupation, both form and content, as one sees from the singing mermaids above.

Another source of forms to copy is Strong Verse (which, I know, I've mentioned countless times) but it is such an exciting book--variations on traditional forms. I'll post some examples from it later today, now I need my morning coffee.

Apropos Alica's poem above. I first saw the title poem of her book Olives in The Atlantic. I don't know if it is a new form or not, but it was certainly exciting. Understatement; isn't everything that comes she presents "exciting".

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks for taking me up on my offer, Chris and Janice. A couple of observations:

I'm a huge fan of nonce stanzas (not only of reading them but of writing them). While we certainly could use more of them here on the Sphere, I have to confess I think of them as standard tools, more like different uses of the ordinary building blocks than especially creative. That's not to put them down! I have no idea why we don't see more of them here. [Editing back: I see today there's a Gwynn specimen on Metrical.] I do grant that "Hamlen Brook" is amazing in its pacing and its match of form to substance.

About Donne's "Song," it seems to me that we should think of it according to its title: as a song lyric rather than a page poem primarily. Those short lines--the two of them together--strike my ear as intended to be spread out over the same number of beats as the long ones.

I wish I could show you some of the interesting pieces in Todd Boss's latest book, Pitch, but the formatting is really hard to do with our system. I'll look for a way to link.
And here I am, back to add the link, to "Accounting." Format-wise, this one is simple, since it's not het-met, but monometer. (And how many other monometer poems can you recall?) The one-beat-per-line structure is the perfect match to the idea of sparsity, of counting up a sad and meager insufficiency. I'm still looking online for Boss's more complicated forms.

Another variant we might highlight is the use of the rarer meters, or mixes of meters, in ways that really zing with the content. I'm not even quite sure how to characterize the meter in Karl Shapiro's "Buick"--sometimes it's dactyls, sometimes it's anapests, and there are a lot of flips and substitutions--but for gliding and sliding like a big old car, it's unmatched.

[Marcia Karp]

[Removed for more thought]

[Catherine Chandler]

I am intensely interested in new, odd, nonce, and invented forms, and have written several lately that I feel marry content and form (e.g. my "Intervals", which will appear in the next issue of Measure and "White Night", to be published soon in Mezzo Cammin). I'm also experimenting with what Chris calls the "curtal" stanza and stanzas with interesting rhyme schemes (esp. slant).

Thank you for the links and examples.

One nonce I love that comes to mind is Frost's "Storm Fear". Notice both the varying meters and rhyme scheme.


Storm Fear

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lowest chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
'Come out! Come out!'-
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,-
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether 'tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.






---- Robert Frost

[Chris Childers]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

I'm a huge fan of nonce stanzas (not only of reading them but of writing them). While we certainly could use more of them here on the Sphere, I have to confess I think of them as standard tools, more like different uses of the ordinary building blocks than especially creative. That's not to put them down! I have no idea why we don't see more of them here. I do grant that "Hamlen Brook" is amazing in its pacing and its match of form to substance.

I wouldn't disagree that nonce stanzas are "standard tools," but it seems to me the trick is to find stanza forms that seem uniquely and unparaphrasably appropriate to the subject matter, & that to do this well is anything but standard. To begin, you need 1) to recognize and think about how it works in other poems, and 2) to allow yourself a little freedom from the basic sonnets, quatrains, blank verse, and received forms, to explore and put together larger or other units, and find a structure that works. So that's what interests me most in the idea of "nonce," not necessarily the way-out-there, novel, eye-catching and adventurous (though that can be cool too), but the skillful and suggestive combination of traditional elements in such a way that meaning and meter each seem filled with the other.

Another famous example of the nonce stanza is "The Pulley," by George Herbert, who is a master of this kind of thing, and whose stanza forms repay serious study:

The Pulley.

...............VVHen God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
...............Contract into a span.

...............So strength first made a way;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
...............Rest in the bottome lay.

...............For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
...............So both should losers be.

...............Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse:
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
...............May tosse him to my breast.

The stanza form mimics the contraction and expansion, the giving and withholding, within the poem. The first short line of each stanza suggests the gift God withholds--rest; the last evokes the ultimate rest to which we go; and their equality suggests the equivalence of the giving and withholding; by withholding rest, God gives it to us, and this is the pulley, which takes the force applied in one direction and transfers it to the opposite, as blessings from heaven to earth move us from earth to heaven. Again, this seems to me the kind of thing that we should be trying to do half so well ourselves.

An example of the "curtal" stanza, in which the shortened last line is used to chilling effect, is Larkin's "The Old Fools." I won't paste it, but it should be easy to find online. Stanzas and nonce stanzas are a (somewhat under-utilized) way of introducing formal variety into one's work without artificially ticking off the boxes of Sestina, Villanelle, Rondeau, Pantoum, etc., & I think they train us in the essential discipline of melding form and content.

C

PS: Catherine's Frost poem, which I didn't know but is great, is obviously not stanzaic, but a heterometrical verse paragraph. The unpredictable line lengths may be suggestive both of the violence of the storm outside, and the internal storm of fearful thoughts, though it's interesting that there is more alternation of very long and very short lines in the first part of the poem (the storm proper) than in the second part (the speaker's troubled thoughts). Frost is at any rate a master of this kind of thing, maybe most famously in "After Apple-Picking." Other similar poems are Herbert's "The Collar" and Wilbur's "Fern Beds in Hampshire County."

[Maryann Corbett]

Chris wrote in the post just above:

that's what interests me most in the idea of "nonce," not necessarily the way-out-there, novel, eye-catching and adventurous (though that can be cool too), but the skillful and suggestive combination of traditional elements in such a way that meaning and meter each seem filled with the other.

Which is all well and good, and accompanied by some fine analysis. Being vast and containing multitudes, however, he also writes back in post 2:

Of course, not all "nonce" or heterometrical forms have such subtle relations to their subject matter, & that's fine.

Agreed. And since a good measure of my aim in starting this thread is to stir up activity in the creation of new poems, I get a little nervous about pointing only to the highest pinnacles of stanza creation. There's much pleasure simply in finding variety of form. Yesterday, someone on Facebook posted Auden's "Heavy Date," which was new to me. Here's just a stanza:

Sharp and silent in the
Clear October lighting
Of a Sunday morning
The great city lies;
And I at a window
Looking over water
At the world of Business
With a lover’s eyes.

Not much going on yet, but even in a short space the reader says, Oh! something different. Not just the same old IP.

I am, in fact, interested in the novel, the eye-catching, the adventurous. Is anybody else? Mastery is not past-tense-only.

[Catherine Chandler]

Of course "mastery is not "past-tense-only"!

Sorry if my Frost example seemed to imply it.

There's a lot of gimmicky novel, eye-catching stuff out there. Not all of it is well-crafted, though.

I'll leave it to others to come up with adventurous examples (from Facebook or elsewhere ) since I'm flying back to Canada on Sunday and I want to wallow in the ancient rhythms of the sea until then.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

Sevenlings by RODDY LUMSDEN

The sevenling is a poem of seven lines inspired by the form of this much translated short verse by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966).

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.

... And he married me.
tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin)

The rules of the sevenling are thus:

The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition. There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, metre or rhyme is desirable. To give the form a recognisable shape, it should be set out in two stanzas of three lines, with a solitary seventh, last line. Titles are not required. A sevenling should be titled Sevenling followed by the first few words in parentheses The tone of the sevenling should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing, giving a feeling that only part of the story is being told. The poem should have a certain ambience which invites guesswork from the reader.
_________________________________________________

Two Sevenlings by Roddy Lumsden

A filthy West End night, the windows wide.
Now she's been gone a month and missed a week
and ached for all day long. Her sister waits:

she flips the Magic 8 Ball, walks in circles,
spreads mushy peas on cold, unbuttered toast
in the kitchenette. The record stops. She shouts,

put on some songs by four black guys in suits.




All those buzzsaw years I ran the show,
all those kids who asked me for advice,
The Architect, the Miraclist, The Man.

The starlets kick-line, that was my concoction,
the sailor boys, the peacock feather spotlights;
till one night in a blackout, I let slip

what it is I say to all the girls.