[Allen Tice]

(Just signing on so as to get the updates.)

[Gail White]

Interesting topic. Many of my poems start out intending to be sonnets (background thought: "Maybe this would do as a Nemerov entry") and then turn out to be better as 4 quatrains or blank verse. Sometimes an idea will occur that seems better as tetrameter. But in general I stick to rather simple forms, and the first lines and the form usually come to me at the same time.

PS: All you Americans might want to go out for a wildly expensive weekend. Come Tuesday, the dollar may be worthless except in Patagonia.

[John Whitworth]

I think Yeats always wrote a prose summary. He was, as Stevie Smith would have it, 'a 'foot off the ground person' and perhaps he felt these things grounded him a bit if you see what I mean.

I couldn't possibly do such a thing.

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks for all these fascinating responses. I was reading an interview with Eve Sedgwick today, and she said she likes to be silent in the classroom sometimes, to “give room” to her students. Then I realized that if a received form could talk, it might say to me: Here, I’ve “made room” for you. I understand you’ve been squeezed out of the world in various ways, but you are welcome here in my imaginative house. You’re free to look around the rooms, look out the windows, and work in the study. We’ll have tea and biscuits (sonnet), or petit four (triolet), or spanakopita (sapphics), or dolma (ghazal).

I know this isn’t exactly the question that started this thread. The first question is whether you can write something in one form, then re-write it in another form. I still feel that this method is less successful. Certainly, one can write reams of prose in advance of writing a poem, but when it’s time to write the poem itself, it seems best (for me! let Yeats do whatever he wants!) to approach the form with a clean slate. Then you have the best chance of hearing what the form and you have to say to each other, of learning about each other.

To revise something I said before. It isn’t “most often” that the form and I meet in thin air before the poem is written. I just find that the most thrilling way to begin a poem - not knowing anything in advance. Many times I’ve decided to sit down to write in one form or another, but as I practice different forms, the thrill of not knowing which form will appear happens more often.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Form informs informally, for me.

Cally

[Jean L. Kreiling]

Hello, all--

I've only refrained from adding to this thread because there's so MUCH I'd like to say about this crucial issue.

I finally decided to offer just one very personal observation: I am amazed by how many of the ideas, stories, and images with which I work seem to demand the sonnet form. Or is it my mind that's shaped that way???? I've done some research and writing on this, but it remains mysterious and astonishing to me (and sometimes even annoying!).

On the other hand, I can't imagine rewriting any of my villanelles in another form--which leads me to believe that a big part of our job as poets is discovering the "right" form in each case.

Ah, now I've started to go on and on, as I feared I would . . .

Best,
Jean

[David Mason]

"Form informs informally, for me"--that's one of the great pithy statements I have read of late...The "for me" is , of course, the kicker.

Dave

[Tim Murphy]

JK, MM, "We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms," as the Dean told us four centuries ago. Sonnets comprise less than ten percent of my ouevre, but for the leading women poets of our day, including many at this site, the figure is far higher. I often read manuscripts and first books where the ratio easily exceeds fifty percents. And this isn't a new phenomenon. Look at three generations, Espaillat, Chandler, and Dubrow.

[Ed Shacklee]

I'm guessing your musical bent has a big influence on which forms call to you, Jean. If the converse is also true, it may help explain why I find villanelles so hard to write.

Has anyone else felt their heart thudding in tune with the drums? I don't know, but I think that's a universal feeling; so I wonder to what extent beat -- where our preferences may shift, but on a more instinctive, reflexive level -- drives our choice of forms, and even (perhaps) attitudes and topics.

Best,

Ed

[Jean L. Kreiling]

Well, now that I've joined the conversation, I'm not quite ready to shut up . . .

Ed, for me the relationships between music and poetry are intriguing, challenging, and sometimes troubliesome--but yes, there must be a link between the specific types of music and poetry that appeal to me.

And yes, much of it is about the beat. It's usually clear to me that certain material needs either a more pronounced or a more subtle sort of beat--there's a poem languishing in my files that I honestly think is both thoughtful and metrically skillful, but the thought and the meter do not match, and I just haven't managed to recast the thing succesfully.

Also, while my previous post exclaimed about how often the material that interests me seems to seek the sonnet form, I should have added that I have also worked with ideas that seem to "demand" other forms. I've occasionally had the experience of totally recasting a poem-in-progress, finding the form it really wanted from the start--and then I feel like a real poet.

Best,
Jean