[Victor Kulkosky]

Here's a question that can be answered in a few words:

How does a poet choose the form that fits what he wants to say? I know, for instance, that the sonnet is generally used for personal statements, often related to love found, lost, hoped for and so on. But what about the rhyme scheme? Why use the Shakespearean version as opposed to the Petrarchan (sp.?)

English poetry generally works best in pentameter and iambic is the best meter for sustained use (with variation). Beyond these basics, why choose longer or shorter lines? When to use couplets versus alternating rhymes or some other scheme, or slant rhymes or no rhymes?

As an example, Elizabeth Bishop (my current heroine) uses the sestina form in a poem called, simply enough, "Sestina." She manages to express personal and disturbing feelings within this demanding form. Is there some relationship between the content and this particular form that makes the content and the form a best fit? Likewise, say, Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," which is a villanelle: why a villanelle?

Might there be books that address this issue (that is, beyond describing forms and meters, do the books explain or attempt to explain the choice of form for content?)

Aside from that, I think I know everything about poetry ...

[Tim Murphy]

Victor, Richard Wilbur once said “If you find yourself wanting to say a thing for 8 lines, and then unsay it for six, you are probably wanting to write an Italian sonnet.” Conversely, say something for 12, then unsay for 2, and you have an English sonnet.

As I address an idea for a poem, I get a tune in my head. That tune is the stanza, which often as not, is a nonce stanza. Then it’s just a matter of hewing to that stanza. If what you say has a strong linear progression, an abab stanza will work well. If each stanza is a self-contained idea or image, an envelope will work well (abba). Or perhaps, ababcc if it takes more room to develop each thought. But there’s no hard rule. Byron employed ottava rima so brilliantly in Don Juan that for 100 years it was thought of as a comic measure. But then Yeats used the same stanza to devastating effect in Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children, indeed, in many of his late, great poems. However Byron used funny, polysyllabic rhyme, and Yeats, jarring slant rhyme.

Tim Steele’s All The Fun’s In How You Say A Thing (Ohio University Press) is the best new book we have on prosody, recommended to all our members; and yes, he comments on rhetorical and structural strategy. Tim and I disagree on short line, which is overwhelmingly prevalent in my work. He characterizes it as having “a nervous energy.” But let’s face it, trimeter can be employed to address the very weightiest of themes by Yeats, by Frost, by Hardy. The latter is the great teacher. In 860 poems he employed the same form only once!

I'll ask Rhina Espaillat to comment on the repeating French forms, which I do not employ.

[graywyvern]

often i'll hear about a new form & want to try it
the next time i sit down to write, or remember an
old form i haven't used in awhile: which is to say
i don't believe there is as much DIRECT connection
between form & "content" as people like to make out.
this is used to justify the use of forms, whereas
the real justification should be in the pleasure of
making something artful. but there are occasions of
writing which transcend playing-by-rules, when the
word "ritual" might not be inappropriate; & at those
times the choice of form is paramount.

[Michael Cantor]

I rarely know what form a poem will take when I start, because I generally begin with a few lines - or an image - that resonate with me, and a vague idea of where I want to go thematically, and then the poem takes over as I write.

If I know from the beginning that I'm doing something brief and humorous I'll go for tetrameter, but my normal instinct is to use IP and Shakespearean sonnet as the starting point - just something to get me going - and then see how the poem develops.

The ultimate form generally doesn't emerge until the poem is well along - half or more of the first draft - and, once I feel comfortable with the form, the draft moves along much more quickly. For me, one of the biggest problems is finding that form. During the course of a poem it is not unusual that I play with four or five different approaches -terza rima, for example, is something I almost always explore and almost never end up using - including blank verse and various rhymed stanzas and sonnet variations. If I am working with one particular line or thought that I want to hammer home - or I really fall in love with - I may start with a villanelle or ballade format rather than a sonnet.

Poems I write in free verse - and I seem to be doing less and less of that - seem to sprout that way from the beginning. I don't know why, but with a given poem I almost never wander back and forth between free and formal verse.

In effect, the poem finds itself. I rarely set out to write in a specific form.

I hope this has been of some help or interest.

Michael

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Michael Cantor hits it on the head when he says "the poem finds itself." It does, and not just where imagery is concerned--the central metaphor that gives itself to you and makes the rest of the poem inevitable--but also meter and form. My experience is that the poem lets me know it's there through some feeling or thought that won't leave me, and through some visual image that keeps playing itself like a film, and through a beat that becomes obsessive. All three work together, and the individual words come last. So in that sense the poem "finds" its own form.

But it's also true that sometimes a form appeals as a simple source of delight and you want to try it just to be playful, "artful." Those are exercises, and I write those not expecting them to turn into real poems, which, in my case at least, come from something deeper in the mind and are less consciously "made." What surprises me is how often those exercises end by becoming poems that I keep, against all expectation, as if what had started out as a game had decided to go serious by locating something that needed saying. The form helps that, I think, and the more demanding the form the more likely that is to happen, as if the ingenuity required sent you into deeper places. Workshop students I've taught have commented on that too, noting how an assignment that should have led to nothing beyond the mastery of some technique had led them into an area of thought, recollection, that turned out to be full of poems waiting.

I don't know how to answer Victor, except to say that nothing is wasted, that even the mechanical exercise may surprise you, but that you should always be open to the other thing, the unorthodox sound or picture that pulls at you internally and makes the poem...or at least the first draft. After that, of course, comes the rest of the work, which is conscious and involves challenging the first draft to prove it's worth keeping. You may decide, at that point, that it's been fun, but this form is wrong after all.

Is there a connection between theme X and form Y? I don't think so. I tell students that the fixed forms are good for
getting their obsessions out in the open, but that's humor, a teacher's hook. All poetry has something "obsessive" about it, it's just easier to see in forms that use refrains and other forms of repetition. What such forms do have is a greater degree of challenge--a tighter, smaller box to work in--so the creative juices are stimulated to flow faster and the rhyming words come riding in like the cavalry to the rescue, with the syntactical maneuvers and grammatical shifts required. Whatever it is in there that writes poems really is on your side and wants to save you!

[Victor Kulkosky]

Tim:

What do you mean by "nonce stanza?" Something to do with nine?

Do you mean that the length of the tune is the length of the stanza, like a musical phrase that concludes with a cadence?

While we're on the sonnet, why 14 lines? Why not 11 or 16 or some other number -- a relatively small number, given that the word means "little song?"

Along the same lines: These various formal elements, such as stanza lengths, length of the whole poem, rhyme schemes -- we have inherited them from various sources, and great things have been done with them, and more may yet be done, but what about the pros and cons of inventing new ones? These would not replace the old ones, but add to the pool. We are, after all, in the 21st century, in a global, cross-pollinating culture. New function may require new form, yes?

[Victor Kulkosky]

Rhina, your post came in while I was writing mine. It partly answers my inquiry. I am in a fallow period right now. It's the effect of being in graduate school. Everything I read sends me in a different direction, (graduate school being the place where you actually have to think). I encountered Elizabeth Bishop in a Modern American Poetry class, and I was ready to do the formal thing. (Bishop was the notable new discovery in this class. WCW I already knew well, Eliot I learned to respect more, while I'm still waiting for convincing evidence that Pound is worth his weight in anything.) But I can't be Elizabeth Bishop (and from what I know of her biography, wouldn't want to be) anymore than I can be William Carlos Williams or whoever the next muse/master turns out to be.

What all this babble is leading to the question of where my creative writing will go. Lately, I have more understanding and appreciation of rhyme and meter and form, but at 43, and with other irons in the fire, a prolonged apprenticeship is probably not in the cards. But I get the sense that if I keep writing, the right way for me -- which will not be the right way for anyone else -- will present itself. (Maybe a 19-line form in nonameter is in the cards.)

P.S. I'm studying journalism in grad school -- a decidedly unpoetic medium.


------------------
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens." Baha'u'llah

[Tim Murphy]

Victor, Nonce Stanza: one invented for the occasion, and not derivative of any kind of tradition. Two, four, six lines? Has nothing to do with nine. Wonderful comments from Michael and Rhina, very experienced poets who deal with this issue every day. And a very good question, Victor. I get asked questions I decline even to answer here too frequently. I'm going to email this thread to some of the other poets lariats who have been my guests, and see what they have to say. Timothy

[Victor Kulkosky]

Tim:

You mean my question doesn't get asked much? Seems to me a fundamental question. A painter would choose a big canvas for a big subject, such as a landscape; a composer would write a symphonic theme for a symphony. Likewise, I wouldn't write a book-length poem out of hundreds of haiku (or has somebody tried to pull this off?)

Maybe it's an idiosyncracy of mine, but if I ever get around to writing poetry with enough consistency and depth, what I have to say may well not fit into any given form, at least some of the time. So, from what I've heard so far, this is permissible and doesn't violate New Formalist Doctrine?

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Victor, you talk about "the right way" for you, which "will not be the right way for anyone else." But take it a step farther: what matters is the "right way" for the poem you're writing now, which may be the wrong way for the one you'll write tomorrow. It's not YOU that is the focus of this process, but THE POEM, which is always different: the rules and methods have to be weighed against ITS needs, not against yours. A great many people worry about developing a "voice," like a seal or a trademark that says "X wrote this." Don't worry about that: if it comes, let it come so naturally that you're the last person to know it. Listen hard before you put anything on paper, so you don't WILL it into being what you make it, but let it tell you what it is, in each case. Richard Wilbur says somewhere that he writes only "poem by poem." It looks to me as if he finds "the right way" for each, one at a time.