CHAPTER SEVEN

Forms, Forms, Forms

“It is the artist’s job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it.” - Brenda Hillman

The forms of poems often have historic and geographic origins: the haiku from Japan, a ghazal from Arabic roots, the villanelle from France, and some forms such as the prose poem are born as a reaction against a literary movement, and some forms, like the Golden Shovel, have been invented more recently. A form in poetry is simply a way to organize sounds, rhythm, lines, and patterns. Lyn Hejinian says, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics–they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, direction, number, and velocities of a work’s motion.” Forms are a way to both contain and explode what a poem can do.

Like the chapter on figurative language, our work here is an introduction. We will look at Western form, a few Eastern forms, and a more modern form, but for a more comprehensive resource on forms, head back to Poet’s.org Glossary of Poetic Terms, which contains definitions, descriptions, and examples of common and obscure forms. A great print resource is Robert Hass’s book, On Form, which looks at form according to line numbers: one, two, three, and four.

Sonnet

The word “sonnet” is almost synonymous with “form” in the tradition of Western poetry. Sonnet is Italian for “little song,” and likely comes from the musing of Italian monks circa 1100. Petrarch (1304-1374) wrote many sonnets, and the Italian sonnet is named after him; the Petrarchian sonnet is composed of eight lines (an octave with the rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA) and a six lines (a sestet with the rhyme scheme of CDECDE or a variation of these sounds). Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) popularized the sonnet in England, but the English sonnet is named after Shakespeare, who famously wrote 154 sonnets. The Shakespearean sonnet is comprised of three quatrains, with this rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF and is followed by an heroic couplet GG at the end. Unlike other forms, there are no stanza breaks in a traditional sonnet. You already know from the chapter on endings and beginnings that a sonnet contains a volta, which is a change in argument or direction. In a Petrachan sonnet, this comes between the octave and sestet and in a Shakepsearen sonnet the volta occurs between the last quatrain and heroic couplet.

Poetry, too, evolves, so no form is static. Many folks have played with the sonnet form, notably Robert Frost and John Berryman, whose Dream Songs are a kind of “near-sonnet.” Most recently, Diane Suess won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets, a collection of work illustrating how elastic the form is, even within a fourteen line container. In one of her sonnets, Suess writes, “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.” Writing in form teaches us what to leave out. If you are intimidated by writing in form or feel that it confines you, Suess reminds you why writing in form is important–you put on the page only what’s necessary for the poem. Even if you don’t identify as a formalist poet, writing in a received form is a constraint exercise that stretches your skills. You’ll learn new words, experiment with syntax, and surprise yourself with what appears on the page.

Below are two sonnets that appeared in the NAR. The first sonnet is more experimental, and the second sonnet is more traditional.

Sonnet Studies #2 by Sean Cho A.

Outside your window. the loud white snow.

it doesn’t matter who has unloved you

today we don’t have to talk about what’s

in your glove box. on his way to work

the sun bear sees many cars on the side

of the road. some engines on fire. many

people will be without telephone service

for days weeks maybe longer, lets now talk

about bear cubs or haggle with life insurance lawyers

The sun bears have enough star fruits to end world hunger ten times over

but of course i don’t really mean hunger and of course this time the sun

bear is me (surprise!). the sun bear doesn't like to think about the possibility

that he has everything he could possibly need to have happiness. he likes

hope because it gives him something to be hopeful for.

Sonnet for My Comrade in Room 11 of the Whitman Motor Lodge by Martín Espada

Now, dearest comrade, lift me to your face,

We must separate awhile–Here! Take from my lips this kiss.

-Walt Whitman

I see the traffic on Long Island, and the fumes of Jericho Turnpike,

And the shoppers invading the Whitman Mall like a lost city of gold,

and the tartan carpet in the lobby of the Whitman Motor Lodge,

and the clogged Raisin Bran dispenser at the breakfast bar,

and the hair in the nose of the desk clerk bickering over the AAA discount,

and the burnt lampshade, and the bathmat like a black rubber waffle,

and the floor luminous with Lysol, and the cartoons on television,

and I say this is good, and Whitman would have said this is good,

since you are here with me, dearest comrade, at the Whitman

Motor Lodge, and would brave the fuming traffic of Jericho Turnpike,

and the army of the bankrupt stampeding away from the mall,

and the spirits haunting Room 11, stubborn as cigarette smoke,

to call me your bearded poet, and tung on my gray beard,

and lift me to your face, and take from my lips this kiss.

Prose Poem

As a reaction against the traditional verse of the early 19th century, German and French poets began writing poems without line breaks, notably Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) in Germany and later Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in France. The prose poem is a poem written without line breaks and uses fragmentation, compression, repetition, and internal rhyme, as well as the span of figurative language. It’s the repetition and compression that provide the cadence of a poem written in a prose style. Prose poems are typically one paragraph, either in a typographical block, like Katie Prince’s poem in chapter two, or they can stretch from margin to margin, like this poem “Office Hours” by Bridgette Bates.

It’s also worth noting that Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) created the haibun, mixing elements of haiku with prose. Haibun are popular in Western poetry, and “More than the Birds, Bees, and Trees: A Closer Look at Writing Haibun” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a great resource to learn more about using this form.

Tanka and Haiku

Most students were introduced to the haiku at some point in secondary school. Likely, they wrote their own haiku, a three-line poem of seventeen syllables using the syllable pattern of 5/7/5 across three lines. Traditional haiku use images from nature, often these images (plum, cherry) have cultural significance. If you’ve ever read a haiku translated from Japanese and the syllable count is off, this is because of translation, particularly working from a language that is both ideographic and phonetic.

A form similar to the haiku is the tanka, a five-line poem of thirty-one syllables, using the syllable pattern of 5/7/5/7/7 across five lines. I was introduced to tanka, a Japanese form through the work of American poet, Haryette Mullen. I read Urban Tumbleweed in one setting. In the preface, “On Starting a Tanka Diary,'' Mullen explains that her goal was to connect walking with her life as a writer, so for one year she took a walk with her notebook with her on these “tanka walks,” and the result is 366 tanka in Urban Tumbleweed. She uses what she calls a “flexible line” and her tanka are mainly three lines with a variation of 10/11/10 syllables. Traditional tanka are usually written as one sentence, and you’ll recall from the chapter on endings and beginnings that tanka have a kind of volta or upper and lower poem.

Every semester I teach our introductory to creative writing class, I follow Mullen’s example and take my students on a “tanka walk.” I live in the Midwest, so we visit the controlled climate of our campus greenhouse run by the biology department. The spring semester visits are the most spectacular. The earthy smell greets us at the doors. We leave the sideways snow and slick sidewalks to enter a kingdom of glass and pipes, below which tropical plants bloom and cacti flower. A greenhouse is the perfect setting for the upper poem and lower poem and reminds me of Mullen’s juxtaposition (urban and tumbleweed) that she discovered while walking Los Angeles with its bright, blooming bougainvillea and orange and avocado trees against a city stitched together by jammed freeways.

Here are a few tanka my creative writing students wrote after our greenhouse tanka walks.

[Taller than these trees] by Coy Cummings

Taller than these trees

Peppers are smaller than thumbs

Snow piles outside

Wind cries just before the glass

Safety of a nursery

[Take a nap when I touch you…] by Elana Williams

Take a nap when I touch you, Mimosa pudica.

Look up! Look up! Shirk first from my sight.

I’m a liar, a fraud. If not embraced, who am I?

[Flesh lacks chemical] by Connor Ferguson

Flesh lacks chemical

substance and pulse, slips of sheets

glued, paper mâché,

veins, blue ink of his life quiet

like the lips I help stitch shut.

Below is a poem that first appeared in the NAR by contributor Nicole Cooley. You’ll notice that she uses a different form entirely, letting each tanka function as a “line” or “stanza” in her poem. This is a good reminder that forms, even strict ones, can be made flexible.

Marriage Tanka by Nicole Cooley

When Shakespeare’s Corialanus greeted his wife, he called her “my gracious silence.” Or

was it not “my greatest silence?”

ii.

Build a Shrine to the Unlucky. To the Misfortunate. The Tubercular Wife who died

too early, lungs wool-clotted.

iii.

The wild roses climb the fence like bad girls, into the neighbor’s yard, ravenous, then as

we sleep at night—gasoline drowned.

iv.

Outside, the street furred with dark. In our bedroom, my legs hooked over your shoulders.

Cold lamplight rinses the night sky clean.

In Spenser’s Amoretti the beloved never speaks back. I swallow the poems like bad

candy, choke on the wife.

Marriage: over and over a re-telling. A dress to wear for days on end. A dress to shuck

off, stuff the bed.

vii.

Husbandless: a bowl of dry ice. Husbandless: thimble to protect a finger, little silver

stump. Husbanded.

viii.

The cassone, or marriage chest, given to the bride by her parents at the wedding. Gold, to

hold her clothes. Most resembles a casket.

vix.

Green lush silence is its own shrine to marriage. As is the wife who did not die. The wife

who wore the tight black wedding dress.

Exercises

Exercise 1: Pick a Form

Spend one of your writing times browsing this resource Poets.org’s Glossary of Poetic Terms or Edward Hrisch’s A Poet’s Glossary and read about familiar and foreign forms. Pick a few to experiment with, ones that are fun and interesting. Here are a few tried and tested forms that work with this kind of exercise: Abecedarian, Sestina, and Villanelle.

Exercise 2: Take a Tanka Walk

Take a tanka walk like Mullen describes in her introduction and/or like I describe in the section on tanka. You can be familiar with the place, but it’s best if the environment is somewhat new to you. Receive the environment with a beginner's mindset, “shoshin” in Zen Buddhism, which means to approach with curiosity, openness, without any preconceptions. Even if you are an expert, you set this knowledge aside and put observation, question, and delight up front. Have experiences, not expectations. Take pictures. Record and/or look up the genius and species. Become Claude Monet, an Impressionist painter who would visit his scene throughout the day to see how the light changed it, and record the passage of light. Revisit the place at the same or a different time of day. Get curious about what you’re observing. Write a tanka, and you have options for form.

use the traditional 5/7/5/7/7 syllable pattern across five lines
use Mullen’s flexible line where 31 syllables are split across three lines: 10/11/10, 11/10/10, 9/11/11 or any adjacent variation across three lines
use Cooley’s notion of a 31 syllable “sentence,” a type of prose line for the tanka

Exercise 3: Forms are Flexible

Language evolves and so does how we use it. Forms are flexible, which is how new forms emerge and how we have a rich sonnet tradition with many different types of sonnets. Pick any form and change it up. If you are working with a villanelle, maybe only part of a line repeats. If you are working with a pantoum, maybe the lines repeat slightly out of order. Note, if this exercise intimidates you, start with the sonnet, which has had many iterations of the form.

Attributions

"Sonnet for My Comrade in Room 11 of the Whitman Motor Lodge," by Martín Espada, 2018, North American Review, 303 (2), p. 29 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44872173) is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.

"[Taller than these trees]" by Coy Cummings, 2022; "[Take a nap when I touch you]" by Elana Williams, 2022.; and "[Flesh lacks chemical]" by Connor Ferguson, 2022, unpublished works, are used with permission. All rights reserved.

Poetry: By Rachel Morgan