Poet's Tool Box Part 3: Form

Once again, I am not going to discuss classical poetic forms here.  Any good poetry textbook will give you that.  I am going to discuss how form can give your poetry more impact and make it more memorable to the reader / listener. 

Form is poetry’s container.  Form can define a poem:  sonnet, sestina, villanelle.  Form can be to a poem as framing is to a house, defining shape and size and in the end providing spaces on which to hang your pretty pictures and shelves of stored knowledge, or in which to arrange the furniture for your scenes of comedy or drama.  Any good decorator knows that the character of their work is defined by the space.  So it often is with poetry. 

The devices of the form, the studs and joists if we really want to keep this metaphor alive, are: 

• Meter
• Rhyme scheme
• Repetition
• Enjambment (line breaks)

Traditional forms dictate the number of units of meter (feet) per line, where the rhymes go, and which lines are repeated and when.  Meter generally dictates line breaks.  However, if the poet is flexible with the form they can put the line breaks where they can do the most good. 

Repetition can increase impact. 

Repetition can increase impact. 

A rhyme scheme can be either freeing or severely limiting.  Personally I like to see complex rhyme schemes where much of the rhyming takes place between the middles of lines or in line endings several lines apart.  I like to be surprised by rhyme.  But I have also read many good (recently written) traditionally rhyming poems. 

For the beginning poet I recommend a systematic exploration of forms until you get the idea.  The measure of ‘getting the idea’ is when you can think in a form.  After that you can depart from it intelligently because you can use what you learned from it any way you want. 

For the more advanced poet I recommend close attention to line beginnings and endings.  Just as in a good paragraph the writer does not generally begin every sentence with the same word, for example, “I”, a poet should not unintentionally begin every line with the same word.  Note the word, “unintentionally.”  The point of all of this is that you should know what you are doing and do what you intend to do. 

At the same time I am not saying that every part of your poem will be intentional.  A wonderful part of poetry is reader / listener interpretation.  If you let go of what you meant and let yourself be receptive to what your audience thinks you meant, you will learn a lot.

Be conscious on some level of the stresses in each line.  Are you inadvertently writing a nursery rhyme full of trochees marching across the page?  Are you accidentally writing a limerick?  If your audience laughs, you want it to be because you intended them to.  Do your line breaks make sense?  Do they help your poem say what you want it to say?  Do your line lengths make or break the music of your poem? 

The sum of all these questions is this answer:  If you are as mindful of every aspect of your poem as the skilled carpenter is mindful of every brick laid and nail driven, you will construct something worthwhile.  Visitors smile as they pass through the unique spaces of the dwelling-place you have built.  A house is a house for you.  A poem can be a house for your deepest thoughts and feelings.  Build it well.