85 poets present one of their poems and discuss its form. The editor asked them to consider issues like "Which formal choices preceded the act of writing, and which grew out of it?". The definition of form is left to the poets (Ashbery, John Cage, Creeley, Hecht, Turco, etc). The poets focus on form with varying intensities.
- Frank Bidart writes
The first lines I wrote were the last three of the poem.The love I've known is the love of
two people staring
not at each other, but in the same directionThe love I've known is the love of two people staring
not at each other, but in the same directionNothing of the dynamic within the idea is present in how this looks on the page.
So I tried setting it up in three lines, with a stanza break after the second - as it now stands. Now I had something balanced ("The love I've known is the love of"), followed by something linked to it - because in the same stanza - which is not "balanced" but points outside the stanza ("two people staring"). After the gap, the slight pause of the stanza break, the sentence is completed by a line which - by denying an expectation - reestablishes "balance" ("not at each other, but in the same direction"). The denial of an expectation becomes the means of understanding the nature of the thing (love) that caused the expectation.
I found that explanation useful. He could have used colours, fonts, arrows, indents, etc to carry out his aims. Line-breaks might be more ambiguous in their effects, but there's a case for using the minimum of devices, ones that already exist. All the same, I'd have preferred it as prose. I don't see why contriving the first line-break (so that the word "love" is the second and penultimate word) produces anything other than a visual, petty symmetry, with "of" consequently ending the line. - Donald Britton's "Winter Gardens" is 12 triplets which aren't mentioned by the poet. The "form" seems arbitrary to me.
- Lucie Brock-Broido writes "Since it is not my custom to capitalize the initial word of each line, I decided to experiment with this convention. By doing so I found I could usually arrange to affix much more weight - power to the words - not only on the line endings, but on the beginning of each line"
- Wyn Cooper's poem "Fun" appeared in his first book. "Five hundred copies were printed, and six years later they were still available". Then a record producer happened to buy it in a used book store and gave it to Sheryl Crow when she was stuck for lyrics (the poem's first line is "All I want is to have a little fun"). The single has sold over a million copies and Cooper has done over 60 interviews.
- Douglas Crase quotes Gertrude Stein in writing that "it was strictly American to conceive 'a space of time filling always filled with moving,' and as examples, she told us to think of cowboys, or detective stories, or movies". He suggests that "devices of rhetoric - alliteration, assonance, sheer repetition itself [are] replacing end rhyme as a mechanism for moving the argument along. End rhymes tend toward something like stations of the cross: instead of a space filled with moving, they define a space filled with stopping and bowing".
- Maria Flook writes "it's foolish to think a line should break so that the reader might rest or so an end word can shiver and throb in order to call more attention to itself"
- Alice Fulton writes "Since it's impossible to write unaccented English, free verse has meter". Is that true? It certainly has rhythm and beats. She writes "Rather than relying on regular meter or rhyme as a means of ordering, the structure of free verse may be based upon registers of diction, irregular meter, sound as analogue for content, syllabics, accentuals, the interplay of chance with chosen elements, theories of lineation, recurring words"
- Edward Hirsch writes "I tried to find a form that would create the rhythm and texture of a perfect [basketball] play, a moment that was simultaneously inside and outside of time. Eventually, I decided upon a single enormous sentence unrolling in long snakelike couplets. My task was to establish a ground rhythm that could both quicken and slow down, rising and falling; and I wanted a form that was simultaneously open and closed, flexible and determined"
- Paul Hoover writes "I broke the poem into quatrains for the purpose of making a better shape on the page"
- Phyllis Janowitz writes "one of the most life-sustaining molecules, water, arranges itself consistently into two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen ... Yet a microscopic change may result in a totally different compound, as the molecule becomes "heavy water," or deuterium oxide, with the addition of another hydrogen atom" - not so.
- Lawrence Joseph writes "I chose couplets because they require clarity of image or statement to work at all. I chose a variable pentameter line for its declarative potential"
- Yusef Komunyakaa's commentary fails to mention form, though the poem's in triplets whose lines are carefully staggered.
- Brad Leithauser's 14-word sonnet, "Post-Coitum Tristesse" is better than I expected
- William Logan writes "Why is it so attractive, this breaking of free verse into couplets, tercets, quatrains, and other regular units? In regularization free verse recoups some force from form ... Purely psychological, perhaps. ... A young poet said he preferred tercets because every line was either a beginning, a middle, or an end"
- W.S. Merwin writes "The absence of punctuation ... stems in great part from the conviction that punctuation is predominantly a mark of allegiance to the protocols of prose and of the printed word. Doing without it, in my mind, maintains a living line to the spoken word and its intonations and motions, which do the work of punctuation themselves"
- Robert Morgan writes "an eight-syllable line with no regular meter, no counting of stresses. It is almost free verse broken into an arbitrary length. ... I like this form because it leaves the musical cadence almost entirely free to follow the content. ... yet has some of the surface tension of regularity. ... My greatest difficulty here, in fitting the sentences into lines, has been avoiding too many articles and conjunctions at the ends of lines"
- Thylias Moss writes "I place my renegade angels in a prose poem ... Ideally, there would be one long line curving until the poem becomes a circle ... The margins are simply the edges of the universe"
- Katha Pollitt writes "Throughout the poem. I used two- and three-beat lines to give it a monotonous ticktock rhythm" (I sense no regular rhythm)
- John Updike writes "Light verse adhered to rhyme and metrical strictness long after serious poets had gone the way of vers libre, and for a good reason: there is something comic, something of the imposition of the mechanical upon the organic which Henri Bergson defined as the essence of the comic"
- Bernard Welt writes "I like being about to make a new start with each new stanza"
- Charles Wright writes "By using the dropped line, the "low rider," you can use both sides of the page at once, left- and right-hand margins, the conjunction of line and surface, and you can carry the long line on as an imagistic one, rather than a discursive or laboriously rhetorical one"
One piece is in the form of an index. Another is a baseball line-up (poets, etc) with positions in the field. Both look like prose to me. The book ends with "A brief glossary of forms and other terms" which includes a villanelle where each line's an anagram of "Wystan Hugh Auden". It mentions Alan Ansen's sestina where the line lengths grow shorter with each stanza.
It seems to me that some poets clearly don't achieve what they set out to do. Several have a lax notion of form (e.g. they talk about why their lines are short or long). Mimesis is sometimes evoked (most clearly by Thylias Moss). Enjambment is associated with high speed. A loosely formal piece is thought to gain power by association with a tighter forms, whereas I might think the loose piece sloppy or casual in comparison.
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