Feature On Form

Musings for December 24

Feature on Form

Some of my students whose experience with poetry has been limited to Emily Dickinson, Alexander Pope and other pre-20th century writers sometimes complain that I don’t like form in poetry. But they’re wrong. I love form. In fact, until I was 20 or 21 everything I wrote was formal. In college, I was the sonnet champion, cranking out sonnets in as little as 10 minutes at times. And I still write the occasional formal poem, and I still utilize what I call the shadow of form in all of my work. And I still encourage my students to read formal poetry and write their own formal work as a means of training their ear and learning to appreciate sound play and a sense of the line.

The thing I don’t like is form for the sake of form, which is often an unfortunate side effect of limited exposure to poetry. I like purposeful form. I like form that reflects the meaning or mood of the poem. A poem that sounds like a nursery school rhyme but deals with a tragic experience will only work if it’s clear that the form is intended to create a sense of irony; otherwise, it would just seem inappropriately funny.

I also don’t care a great deal for simplistic form, simple meter, simple rhyme, iambic pentameter with an alternating rhyme scheme and little or no variation, for example, poems that sound like nursery rhymes or greeting cards. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy complex, challenging forms--villanelles, sestinas, terza rima sonnets, pantoums--especially if the form seems to match the subject matter. Villanelles, for example, with the emphasis given to repeated lines seem a perfect match for very serious poems, ones about death, like Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” or the meaning of life, like Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.”

And I enjoy poems that experiment with form, that play around with it to make something new. The pantoum, for example, traditionally consists of a series of 4-line stanzas in which the 2nd and 4th lines of one stanza are repeated as the 1st and 3rd lines of the next stanza, and then the final stanza not only repeats that pattern but also repeats lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza as lines 2 and 4. Below, on the other hand, is a very interesting and enjoyable variation in the pantoum form by NC Poetry Society President Anthony Abbott, republished here from Bay Leaves 2009, the awards anthology of the Poetry Council of NC. I think the repeated lines wonderfully capture the stream of consciousness of the speaker and the wistful sort of wishful thinking we all engage in when we look back with bittersweet regret on the things we didn’t or couldn’t do.

Pantoum
by Anthony Abbott

If yesterday were tomorrow
and we were driving
on a small country road
with the sun setting

if we were driving
to the west
with the sun setting
a huge transparent orange

more to the northwest
it still being winter
a huge transparent orange
I would have stopped the car

it still being winter
and not yet six o’clock
I would have stopped the car
and taken you in my arms

not yet six o’clock
I would have turned to you
and taken you in my arms
and held you while the sun slowly

I would have turned to you
and together we would have watched
while the sun slowly disappeared
and I would have kissed you

together we would have watched
on the small country road
and I would have kissed you surely
if yesterday were tomorrow