How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 2

Another consideration for writers who want to sustain a career, is not to put all your eggs in one basket, to coin a phrase. If you focus your entire creative effort on one book, and invest years of your life in that book, it better be an incredibly good idea that you are the right person to carry out—and a book you can finish. But even if it’s the greatest idea on planet Earth, and you are the one person in the universe to write it, and you finish it, it may still not be the book that gets you published for the first time. Even if it is published, it may not be the work that finds the audience you’re seeking.

So I would advise you to work on multiple projects. Don’t count on that first book being the one that gets you in the publisher’s door. Write a second book, and after that, a third book, even if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet. Especially if you haven’t gotten the first manuscript published yet.

The nineteenth century French writer George Sand wrote more than 100 books or plays. Here’s a portrait of George Sand by the great French painter Eugène Delacroix:

Sand was famous for staying up all night to write, burning many candles. Then every morning she slept in, and entertained her children and friends all afternoon and evening. There is a story that she once finished a novel halfway through the night, and instead of going to bed, she started writing another book. We could all emulate that drive. 
Of course, there are writers who write just one great book. The classic example is Harper Lee:

 Born in 1926, she has written just one book in her lifetime. That book happens to be To Kill a Mockingbird. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize and selling more than 30 million copies, the book has changed the lives of countless people who’ve read it. If you’re Harper Lee, fine, just write that one book. No complaints. But most of us are not that sort of writer. We’ve got to keep trying, throwing out more than we keep of our writing, getting better at certain aspects of this crazy job as we go along.

I’m going to make up a person who is a composite of several different creative writing students I’ve encountered. This student is terrifically talented. Not only does she write, but she’s also an accomplished professional. In short, a person with lots of skills, including excellent people skills.

She’s been done with her MFA now for about seven years, and she hasn’t published a book yet.

Why? She’s invested years in finishing the book she started as her MFA thesis. The book is a novel with a very challenging structure. It’s a work of fiction, but based solely on nonfiction stories from her own family history. That’s a tall order to fill, since in a case like that you feel you can’t change the story, even when it doesn’t work for the reader, because it’s based on fact. The manuscript also has several main characters who live in different centuries.

It could be a fascinating structure for a novel, but maybe too challenging to pull off for a first book. It’s the kind of project that might be better to work on later in life, when the mechanics of writing a good plot and having a polished style are almost second nature. 
So I would suggest that you don’t put all your chips on one number, and play that number over and over. The odds are, you will run out of chips before that number comes up. Keep working on different projects, and increase your odds of finding the readers you seek.

 
Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1

 

The best way to avoid becoming a literary dropout is to keep writing. As all of us know, that’s easier said than done. There are many elements to keeping the writing flowing. I’ll try to cover several in this series of blogs.

To begin with, I’ll start with factors that relate just to the writing itself, and not to circumstances peripherally connected to, or outside of the writing.

The first suggestion I’d make is to choose projects that you can complete successfully. I had a terrific student several years ago, a guy who had a remarkable facility for spontaneous writing. Our class was studying the surrealist movement at the time. I asked the students to attempt automatic writing as a learning exercise. Automatic writing is a type of writing devised by the surrealist group in Paris in the early 1920s as a way of liberating the subconscious. In automatic writing you don’t edit or look back at what you’ve already written but compose spontaneously, as if dreaming onto the page. It’s a great exercise if you’re suffering from writer’s block or just want to warm up. The student I’m referring to was one of the few I’ve ever encountered who could create a finished piece of work using automatic writing. The whole class was amazed at what he created during that in-class exercise, without editing. If he had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d be a legend.

Surrealist group in Paris practices automatic writing

Now, you would think that a person who can compose literature so fluently would have absolutely no trouble finishing a longer work. Poof! You sit down, you write, it’s done. But that wasn’t the case. For his MFA thesis, he attempted to write a sort of modern-day Dante’s Inferno. A worthy project. The task was almost impossible, though, since the way he set it up, not one of the characters interacted with anyone but the narrator. Not only that, but we knew that each story ended with the death of the person recounting it, since all the characters besides the narrator were ghosts. And there was a talking-head aspect to the format that killed almost all of the drama.

You should be extremely ambitious in the projects you pick for yourself as a writer, but don’t choose a project that you can never finish, or that won’t interest many people even if you do finish it. Stretch yourself, be daring in your aesthetic choices, do things that no one has attempted before, but don’t try to climb Mount Denali on rollerskates.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Using Poetic Forms, Part 5: The Tanka

Many know about haiku, that ultra-short form of poetry from Japan that captures a flash of consciousness in only three lines. But a thousand years before haiku was created, Japanese poets developed and perfected the tanka form. Tanka is slightly longer—five lines—but it’s significantly different from haiku in the type of moment that sparks it.

Like haiku, which crystallizes one specific moment in time or consciousness, tanka is about a particular observation of the poet. But unlike haiku, tanka can reach both backwards and forwards in time to include a broader observation, or even a story. How can just five short lines of poetry tell a narrative? It’s not easy, but with the conciseness of tanka, a poet finds the fulcrum of a story, the moment of truth in that encounter.  Here’s one of my favorite tanka poems, by the great Japanese woman poet Yosano Akiko, who lived from 1878 to 1942, and wrote over 50,000 poems:

early evening moon
rising over a field of flowers
somehow I knew
he was waiting for me
and I went to him

(translated by Leith Morton and Zack Rogow)

Here the poet describes the moment when she made her choice to embark on a difficult relationship. The image of the evening moon suggests the expectant lover, wishing for her. The field of flowers makes me think of the fullness of her love.

I haven’t said anything yet about the rigorous form of the tanka. In Japanese, each of the five lines must have a specific number of syllables. The number of syllables per line is: 5-7-5-7-7. I haven’t mentioned this because this form works beautifully in Japanese, but when English-language translators or poets attempt to duplicate the form exactly, it often takes away from the freshness and the gentle punch of the tanka. Personally, I prefer poems that follow the spirit of the tanka and don’t count syllables like pennies. On the other hand, if you’re up to twelve syllables per line, you’re losing the concentrated flavor of the language in tanka.

Another fascinating side of the tanka is that the poet often sharply splits the five lines between two seemingly unrelated images. The writer does not directly link these two worlds, but leaves it entirely up to the reader to make the connection. Yosano Akiko does this in the poem just cited about the moon over the evening field and the lover’s impulse. Here’s another example, a thousand-year-old tanka by the 10^th century poet Fujiwara no Toshiyuki:

in the Bay of Sumi

waves crowd the shore

even at night

by the corridors of dreams

I come to you secretly

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

The poet never says that the waves are like him, the lover. He never directly mentions that the shore is a metaphor for his beloved. It’s all just understood. That’s what I love about it! And the fact that the waves are not simply approaching the shore, they are crowding it. It is a little invasive to tell your beloved that you can visit her at night, even when she’s dreaming. The poem acknowledges that, in the midst of a wonderfully romantic moment. That’s an amazing amount of emotional complexity to pack into five lines.

Another classic tanka that I love is one by Ariwara no Narihira, who lived from 825 to 880 C.E.:

I always knew
that I would take this road
but yesterday
I didn’t know
it would be today

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

There are so many amazing things about this poem—the ease and simplicity of the metaphor of the road, the way the poem can be applied to a myriad of situations, the way it doesn't hit you till the last line. Beautiful! 

If you’d like to read more tanka, here are some collections of the form:

Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Tanka

Yosano Akiko, Tangled Hair: Selected Poems from Midaregami

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Zack's own tanka poems appear in his books Irreverent Litanies and My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 


Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Using Poetic Forms, Part 4: The Ghazal

First of all, how is it pronounced? The ghazal exists as a poetic form in many languages, and depending on the language, it’s pronounced differently. I just pronounce it “huzzle,” to rhyme with “puzzle,” for the sake of simplicity.

Agha Shahid Ali, who played a major role in bringing the ghazal form into English.
Photo by Margaretta K. Mitchell

The ghazal can be traced as far back as about 600 C.E., in the period of Arabic literature before the advent of Islam. The form was originally a lament sung by nomadic troubadours, part of a longer poetic form called the qasidah. The quality of lamentation is still an important part of the ghazal. For more background on the origins of the ghazal, see David Jalajel’s essay “A Short History of the Ghazal.”

Like many North American fans of poetry, I first came across the ghazal through translations of the work of Federico García Lorca. That great New Directions volume of his Selected Poems first published in 1961, has several magnificent poems that Lorca calls gacelas, Spanish for ghazals. These were part of Lorca’s last book of poems, Divan of the Tamarit, a book he never got to finish or publish in his lifetime because he was tragically murdered in 1936 during the fascist coup in Spain. This book consisted of poems that Lorca called casidas and gacelas, but in reality the poems were only partially related to those forms in Arabic, which Lorca may not have known well. Lorca did stay true to the spirit of lamentation in his gacelas, and he used couplets, also a feature of the ghazal. Lorca’s embrace of Spain’s Moorish history seems prophetic to me even today, when we see Western politicians and media so often demonize the Muslim world. This is one of the reasons I find the ghazal so fascinating—it spotlights a wonderful feature of the literature of a part of the world that the West seems to have very little use for now except to make war on. For a couple of decades, the translations of Lorca’s poems stood as the only well-known model for a ghazal in English, a model that led many astray, since Lorca didn't use most of the form in his poems. (For more on Lorca, please see my essay, "Lorca's Local Modernism.")

That lack of information in the English-speaking world about the actual ghazal form changed as the result of one person: Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid was an enormously entertaining and brilliant poet who grew up speaking the Urdu language in his native Kashmir. He chose to write in English, and he became the first poet to write excellent ghazals in English that followed the form. Through Shahid’s publications, readings, and workshops, something closer to the real ghazal form finally became known and practiced in English.

The ghazal consists of a group of couplets or two-line stanzas, often on unrelated or loosely linked themes, like a series of two-line haikus. Part of what ties the stanzas together is the rhyme scheme. It’s not a “moon, June, tune” rhyme scheme, but one that involves a rhyme (termed the “qafiyah” in Arabic), directly followed by a repeated sound or series of sounds at the end of a stanza (called the “radif” in Arabic). Remember “q” comes before “r.” In the first couplet of a ghazal, this rhyme scheme occurs in both lines. In subsequent stanzas, only in the last line.

One other feature I like about the ghazal is that the poet has to mention his or her name or pen name (called a “takhallus”) in the second-to-last line of the poem, one of several features of the form that seems surprisingly contemporary for a form that is fifteen centuries old. In South Asian languages, where the ghazal has flourished, there are also very specific meters for the form.

When I began exploring the ghazal in my own writing, I had enormous difficulty trying to use a qafiyah and radif in English. That intricate rhyme pattern seemed impossible to me, and contrary to the lyrical traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry. I just couldn’t get my mind around this rhyme scheme, until I started to hear it in something very unlikely and very American—Broadway show tunes. I started to realize that a rhyme before a repeated sound or word is actually a very common form, not in U.S. poetry so much as in the American Songbook. Here’s part of Lorenz Hart’s great lyric to the song “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”:

I’m wild again,

beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

Couldn’t sleep

And wouldn’t sleep

Until I could sleep where I shouldn’t sleep

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

Do you see the qafiyah—“wild,” “beguiled,” “child”’—right before the radif, “again”? And then in the next verse, the qafiyah is “Couldn’t,” “wouldn’t,” “shouldn’t,” right before the radif, “sleep.” If that isn’t similar to the ghazal rhyme scheme, I don’t know what is. So many of the Broadway show tunes were penned by Jewish writers that I suspect that there is some place in history where Jewish popular song meets the ghazal. Possibly both were influenced by Hebrew prayer, maybe in Medieval Spain or Persia. For instance, the Jewish blessing for new experiences, the Schehecheyanu, includes ghazal-like rhymes, and it was written down as early at 1,500 years ago in the Talmud.

Thinking about this connection between the ghazal and popular music, it occurs to me that this link exists not just in English. In the poetry of South Asian languages, this link is very much alive. I started attending mushairas, something like the Indian or Pakistani equivalent of a poetry slam, that were held in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. When I heard these ghazals performed, I realized that poetry lovers from the Indian subcontinent don’t usually recite ghazals, they sing them. And when they recite or sing poems, they don’t read them the way English poems are read, where the audience members quietly sit on their hands and listen to each line in order: line one, line two, line three, etc. The audience participates in a mushaira, calling out during the reading, singing or reciting favorite lines along with the reader, demanding that a performer repeat a particularly good couplet over and over till they get their fill of it, repeating the radif along with the poet. And the performer does not necessarily recite a line just once. A performer will repeat lines, parts of lines, or whole couplets, sometimes out of order, often spontaneously. A good performer of ghazals will make up his or her own melody for a text that he or she likes. It’s a very creative and active process for the reciters of poetry as well. I think English-language writers and readers have a lot to learn from it.

To make the ghazal accessible to an English-speaking audience, it’s going to take a fusion of the ghazals that have been written in English so far, and the musical ghazals that are popular in Urdu. Something like a mix of the great Indian singer Ghulam Ali and Bob Dylan. There’s a potential there that hasn’t been tapped. I think we need to go back to the musical roots of the ghazal and the connection of the ghazal rhyme to American show tunes, to make the ghazal all it can be in English. For an example of my own very personal take on this, please see this YouTube video. The ghazal starts at 6:05.

If you’re interested in the ghazal form, you might enjoy reading a series of ten ghazals that I included in my book Talking with the Radio, available from Kattywompus Press.

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Using Poetic Forms, Part 3: The Sestina

The sestina is a much longer and more intricate form than the better-known lyric form of the sonnet. The sestina spans 39 lines. It involves an enormous amount of repetition. That’s the key. The words that end the lines in the first stanza recur in a weave, according to a prescribed pattern.

The sestina keeps switching back on itself like a road winding up a steep mountain, because the same end words occur seven times in the poem. For this reason, the sestina lends itself to a question or conundrum that has many facets or variations. The sestina can also be playful, because inserting those words can make the poem a game for the poet, utilizing the reader’s anticipation of the repetition. This can be particularly fun and challenging when a poet uses homonyms of the end words as variations.

The sestina's structure is intricate, mathematical. The words that end the lines in the first stanza recur at the end of the lines in the second stanza, in this order: 6-1, 5-2, 4-3. Notice how each pair adds up to seven, the number of stanzas in the whole poem. The last end word in stanza one becomes the first end word in stanza two. Then the second stanza becomes the template for the third, repeating in the same weave, so that the last end word in stanza two becomes the first in stanza three, etc.

Because of this intricate weave, the sestina is also a useful form to work through an obsession or to discuss repetitive actions. One terrific example of this is Jan Clausen’s “Sestina: Winchell’s Donut House,” about working in an all-night, fast-food business. Here are the final three stanzas:

Linda came in at six, awash with light,

businesslike, making sure there’d be enough change

to get her through the rigors of the morning.

She had a hundred uniforms; I remember pink.

Sometimes she’d cheat, leave me to work alone,

sneak out to flirt in parked cars, fleeing lifetimes of grease.

I can see her cranking the hopper, measuring grease,

indefatigable, wired on coffee, just stopping to light

her cigarettes. She didn’t want to be alone.

It was only my fantasy that she could change,

stop wearing that silly, becoming pink,

burn free of the accidents, husband and children, some morning.

I remember walking home those mornings, smelling of grease,

amazed in summer’s most delicate pink early light,

to shower, change, and sleep out the hot day alone.

(Copyright © by Jan Clausen)

Jan Clausen

One thing I love about this sestina of Jan Clausen (she’s written more than one) is her choice of end words. The word “change” changes slightly each time we hear it, mirroring the meaning of the word. The repetition of the words “morning” and “light” underline the yearning of a graveyard-shift worker for a end to the long nights of labor. The word “alone” conveys the solitude of this job and the speaker’s life. “Grease” is perfect for a fast-food joint, but it also has interesting class connotations, as in “lifetimes of grease.” Finally the word “pink” suggests both the sickly sweet glazes of the donuts (“chocolate and pink-frosted” in stanza one) and the traditionally feminine coworker Linda, object of the speaker’s romantic longings during those long nights.

If you write a sestina, make sure you choose end words that play directly into the complicated fixations that led you to write the poem. Otherwise, the sestina form can take control of you like a vengeful robot, and compel you to repeat yourself in ways that are just—well, repetitive. Repetition is both the music and pitfall of the sestina.

Also consider choosing one end word that I would call the “sunflower” word. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a double sestina (twelve stanzas of twelve lines each, and a coda or tornada of six lines) called “The Complaint of Lisa.” In this poem, Swinburne used the word “sunflower” as an end word, which meant he had to fit this terribly specific word into the poem thirteen times. Just for good measure, he threw it in two other times, for a total of fifteen. Challenge yourself to use as least one “sunflower” end word, where it’s a tour de force to include the word at least seven times in your sestina. Remember, homonyms are fair game. In Jan Clausen’s sestina above, the “sunflower” word is pink. 

One thing to avoid with a sestina, unless it’s a humorous poem, is lots of end words that are so obscure that using them seven times becomes a joke. That will affect the whole poem by making the form too noticeable, and therefore silly.

I had the pleasure of studying the origins of the sestina with the scholar Marianne Shapiro (1940–2003), who wrote one of the definitive works on the subject, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina. Francesco Petrarch is the poet most closely identified with the sestina, since he wrote so many of them, and popularized the form, which comes from medieval Provençal. 

Francesco Petrarch

When I took Professor Shapiro’s course on the Provençal troubadours, I was a hubris-filled Yale undergraduate who thought I could keep up with Shapiro’s sprinter’s-pace graduate course. That illusion was dispelled at the end of the first class, when Professor Shapiro gave us the homework assignment: “For next week, learn the Provençal language.” Right then, I decided to audit and not take the class for credit.

In Professor Shapiro’s book on the sestina (which includes an interesting anthology of the form), she goes deeply into the numerology of the sestina: “To understand the structure of the sestina, with its tornada in place of the seventh strophe, it is necessary to examine the form in the broader context of number symbolism, specifically that surrounding the numbers 6 and 7…” Shapiro goes on to talk about the six days of creation in Genesis, followed by the seventh day of rest, just as the seventh stanza of the sestina is shorter and different.

The fact that the sestina can be mentioned in the same breath as the biblical act of creation gives you some inkling of how enormously rich and challenging this beautiful form can be. 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Using Poetic Forms, Part 2: The Sonnet

Probably the most popular poetic form in English is the sonnet. It’s a form that goes back many centuries. Invented in Sicily in the 13^th century by Giacomo da Lentini, the sonnet caught fire and became enormously popular in Italy and then throughout Western Europe in the subsequent centuries. In most European languages, the sonnet has fourteen lines of twelve syllables each. Only in English does it have ten syllables in iambic pentameter. In English the most famous sonneteer is, of course, Shakespeare, but he was far from the first or the last to popularize the form in that language.

When to use the sonnet form

A sonnet usually has a volta (from the Italian word for “turn”), traditionally after the eighth line. This indicates a switch from what is laid out in the first eight lines, to a different mode or state of mind. So the sonnet is like an argument that has a decisive shift two-thirds of the way through.

A sonnet begins with exposition, and then reaches a conclusion. Or a sonnet starts with a problem, and works toward resolution. It has to be a situation that can be spelled out and resolved in 120 syllables, which isn’t a lot of verbiage, so an extremely complicated premise isn’t going to work. The topic of a sonnet also has to lend itself to the argument, counter-argument format, though that is less important in more recent sonnets, such as the poems of Marilyn Hacker, which tend to be more narrative.

Here’s a sonnet that seems to me almost a perfect embodiment of the form, John Keats’s great poem, “Bright Star”:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The first eight lines, called the octave, present a model of constancy, using diction that is full of distance, coolness, and religiosity: “lone,” “aloft,” “watching,” “Eremite (hermit),” “priestlike,” “pure,” “ablution,” “mask,” “snow,” “mountains,” “moors.” Everything suggests the opposite of heat or passion. The rhymes are tight and unwavering: art-apart, night-Eremite, task-mask. At least until the last word of the octave, or first eight lines. These first eight lines spell out the argument or the problem—the speaker yearns for the fidelity of the star. The star is a perfect image of loyalty, particularly the pole star or North Star that stays in one place in the sky, but it’s also remote and untouched, which makes it an incomplete role model for lovers.

In the sestet, the last six lines, Keats gives us the counter-argument, making it clear from the first word—“No”—that he’s going to show us the exact opposite of that cold version of constancy. The contrary is the extremely close, warm, and intimate image of the speaker lying with his head on his lover’s chest. He feels the motion of her breath as her chest rises and falls. This is as far as you can get from the distant, cold-hearted star. And yet the speaker hopes to combine this time-bound passion with the constancy of the star: “yet still stedfast.”  Interestingly, this bodily version of love could lead to something even more immortal than the star: “And so live ever,” but it can also lead to mortality: “or else swoon to death.”

One thing Keats shows us in “Bright Star” is that the sonnet can take in everything from passion to metaphysics in just fourteen lines. It's a great form to play out an argument you're having with yourself or another person, but not a violent argument, more like differing viewpoints. The form can also portray a moment of intense closeness. Oddly, Keats addresses the poem to the star, using the intimate “thou” form. The poet speaks of his beloved in the more distant third person. But hey, this was 1819. I think this was about as sexy as you could get in England at that time—and then some.

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 


Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Using Poetic Forms, Part 1

To begin with, how do you decide to write a formal poem, as opposed to free verse? (By a formal poem, I mean a fixed form such as a sonnet, sestina, ghazal, tanka, etc.) Maybe you just read a poem in a particular form, and you feel you’d like to try it out. Or there’s a form you’ve always wanted to try, and suddenly you feel like you’ve got the chops to actually write it. Sometimes there’s a form kicking around in your mind, the way a song gets stuck in your head. It’s just there, waiting to be put in the game, like a player nervously pacing around the dugout. (OK, I know I’m mixing metaphors here.)

If it’s the case that a form is already eager to be part of your poetry, then maybe your next idea for a poem wants to go in that form, even if the form hasn’t yet been introduced to the story or idea or feeling that is hoping to be your next poem. Once the two knock into one another, the form and the idea for the poem, that collision can activate both, like particles in a linear accelerator.

The alternative to writing in a fixed form is to write in free verse, although some say free verse is also a form. The advantage to free verse is that the language is liberated so it can find its own rhythms, line-lengths, and endings, so that it’s not saddled with any structure. Structure can sometimes reign in emotion or ideas, because the constraints of the form limit spontaneity and flow.

But sometimes form is exactly what you need to give shape to the feeling or idea in your mind. The form becomes a perfect container to hold what’s teasing your mind. It’s as if the Jello mixture of your poetic idea needs a mold to give it shape, color, and flavor, or it will just melt away. (Now we’re really deep into mixed metaphor, once we’re into chilled desserts!)

In my experience, it’s really an either/or situation. Either a poetic form is tugging at my coat, asking to be noticed, or it’s not. If it’s not, I go with free verse. If it is, then I have to wait for the right idea for that form. But more often than not, the idea and the form arrive almost at the same time, like two different connecting flights that both funnel passengers to the same plane.

In the blogs that follow, I will not provide an exhaustive catalogue of all the possible poetic forms. I'll just touch on a few that resonate deeply with me.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;  Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka; Part 6, The Villanelle

Zack's most recent book of poetry, Irreverent Litanies

Zack's most recent book of translations, Bérénice 1934–44, An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer