Hello, Poetry Friend
One day I was rehearsing to sing at a church service with a pianist who is an accountant. I was trying to figure out what compels a person to be good at both numbers and notes. He said that piano, well, “It’s math.”
Go on …
“If you’re in a particular key, you know what notes you have available to you,” he said.
“Ah,” I said. “So it’s like a form poem.”
If you know you’re writing a Shakespearean sonnet, you know how many lines it will be, what the rhyme scheme is, and where the stanza breaks are. If you’re writing a Petrarchan sonnet, you know it’s the same number of lines, but a different rhyme scheme with different stanza breaks. Just like music, it’s math.
I hate math, but I love form poetry. I love the discipline of squeezing my pinball machine of ideas into a well-ordered style.
My pianist admitted that you can experiment within a given key, but it’s got to work. So also, with a form poem, you can break the form as long as it still serves the twin purposes of clarity and beauty.
I talk about this in the notes about Form & Free Verse in the back of my book of children’s poetry, Rainbow Crow.
“Poetry can be written in form or free verse. Think of form as a fence—it has boundaries that show the writer and reader where to go. Free verse is free range—no fences, no rules. Ironically, free verse can be much harder to write well. A fence can provide structured space for creativity to root and bloom. […]
In the case of “Dear Rascal,” I added an extra line at the end, just for fun. Sometimes you need to cut a hole in the fence.”
Dear Rascal is a ghazal, an ancient form of Arabic poetry. After spending ten lines bemoaning how this poor dog is tormented by crows, I decided the poem needed to end with a note of humor: “Go chase a chicken instead!”
This is clearly fence-cutting. It wouldn’t work for a college textbook on how to write a ghazal, but for kids? It works just fine.
Poetry Journal
Read the poem about Rascal, that poor dog.
Do you have a story or a poem that’s been filling up pages, going nowhere?
Choose a form poem—you know, the one frantically waving its hand at you from the back of the room. Click here for ideas of form poems to consider.
Turn your original idea into a form poem. If you like, email me what you write.
Take care, Megan