Poetry and Form

If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks. In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms…We all, with practice, might move others to feel something that we have felt or to see the world as we do. If we’ve got that spark, technique gives us a way to share it.

Why Write in Form? by Rebecca Hazelton

This collection on poetry and form gathers resources from across the Poetry Foundation website to curate a selection of poetic forms, definitions, examples, prompts, and articles on formal writing. The authors intend this resource to be an evolving, ongoing conversation that provides context on forms and their impact on poetic history and poetry today. The Poetry Foundation especially hopes this collection provides inspiration and encouragement for writing in forms and experimenting within constraints, as so many writers included in this collection do.

Forms Included

Sonnet

Sestina

Haibun

Golden Shovel

Cento

Ghazal

Abecedarian

Zuihitsu

Glosa

Form and Content, Thing and Thingness

By Robert Eric Shoemaker

Poetry, like all art forms, sits on the shoulders of a long history. Poets draw from whatever corner they’ve learned from or that they prefer: maybe a lineage of poets they identify with, their teachers, poems that shaped who they are, or poems they aspire to write. Because of the rich history of poetry, the original art form if we think of storytelling as the oldest art, there are too many possible ways to do poetry to list. Forms of poetry, the how of it, make up the crux of poetry’s history and techniques. 

If one thing stuck from my MFA that I imagine most poets also have stuck in their brains, it’s the distinction and lack thereof between form and content. We might imagine form as the how of the poem and content as the what. It is, however, very difficult to disentangle the two, especially in poetry from 1900 on. The history we’ve emerged from uprooted what poem means just as technology continues to alter and evolve how people consume poetry. The question of what makes up the thing and thingness of poetry makes contemporary poetry especially exciting.

If readers don’t understand forms, just like history, we’re doomed to repeat them. Unlike historical blunders, repeating old forms and not writing anything “new” isn’t truly perilous, but those who practice poetry and understand its origins, in whatever corner of the history they want, are more likely to make poems that excite readers or listeners. Knowing forms and knowing how to share “that spark” of content through technique, as Rebecca Hazelton puts it, stands contemporary poets on the shoulders of the grand lineage behind them. Forms are the key, for many, to writing poetry under the poet’s control. And if you, like me, don’t want to draw in the lines of poetry, if you want to break with form, you first have to know and understand it.

Teaching with Poetic Forms

By Maggie Queeney

I write often into and through poetic forms, so I often teach poetry workshops that focus on and through forms. What I have found is that poetic forms appeal to poets writing their very first poems and to those who have been writing for decades and for largely the same reasons: the challenges of the form ask us to move past our first impulses, to attend to aspects of poem we might otherwise ignore, to invite surprise, and to allow meaning to grow organically. In my work, I turn to received forms when a poem or topic stalls, when I am reluctant to write what I know I have to write, or when I do not know what I want to say or how to say it.

Forms guide me into sounding out the possible. When I adhere to the conventions of a form, I retrace centuries of thought and feeling. When I flex the boundaries of the form, I reimagine not only the container but also what can be contained. I learn what I, as a writer and a reader, value; what I think is interesting, important, and vital; and what feels less necessary at that moment.

Poetic forms ask me to shift to my frame, and so, my gaze from the part to the whole. They remind me that I and my poem are beholden to larger patterns, systems, and structures. Form is communal and collaborative. When I write in poetic form, I join a larger conversation composed of many voices, languages, histories, and traditions, one that extends centuries into the past and may, as long as the form lives in new poems, continue into future centuries. Form is a means of time travel and space travel. In form, I can speak to and through the dead and the not-yet living. Form can offer a soft armor, a flexible shelter, and an instrument to measure and map the invisible currents and energies that drive us to write. Form is a vehicle that carries us through.

Not Too Hard to Master: Poetry Magazine’s Series on Form

By Holly Amos and Lindsay Garbutt

In 2022, the Poetry magazine editors received an essay submission from Tishani Doshi that talked about her love of shape poems, also called concrete poems. Her 2021 collection, A God at the Door, included several of these types of poems, and a question from one of her book editors prompted her to think about the form more deeply. Her essay didn’t read like a typical essay on form; it was personal and expansive, drawing on Indian literature and art to examine the resonances she found in reading and writing shape poems.

Because of Doshi’s essay, we became excited about a form that can be considered, as her editor put it, “somewhat gimmicky.” She made us want to read more shape poems, to write shape poems! We also wanted to read more essays on form that offered readers (and us) a different way in, as well as some examples and a prompt to get going. So we created a new series.

Doshi’s essay appeared in the January 2023 Poetry issue, with the series title “Not Too Hard to Master,” playing on Elizabeth Bishop’s famous sestina “One Art.” That essay was followed in March 2023 by Terrance Hayes writing on the sestina and in July/August 2023 with torrin a. greathouse writing on the burning haibun, with more to come!