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I’m not sure if this makes me a neo-formalist or not, but I’ve been enjoying the forays into formal poetry I’ve been doing recently. Most of them have been for my Poetry Writing class but several of the villanelles have been written just for fun and I had a great, frantic time writing the sestina. More on that later.
So the first goal I have for December, something spanning the whole month, is to go through the book The Making Of A Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland and write a poem in each form in order.
- Villanelle
- Sestina
- Pantoum
- Sonnet
- Ballad
- Blank Verse
- Heroic Couplet
- Stanzaic Poetry
- An Elegy
- A Pastoral
- An Ode
Hmmm… that list is longer than I thought. This may be a goal for December and January.
As I said a few days ago, there is some explanation to go along with Sestina For No One. The last two weeks of my Poetry Writing class, we had to write in a form from a specific list. My villanelle “Just to Live in a Dream…” was for class two weeks ago, and I couldn’t continue with the villanelle thing, I had to write in a different form. Mr. Rutherglen just had to say that the villanelle was an exceptional challenge so… I wrote one. Then, just to take things up a notch, he said that if the villanelle was hard, the sestina was super-extra hard. I love a challenge. To quote (perhaps more accurately, misquote): The most hardcore version of the sestina is to take six nouns as the words you repeat. This was not good enough. I took six words from a random word generator as the basis for my sestina. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It was an insane level of mania and focus just struggling to get from one word to the next and have it make some kind of sense. FOR 39 LINES! Most of my work is vastly shorter than that. I don’t know what I was thinking, thinking that was a good idea. I am, on the whole, fairly pleased with it. It’s undergoing revision: it came back with the comment one line was R-Kelly-esque. I’m not sure what that is but it doesn’t seem complimentary.
I have to do a whole bunch of revision in the next couple of weeks. The final portfolio for class has to include four revised works. I’ve never been big on the revision process but it may be that it is time to get into revising. Ah well.
Go read about the Virgina Quarterly Review’s angry letters (hat tip to Poetic Asides)
Hi T.
It’s strange, you are the second blogger I’ve read who has touched on this same theme, just when I wrote about the same topic on my site. Check out Slow Muse. She writes about an essay by Rosanna Warren.
I wrote about the debate between the neo-formalists and the free verse poets just yesterday. I’d love to hear your input.
Your challenge is astounding, but I think it’s a wonderful exercise in learning how sound works. To me, it’s like a visual artist who learns color and line theory, if only to discard it later. Like a scaffold of knowledge. I’m sort of working my way through the same type of process, but slowly.
One thing I’ve always been unsure of, and intimidated by, is meter and cadence. But the form challenge is a sure way to get a handle on that. I look forward to reading your results.