My first experience with non-traditional poetic forms was e.e. Cummings “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”. I was sitting at a hard laminate desk in my sophomore year of high school listening to my creative writing teacher talk about form for the first time. It astonished me that something so experimental and absurd could, at the same time, be considered a groundbreaking and highly notable piece of art. That’s what I wanted to do.
Now, halfway through my junior year of undergraduate school for creative writing and publishing & editing, form is all I can think about. It’s shaping the way I think about poetry. And it’s shaping the way that poetry functions on a broader scale. Over the past few years non-traditional form and hybrid works have been taking a stand. There are tons of collections such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen which was awarded National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, PEN open book award, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry, and I could go on. Poets like Bhanu Kapil, Ben Lerner, and Tina Chang use form to their advantage, emphasizing their points, creating natural flow, making use of white space etc.
One of the best examples of white space comes from Jody Gladding’s collection the spiders, my arms. She utilizes the page as a canvas, posting words across the page in a way that makes it look almost like a jumbled set of related words. But, when looked at more closely, using the white space to digest and decipher patterns, the poetry itself becomes a lot more clear. Take the first poem in that collection for example:
The bolded words in this piece act as a through line: a line describing the central theme or purpose of the poem. In this case, “the hawthorn in flower was my first alphabet”. Her poems aren’t meant to be read in a specific order. Every time it’s read it presents a different order, a different message, but all surrounding the one specific theme. Gladding’s use of white space and form adds another layer to the piece itself, keeping the audience engaged. She makes sure they’re paying attention, and it might take a little deciphering. But, overall, she creates a highly interactive space pulling the reader in and almost making them the writer each and every time they read it.
More abstract poetry like Gladding’s work is one example of a great use of form and white space. But form isn’t always abstract, avant-garde, or hard to understand. Notable poet William Carlos Williams is known for his succinct poems, and while they don’t mess with form anything like Gladding does, his short lines, distinct line breaks, and short stanza uses form in a really simple way. Take his poem “Between Walls”:
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
His use of form, creating these short flashes of imagistic language, slows the reader down and pulls them into the poem. If this poem were to be in a different form, it would not work as well. Let’s take this poem if it were put into a more common free-verse form:
the back wings of the hospital
where nothing will grow
lie cinders in which shine
the broken pieces of a green bottle
In this form, this poem is nowhere near as effective. It feels like nothing, just an observation. Language isn’t everything when it comes to poetry, it’s about how it’s presented. Just like slam poems aren’t as effective on paper, poems without thought into form are not as effective.
Form takes some getting used to when learning the ins and outs, but so does every other aspect of writing. By using form you can turn an alright poem into a piece of art.
RED INC. 