Writing in Form

Yesterday I turned in a review of a book-length poem written entirely in terza rima--a remarkable endeavor, given our free-verse world, yet not without its problems. Please understand: I love formal poetry. I read a great deal of it, and I write it myself. But form opens a poet to all sorts of hazards, not least a superficial glissade into cynical doggerel. (I can think of at least one person who calls himself a critic and defender of form, a man who declares to anyone who will listen that any poem not written in form is automatically prose but whose own exemplars make Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics look like Wordsworth--not to mention that his lines don't scan.) The book I reviewed was a thousand times better than such tripe. It was a serious and ambitious narrative that demonstrated considerable skill and resolve. Yet it stumbled, in part because the rhyme scheme became the primary driver of the lines.

Here's a bit from the first draft of my in-progress book Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet. In the manuscript it follows my chatter about Shakespeare's Sonnet 81:

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I (once gone) to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie;
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
            You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
            Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

Sonnets can be dangerous writing prompts because they tend to lure poets into rhyme-scheme obsession. Those fourteen come-hither line endings often become so distracting that the poet allows the rest of her draft to fade into undifferentiated filler. Yes, a sonnet is a poem that follows a predictable pattern of rhymes; but as a glance at Sonnet 81’s two sentences will remind you, that pattern is not the principal propulsion of the poem. Sonnets should be active dramas, moving both the writer and the reader from one state of mind to another. By starting with rhyme rather than content, you risk a mire.

            So I suggest you take the opposite tack. Concentrate on the first words. To get yourself started, you might even borrow Shakespeare’s first words in Sonnet 81:

Or

Or

From

Although

Your

Though

The

When

Your

Which

And

When

You

Where

Now that I’ve erased the rest of Shakespeare’s sonnet, his first words stand out as remarkably colorless . . . at least connotatively. With the exception of the bland personal pronouns your, your, and you and a single article, the, all of the words function as sentence drivers. Or what? Although what? From where? Where to? Every one of them requires a writer to push herself to choose a next word.

When I’m teaching a class, I sometimes throw out a poem’s opening words as prompts. “The first word is Or!” I shout, and the students write feverishly. “Next line,” I shout. “The first word is Or!” I don’t give them time to analyze but push them to write quickly. The results of these rapid first drafts are always varied, but they are consistently active and dramatic, making full use of the propulsive sentence logic that fluent English speakers internalize over the course of their lives. The bland opening words force the students to keep moving down the page, yet each writer retains control of her subject matter. Simply she’s responding to an arrangement of grammatical sign posts.

If you’re working alone on a poem, press yourself to write a fast first draft using each of these words as a line prompt. Don’t slow down and start fiddling with end rhymes. If you decide to add them, you can figure them out later; and at that point, if you find that you need to replace some or all of the opening words, you’ll already have an active, muscular draft in hand. Conversely, if you discover that what you need to write requires more or less than fourteen lines, you now have a flexible framework that you can expand or contract as you revise.