1. FORM AS SANCTUARY, AS SHAPELY REPETITION
If poetry is, at least in part, a quest for form, then form is a poem’s architecture. The words of a poem may be its raw materials—the wood, the stone, the glass—but form is the magic that makes it possible to enter inside those word shelters, to find a place to abide. A refuge. Form is sanctuary, interiority, the house of magic. It is event meeting eternity.
And what is form but a shapely set of repetitions—whether the repetitions are of sounds at the end of lines (rhyme), or of a regular stress or beat (meter), or of whole or parts of lines (as in a pantoum, villanelle, ghazal). Is not music about pleasing and surprising repetition of sound? Poetry is a form of music, in this sense—a pleasing and surprising repetition of sound. It is pleasing because it recurs, and it is surprising because its recurrence is not quite regular. The key, it seems, is repetition with a difference, so that the world of the poem is both familiar and utterly new. It enthralls and enchants us, and yet it also wakes us up—the way the best art does. It is also a way that healing happens from trauma.
Form is the term for that patterning of repetition, that homing in. A Russian poet once said to me, quoting another Russian writer, my homeland is Russian literature. Those of us in diaspora, in exile, or alienated in all the ways that we can be unhoused, still long for home and homeland. How often have we found in a poem or story a home that the world did not provide? Literature can be forms of home, forming home, homing form.
2. WHY WRITE IN RECEIVED FORM?
Though our age compels us to seek out nontraditional means to find the shape that homes our poems, so-called traditional or received forms also have much to offer. Writing in received form offers us a vessel, or technology, for containing what could not be held otherwise. It is a useful distraction, turning our attention into a wrestling with limits rather than worrying about content. It is like juggling, where we’re occupied with keeping three objects in the air, totally immersed in the flowing
