Last month I decided to make a point of working on my poetry. Specifically, I wanted to experiment with as many new poetic forms as I could. As someone who defaults to free verse and who only remembers a scant few forms from school, I thought it would be a good idea to learn a few more. Lucky for me, I have this handy dandy list of 168 poetic forms from Writer’s Digest.
I actually started doing this a couple of months before. I adore The Magnificent Seven remake from 2016, so I challenged myself to write a poem for each of the seven and each poem had to be in a different poetic form. I gave myself a break by allowing one poem in my default free verse, but the rest had to be a different form. It took a few Sundays, but I got all seven poems written. And I had a lot of fun doing it. (If you’re curious, the forms I used were free verse, sonnet, echo verse, nonet, sijo, espinela, and deibide baise fri troin.)
I’ve experimented with a few more forms since, but I decided to make July my little poem laboratory of trying out poetic forms. Here’s what I’ve learned:
-I don’t like forms with too many rules. There are some Irish poetry forms that I didn’t even try because they have more rules than a strict parent.
-But I do like some rules. They push me to up my game and have given me better insight into what I need to do to write a decent poem.
-I’m hesitant when it comes to rhyming and syllables. I think it’s a free verse thing. I want to be specific with my word choice, but I don’t want to be limited.
-But I also like the challenge of rhyming and syllables. Once I get the groove of it, I have a good time.
-I like to match my subjects to forms. It was interesting to see how I couldn’t make a poem work in one form, but if I switched the form, it happened like magic.
-I’ve discovered several new poetic forms that I’ll be using from now on. I’m no longer a one form poet.
Make no mistake that I will probably continue to prefer free verse, though now with other poetic forms in my utility belt, it will be less of a default and more of an intentional choice. But I think by trying new forms and finding new forms that I like, it’s given me a boost of confidence in my poem making. Is my poetry still bad? Yes. Is it less bad than it was before? Also yes. The needle has moved just a bit towards not-god-awful, and that is also a confidence boost.
Even though I will occasionally submit my poems to contests in a spaghetti-wall effort to try to reclaim the glory I once obtained by winning second in state in a poetry contest when I was a sophomore in high school, my main pursuit in poetry is the joy of it. Sure, every poem I write inadvertently improves my prose writing by making me translate emotions into words and those words need to be chosen and arranged carefully to help convey that emotion, which I in turn utilize in my prose. It’s the joy I get that really keeps me writing poems, though. Even when I’m writing about really messy emotions or enraging realities, there is a joy in the act that I can’t find anywhere else.
And now it comes in a stornello.
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