Rather than answering “yes” or “no” to the question, “Is form necessary in poetry?” I would argue that “Form is inescapable in poetry.” Whether we like it or not, once a poem is placed on the page, it is given form even if that form is formlessness. In order for a poem to be effective, it must be supported and enhanced by its form, inseparable from it, forever bound in a communal conversation with it. Before we can understand, perceive and evaluate form in a poem, we must first ascertain the poem’s purpose: we must corner it, interrogate it, determine whether it accepts or rejects us, whether or not it wants to befriend us. A poem demands our attention. We examine its physical characteristics: how it looks on the page, the length of the lines, the tone of the words, the attributes of the fonts, the presence/absence of punctuation, the sense of urgency. When we read the words, we evaluate them through any number of available decoding systems, attempting to approach the poem in its own voice in order to render the most truthful interpretation. We ask it to move us; we either agree or refuse to be moved. 

Jesús Papoleto Meléndez’s “¡Hey Yo / Yo Soy!” is an excellent example of how a poem is inseperable from its form. The poem moves about the page, imitating the swaying of the body, a swaying that is also reinforced by its choice of words. One can hear the punctuating rhythms of the Yo!’s while the ellipses signal the desire for audience response. The word Yo! stomps upon the ground, a hand in the air, and the ellipses call back, Yo! The audience response is not on the page as the ellipses indicate, and we are therefore allowed to imagine what the audience response might be during each different reading event. It will likely be different every time. We recognize now that the poem is not only occurring on, but also off, the page. 

Upon visual appraisal, the poem is stretched out across the page, yearning to encompass a whole world of multicolored individuals and views. It begs for solidarity, for unity, and thus, the form in the first stanza behaves like an umbrella, calling all words to congregate beneath it. After the first stanza, the words fall more in line, hiding under the shelter of

Hey!
            Yo!. . .
                       Yo! . . . Yo! . . .

The poem’s title, ¡Hey Yo / Yo Soy!, functions like a mirror, the slash being the actual mirror and the words on either side reflections of one another. The title, and indeed the poem, is dependent on the Spanish/English double entendre of the word “Yo!” The word asks for our attention and is called out like a greeting, but it is also a word meaning “I.” The poet is calling all of the "I"s in the world to gather: 

Hey-ey! . . . Yo! / Yo! . . .

We see in this line again the slash as mirror, alternative readings of the line being Hey You! / I! or Hey You! / Me! Then, the poet says, “I am Puerto Rican, Bro!” followed by the ellipsis, asking the reader/listener to answer back with what he or she is. 


In his “The Politics of Noise: Unmasking the ‘face of the voice as speech,’” Craig Dworkin explains the current difficulty “critics” have of explaining and understanding the visual components of a poem’s form. He states that: 

In part, this may well be due to the difficulty of talking about visual prosody; we lack a sophisticated critical tradition and ready vocabulary. In fact, when such matters are considered at all, any radical deviation from a printing norm is generally taken to be a more important classificatory element for poetry than the underlying theoretical conceptions of representation, performance, or the relationships between text, space, sound, and so on.

Melendez does radically disrupt the “printing norm” (a left aligned, relatively patterned line breaks, similar line lengths) in his poem; however he is not attempting to radically unsettle “the grid of the page,” as Dworkin argues poets like Susan Howe might do. Rather, the form of Melendez’s poem is dependent on the accepted, physical grid of the page: a right to left, up and down reading. It does not seek to subvert this paradigm because it relies on the paradigm to get its message across: we must uproot the norm by pushing against it, by undoing its violence against us and its encouragement of violence against ourselves. The “radically disrupted page” (in Dworkin’s words) has the effect of “situat[ing] its readers in a position from which they might more empathetically respond to the issues of power addressed by their thematic treatment of personal and cultural violence.” How does this work? When we normally read in English, we expect the left to right format and the patterned line breaks, etc. We read patriarchally; that is, we expect a certain parataxis in our reading, a certain syntax, an understanding of symbols by their oppositions (i.e. light vs. dark, cold vs. hot, me vs. you). When we read something that is against these norms, we are displaced, we are both experiencing and participating in the feeling from which the poem’s message stems. Melendez thwarts the patriarchal power structure by refusing to “properly” align words with one another, by using one word to embody a paradox (as in Yo! referring simultaneously to both “You” and “Me”) and by using both English and Spanish to deliver a message that might not be wholly understood by those who are not bilingual. The reader is now in a place to understand a communication that emerges from the margins. 

Form, according to M. H. Abrams, is not a “fixed container, like a bottle, into which the ‘content’ or ‘subject matter’ of a work is poured,” but rather, is elastic, shapeshifting to fit the purpose of the poem or the viewpoint of the person writing/evaluating it (Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 101). In this case, Melendez uses form to relay the message that both love and racism run deep: 

Because of Love
                          of A Love so deep
                                                  deep
                                 that still it seeps
                                                        seeps
                                        within Us deep
                                                            deep,
                                                        yet still
                                                          it seeps. . .

The words themselves are like a pouring, trickling down into the soil of language. They are deeply rooted and seemingly impossible to excise. The same form is repeated later in the stanza on racism: 

This, Thing, 
                  RACiSM!!!
                               is an Unnatural schism
                  that makes You
                        part of a SyStem

Here, you can see in the way the words are arranged on the page the similarities with the seepage of deep love in the previously examined stanza. Also, the way Melendez separates “SyStem” with capital letters calls our attention to the word “Stem” that lies within the root of the word “system” and corresponds with the aforementioned stanza: the unspoken metaphor of roots. Here, also, the small “i” in “RACiSM” is mirrored in other words containing the “I” such as “KiLLing” and “prisoN.” The alignment of the three capital letters on the page (yoU, prisoN, and NO) form the word “UNO” also referring to “one” along with the “I” and the “Me.” Eventually, the lower case “i” in “KiLL” gives way to small capitals in “KILLKILL!!!” indicating the rise of the “I” to do violence, an especially heinous violence: the destruction of one’s own kind. Similarly, Melendez has separated the word “Violado” (rape) from other words in a previous stanza, effectively illustrating a rape’s ability (both literal and metaphorical) to separate and isolate. 

Finally, the discerning reader cannot overlook the use of punctuation in Melendez’s poem. He uses both Spanish and English punctuation, but in focusing solely on the English punctuation, one can see a certain conscientiousness evident in his choice of symbols. Melendez has almost run the gamut of available punctuation (and some almost to excess): the exclamation point, ellipsis, comma, dash, period, quotes, colons, parentheses, the slash, and even the elision mark (as in “’Tis” for “It’s”). However, this overabundance of punctuation draws my attention not so much to what is there (for the excess of it is a message in itself) but to what is not there: the semicolon. In thinking of the earmarks of the semicolon, I am drawn to two particular characteristics: its visual element of appearing like a hybrid between the colon and the comma, and its use as a punctuation mark that separates two sentences of equal weight. What does this mean to the form of the poem? In order to understand the semicolon’s function as a hybrid between the comma and the colon, we must first identify the uses of both commas and colons. The comma is a pause, a simple breath. It is a way to step back from a sentence, a way to evaluate from a very short distance. It is a politeness. The colon, however, serves as a signal that more information is about to be given. What follows the colon enhances and explains what has come before. It is complimentary. The semicolon thus indicates a type of compromise. Therefore, the absence of the semicolon, this hybrid, reinforces poem’s message of solidarity: there can be no compromise. Without a semicolon, the poet is stating that if we are to overcome the seepage of racism with the depth of love, we must come together wholly and finally, without compromising our values. In the poem, two sentences of equal weight cannot be separated, they must be fused: the I must be the You and the You must be the Me. One can neither perform nor promote an act of violence on his own kind.

ComprendeMI!!! he finishes. 

Do you understand?

H.K.