A Word or 500 on Form

"the poem alone"
hmmm. what is that exactly? it sounds so much like poetry, like it should fit. "alone" and "poem," linked in the psyche of 10,000 poets, and the reason 10,000,000 more attempt poetry. But "poem" is itself 10,000 things; by definition, "it" cannot be singled out; "it" is connection.

I do not begin this way to pick at our esteemed discussion leaders (though by now you know me to revel in playful barb), but to get to this talk of form and the intricacies traversed by poetry.

Form, to me, in this post-sonnet and line measure, post-free verse landscape, is a way of enacting nonverbal cues. Stage direction. Even for poetry not written for stage, there is presence to a poem; there is a space that the poem creates and inhabits, with movement and meaning that cannot be expressed in word. Setting. And instruction. A direction, which, ironically, often provides freedom from established reading norms. Structure that invites, provokes, entices the reader to consider the direction a word might take - form makes line and yet makes possible a reading between the lines.

Aloud, the poet interprets these stops and questions through body language and inflection. Often line breaks aren't followed, because they are not needed to slow and manage the sight read of a poem. Some meanings are missed and left on the page, but perhaps a poem is different in air than it is in the mind. Perhaps it is a different poem all together, no more and no less than the one on the page.

I think what is missing from many of the poems we read for this week is an integration of form and content. You can slap a poem on a page, and if all elements are not considered, then I consider it weak. At the same time, you can impose structure on a poem, and if it is only a casing, not informing the content, then I say there is work to be done. Because whether or not you intend it, the form does inform the content. This is why it is crucial to consider form in the crafting. If you don't pay attention to it, the form might be saying, "I don't know what I'm doing." Poems are loudmouths - they will tell on you.

The old guy that's glad to be alive and writes in all caps, calls up for me a person who did not grow up in the computer age, who stuck the keyboard on caps lock and went to town. This doesn't speak informative form to me. It speaks a lack of familiarity with computer etiquette, or "I survived so I'm going to scream at everybody." And I think of all the double or triple margins that might have helped this poem, the space that could have hinted at the passage of time, the thought of placement on the stage of the paper that might have made the work seem more like a poem and less like a 12-step journal entry (no offense meant, big up and much love to those in recovery).

Aside from attempted set structures, I believe a poem calls for it's form. Often a poet gets in the way of what a poem wants to say. And so to be open to the poem, in conversation with it, as it becomes (or occurs) can only enhance the connection of form and content and make for a tighter, "better" poem. Whether or not the form enhances the poem or detracts from it depends on how well the poet listened to the poem, thought of each space and the meaning lent to the message. At sixteen we were all putting words on paper. Would you look back now and call the early stuff your best work? I wouldn't. I understand much more now about the entry points for meaning, how to create levels, how to write about more than a broken heart.

Form, or the consideration of what the poem's construction says in conversation with the content, seems as essential to me as a skeletal system. Without this, a poem is often mush on a page. Is it necessary? Only if you want people besides your mother to call it a poem.

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie does some interesting things with form in her poem "Medusa." The placement of words adds to the setting, to the turn of past and present that she speaks of in the poem. The left-most margin represents today; she starts here to show the strength of her reclamation, presses it up to the spine of the book. The next margin that appears, though third from the left, represents the painful past of being excluded for her appearance, and is set by the end of "a shedding," to demonstrate what she has shed.

The two stanzas on this margin seem interrupted by three lines that push toward the left strong-woman edge but don't quite make it there. They fall short because in them, she and the friends try to feel beautiful in a way that denies their own beauty.

She returns to the left margin as she speaks proudly and playfully of her hair with a mind of its own, and the final line in that stanza, "beckoning brown hand," returns to the margin where she spoke of the old notion of seductive qualities. This shows a reclamation of what is beautiful; her qualities become "1,000 spiraling waists" that beckon brown hand and replace a time when "seduction looked like...tresses fingers eased through."

The final stanza is set on the innermost margin, a fourth, and speaks to the reader of this knowledge going deeper than the discrimination and the pain of the past. A true reclamation of self, routing out all the fallacies that once held her down. I reprint it here because I like it so much. It does that last-line bam-dam thing.

"As a plaited girl
I was stung by the word 'Medusa'
As a woman
I am unafraid to turn men to stone."


So I guess you could put the words down and say that they don't need a form, but I feel like that is only writing half the book and calling it finished. If you don't take enough time to give your poem a body, why am I taking the time to read it?