The debate between free verse and verse forms is never-ending. How do you feel about forms? Do they work for you or do you feel they constrict your poetry? I’m taking a deeper dive into studying forms and reviewing prosody, both of which are invaluable in sharpening and honing my own toolbox and increasing my appreciation and respect for more traditional poetry and poets. I’m listening to the audiobook of “The Ode Less Travelled” and have begun Robert Hass’s “A Little Book On Form.” I’m finding doing the first exercise in “The Ode Less Travelled” on writing in iambic pentameter is good discipline for getting oneself to think in a more poetic sense. However, I think it causes you to begin to become more aware of language, the proliferating and endless forms and nuances of expression it can take, and the sheer vastness and depth of the art. Do you ever play around with caesuras and enjambment—how they affect line(s), stanzas, rhythms in silent and read-aloud meter, influence meaning, subtext, and form? It never hurts to review fundamentals, for those are the key to improving understanding, facility with language, technique, flexibility, and a clearer eye towards what one desires to achieve. Even in free verse, form is set up and adhered to; does complete anarchy make for something untenable, or does it lend its own rhythms in a different arc and cause the practitioner to learn something new to add to h/his toolbox? Please add a comment. I think this is a subject that has room for much growth, learning, identification, understanding, and enjoyment! I look forward to all thoughts and hope you feel as passionate about it as I do!
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Haha maybe this subconsciously inspired the stream last night. I’ve just sat down to read this, but must have seen a notification for it when you originally posted it. I’m sorry!
Form 'forces' the writer to work harder. Free verse flows like water across the page.
You need to put in some effort to write within the confines & rules of form.
If I back this out of just poetry and apply it to art/creative expression in general, I think that forms can be useful - they can be a shortcut to creating a mood (or purposefully used subversively), the constraints of them can required you to think more creatively about a choice (a word, a line, etc - and sometimes that can be where something special happens), and as you mentioned - knowing about them can just be another tool in your toolbox.
Of course, on the flipside there are times that the constraints of a form absolutely stifle or simply stand in the way of what you are trying to get out - and perhaps in those cases the message is more important than adherence to the form. Put another way - you don't want the technique to distract from the impact of what you are trying to say or communicate (unless perhaps that tension is precisely what you ARE playing with/saying?).
Form and language are such big topics - and they relate in so many things from the way we read the poem to ourselves, compared to a performance of the same piece, to the way way class and culture shift word meanings, to whether or not the form is specifically designed as a meta commentary about the art or control itself - and in a lack of "form" do you sometimes still find some sort of conformity, some invisible set of rules, or are those rules just the basics of the poet's chosen language?