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Sound, Shape, and Space: Received and Invented Forms
For Further Reading
We highly recommend reading these full essays we alluded to and quoted from in this chapter:
● “The Indian Needs No Writing,” A speech by Four Guns, from Karen D. Harvey (1995). American Indian Voices. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press. p. 66. An excerpt is available here.
● Kao Kalia Yang, “My Father the Song Poet” via LitHub.
● Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” via The Poetry Foundation.
And we also encourage you to read more of the work by the poets we touched on in this chapter.
● You can hear Douglas Kearney perform “Noah/Ham: Fathers of the Year” here and read more of his poems here.
● You can see more of Rodney Gomez’s visual poetry here and read a sample of some of his all-text poems here.
● You can read more of Mai Der Vang’s poems at the Academy of American Poets website. We also recommend you check out the special feature, “Writing from the Absence: Voice of Hmong American Poets” that Mai Der Vang guest edited for Academy of American Poets. The conversations between Vang and the poets along with the poems provides a great deal of insight into the ways poets engage with silence, form, language, oral traditions, and formal traditions here.
● A great selection of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s poems are up on the Poetry Foundation website.
Writing Poems using Received Poetic Forms
We barely scratched the surface of the huge number of existing poetic forms. If you love the challenge of writing within constraints and existing traditions, you’ll love this list of forms from the Academy of American Poets.
We also recommend checking out work by the following:
● Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s translation of the Irish epic poem the Caoineadh of Eibhlí Dub Ní Chonaill is a fantastic reflection on how the oral tradition is passed along through generations, from the ear onto the page. For an introduction to her work (and the Irish traditional form Caoineadh, which can be translated as keening, or a wailing grief poem), we recommend listening to her interview with David Naimon on the podcast, “Between the Covers.”
● Mimi Khalvati makes extraordinary use of forms, particularly forms like the ghazal or those that borrow from Persian poetry traditions.
● Agha Shahid Ali, one of the great writers of ghazals in English.
● Mary Jo Bang is known as one of the great elegists of our time. Edward Hirsch is another.
● Ishion Hutchinson is another poet who constantly makes familiar forms feel new in his work.
● J. Allyn Rosser, one of a group of poets known as the new formalists.
● Kevin Young’s jazz poems and blues poems are fantastic examples of the use of poetic forms. If you love these poems and this form, we suggest reaching further back in the tradition to learn more about Langston Hughes’s jazz poems as well.
● We love odes! You can reach way back to John Keats 1819ode sequence, or check out Pablo Neruda’s odes to
common things, like this and this. Or W. S. Merwin’s odes, which you can find by looking for the many poems beginning with the word “To” here.
● We also love sonnets! If you really want to know your tradition, you can dig into Petrarch’s sonnets or Shakespeare’s. But we also love Diane Seuss’s experiments with the sonnet form, as well as the list of other contemporary poets using the sonnet form in new ways exemplified here.
Poets Inventing New Forms
● Marwa Helal, who invented the poetic form “The Arabic.” You can read an interview with her here and read a selection of her poems here.
● Jericho Brown, who invented the poetic form “The duplex”.
● torrin a. greathouse, who uses many traditional forms in their work and developed a new form, “The Burning Haibun.”
Poetry Emerging from Slam and Spoken Word Traditions
We can’t talk about the oral tradition or, frankly, about contemporary poetry’s massive resurgence at the beginning of the 21st century, without talking about the enormous influence of slam and spoken word. Here are just a few of the major voices who began their careers as poets as acclaimed spoken word performers.
Poetry Resulting from Response and Mimesis (Imitation)
One of the oldest traditions in studying craft and form is writing an imitation poem, or poem that typically takes as its shape the exact syntactical, lineation, and grammatical rules of an existing poem. When we write using received forms, we are engaging in a form of mimesis. Yet another way to engage in mimetic traditions is through response poems, those that call back to, but don’t exactly replicate, the inspiring poem.
The following are a small handful of mimetic and response poems that we and our students have loved.
