Form: Finding the Poem’s Skeleton

It feels wonderfully quiet now that the cicadas have died off. The first few weeks of summer filled my hometown with their droning, fluttering, pulsating, and screaming. Sometimes it was too loud to think. At other times I thought the cicadas were like poems: small, urgent creatures making uncanny noise. (Admittedly, not the most flattering comparison.)

Now that the cicada nymphs are burrowing into the ground for the next 17 years, I’m looking at the exoskeletons the parent cicadas left behind and thinking about form—about the shapes that we fit poems into and the structures we give them. About choreographing movement across the stillness of the page.

I used to think I was anti-form. Why saddle a poem with a bunch of arbitrary syllable count and rhyme requirements? Why not just say WHATEVER you meant to say in a free verse poem and call it day? Why limit your creative process? Hadn’t we been there and done that with five paragraph essays? I was looking at traditional forms like an exoskeleton—something to squeeze into or to shed.

Practicing yoga changed my mind. I started to see poses not as shapes to fit my arms and legs into, but as experiences that filled my body with breath. I started to think of a twist, for example, not as shape to hold or make, but as a way of arranging my bones and muscles so as to become aware of breath moving through the back of my body. This helped me to see form as scaffolding and support for the writer’s (and the reader’s) attention; and it helped me to see form everywhere, not just in sonnets and sestinas.

All poems have forms—skeletons shaping their strides. A prose poem focuses my attention on the sentence as a unit of movement and sense-making; a lineated poem focuses my attention on the line. A list poem asks me to find relationships between the items it names. A poem that zigzags across the page asks me to weave back and forth between different ideas.

I’ve come to appreciate traditional forms as ways of channeling attention toward particular sounds and repetitions, ways of acting out patterns of thought. I wrote lots of sestinas during April 2020 when the shifting repetition of the same six end-words felt like an obsessive shielding against uncertainty (when nothing else can be predicted, it’s nice to know how every line of a poem will end).

The bones of my poems don’t always want to stack into traditional forms, though, so finding the poem’s skeleton—the bones that will shape its movement—is an important part of my revision process. Sometimes I do this by reading aloud and listening. Sometimes I use the content of the poem as a guide. I recently wrestled a poem about Gertrude Ederle’s 1926 swim across the English Channel into three-line stanzas to fit the one-two-three-breathe rhythm of freestyle swimming; this forced me to cut ‘leftover’ lines and brought the poem into clearer focus. And I spent years revising a poem about telegraphs before realizing that I needed to make it read like a telegraph by using ‘stop’ instead of periods—folding in all the ‘stops’ helped me see what the poem had to say about silence and miscommunication.

So these days I am very much pro-form, whether that means growing the poems inside a structured exoskeleton or revising with x-ray vision to find its bones.

Who knows? Maybe the next cicada return will find me writing sonnets.