How Forms Shape a Poem's Content - Suzanne Delaney's Blog

Re posting in 2022 for newer poets. 

This is mainly to share a few interesting views I have encountered about form.

Poetry is sometimes described as an idea looking for a form or a form looking for an idea. Robert Hass in comparing metered poems with Free Verse states:

‘……the metrical poem begins with an assumption of human life which takes place
in a pattern of orderly recurrence with which the poet must come to terms-

Meter organizes accents into an overall pattern and more or less evenly times the lines bringing an organizing influence that allows the story to unfold.

The Free verse poem…begins with an assumption of openness or chaos
in which an order must be discovered.  The basic fact of free verse: each poem is shaped from within.  You’ll often hear a poet say they didn’t know where the poem would end when they began writing it but that it comes to them as a natural act of writing."

I also learned  this from an English professor about writing in Rhymes.

The mind becomes focused on finding the rhymes which tricks the analytic mind into allowing the intuitive mind to come forth.

and  lastly these valuable tips

1. A poem is a record of discovery. Avoid judgements, opinions and attitudes.
2. Allow the reader's heart and mind to open.
    This means don't end by telling. The most succesful poems rise at the finish.
3. Don't reverse syntax. We are tempted often to do this to make a rhyme fit.

4. Active verbs speed image. Adverbs can sound too forced.

5 Avoid abstractions.

6.  Vowel sounds effect the emotional sense
                                 ...'i' sound rises up
                                'e' cuts through tension.
                                'o' brings you down.

When using rhyme consider the emotional effect and choose vowel sounds accordingly.

.....and finally from Leonardo Da Vinci....There are ten attributes of sight....

darkness and brightness,
substance and color,
form and place,
remoteness and nearness,
movement and rest.

Hope you have enjoyed all the little gleanings from my poetry notes.

Wind to your wings, light to your path, dreams to your heart.
SuZ

Two excellent books I recommend: are

The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes

The Art and Craft of poetry by Michael J Bugeja

which talks on choosing a form for a subject.