fREEDOM IN FORM,
OR TRICKING OURSELVES INTO DELIGHT AND PLAY

by Rebecca Foust

THE MORE I PONDER the concept of freedom in art, the more it seems to be something that exists most powerfully in relation to limits—it needs boundaries to break through or transcend. In any event, that’s how it seems to work in poetry. There, form is pretty much inescapable, though poets are constantly trying to bust out of it. It’s always amused me that “free verse” is itself a form with its own well-defined set of conventions, and even something a poet does for the very first time can be labeled a “nonce form.”

Form is simply the poem’s structure, whatever it may be—its shape in air or on the page—and is a consequence of controlling any element of prosody: rhyme, meter, line and stanza length, visual geometry, syllables, and the like. It is distinguishable from “mode,” and narrative, lyric, dramatic, and hybrid-mode poems can take any form. The same goes for poems defined by subject (elegy, ode, pastoral, etc.) which likewise can be structured as sonnets, villanelles, rondeaus, rhymed quatrains and more.

Form is ­just the container into which our expression is poured. If it looks like something planned, it can acquire the status of a nonce form. When it takes the next step into also being recognizable and usable by other poets over a longer period of time it can—like Jericho Brown’s “duplex”—evolve into a fixed form or recognizable template any poet can follow. My favorite compilations of fixed forms are by Lewis Turco and Miller Williams, but you can easily find compendiums online. The sonnet is perhaps the most easily recognizable example of a fixed form.

Do fixed forms constrain creativity? (Nope.)

Many poets resist fixed forms, believing they will constrain creativity and result in work that feels recycled or derivative. One rebuttal to this line of thinking is made in The Poem’s Heartbeat (Copper Canyon, 2008) where formalist poet and scholar Alfred Corn advises naysayers simply to have a look at the canon, at “the tradition in all its contrasting variety:”

When we examine all the approaches poets have taken to any given prosodic structure, we can’t fail to see that it highlights (instead of suppressing) individual differences between poets.

I would submit that you don’t need to go any further than exploration in one fixed form—the sonnet—to be convinced. Pick up any of the great sonnet anthologies out there, such as Penguin or Norton, and you’ll see a dazzling display of originality. In fact, just look at the extraordinary work poets of color have been doing in this and other forms over the last decade: Jericho Brown’s The Tradition; Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for my Once and Future Assassin; Tyehimba Jess’s Olio; Douglas Kearney’s Sho; any Marilyn Nelson book, but especially A Crown for Emmett Till; John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry; any Patricia Smith book, but especially Incendiary Art; and many more, too numerous to name here. These are the poems that have wowed me in recent years and that convince me that poetic form is utterly elastic and infinitely relevant.

Nope again.

Another rebuttal to the idea that writing in fixed form constrains creativity is made in Marilyn Nelson’s essay, “Owning the Masters”:  “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free .  .  .  The more constraints one imposes the more one frees oneself of the chaos that shackles the spirit.”

Another wonderful, contemporary formal poet, Annie Finch, has said: “In a completely unconfined, unrestrained verse, one is a prisoner of infinity.” Finch’s craft books are excellent primers for learning the ropes—work your way through A Poet’s Ear (University of Michigan Press, 2013) or A Poet’s Craft (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and you’ll know a whole lot more than most MFA graduates and will, moreover, have all the tools you need to work within, then successfully break out of form if you so choose.

Form allows for greater freedom, not less.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that poetic form can cast off the “shackles of the spirit” and clear creative blocks, but it never meant more to me than during the last two years. When quarantine was first imposed, many of us were aghast at the thought of being shut in for—gasp!—the entire month authorities were at first predicting. Eventually, of course, confinement horror paled next to the real horrors we were reading about, and some of us experiencing. Still, quarantine was challenging, and we each had to find our own way to deal with it.

Mine was the idea of “freedom in chains.” It’s an old concept applied to poetic form that for me acquired an almost talismanic power during this difficult time. Here is Wordsworth in the tradition of “sonnets-about-sonnets” to make the case that writing in a fixed form can bring the opportunity for greater freedom, not less:  

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

 
During Covid, I opened many a Zoom reading with this Petrarchan sonnet and otherwise spent time reminding myself that my “prison” no prison was. In truth—before some significant losses hit close to home—I was able to lose myself for hours, days, weeks, and months in the “pensive citadel” of poetry—reading it, writing it, writing about it, writing about writing it. For me, working in form was doubly effective, a daily solace. I believed this so deeply that I created, for Marin Poetry Center, an online Poetry Confinement “retreat” for which I wrote 14 daily essays dealing with poems in fixed form.

One interesting thing about Wordsworth’s poem is that at the same time it makes the case for freedom in form for the writer, it also makes that case for the reader, arguing that non-writers (nuns, prisoners, students, etc.) also can experience an expansiveness even while finding themselves constrained by limits: a monastic cell, a prison, library walls, and sometimes that opening up comes from experiencing a piece of writing. Wordsworth’s poem gave me the title and form for one of the 77 sonnets in my fifth book, Paradise Drive (Press 53, 2015).

Nuns Fret Not

She’s inside the frame here, and now guesses
she likes it that way. If the nuns fret not
in their narrow cells, why then should she? Her cot

has, after all, got—this very nice mattress
and custom duvet. But under the green hum
of the all-night lights she—almost—makes out

some other sound. A break in the rhythm,
a knock in the engine of warm rocking dark
(for the lights in their way do—emit darkness)
such as the men on their knees in the dirt
of the park she jogs in, a Food-Not-Bombs T-shirt,
a friend’s son’s legs lost in Iraq—wait, Iraq?
What is Iraq doing in here? She’s screwed.
Something is knocking. The size of a world.

 
Here, I wanted the form to recreate the experience of suburban claustrophobia and also to communicate the irony of living a cloistered life in the midst of a great, messy, and often grim world outside. That highly-engineered compact sonnet form gave me the perfect container for this. The meter is regular iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme (abbacbcdabbdee) is an amalgam of classic Shakespearean (ababcdcdefefgg) and Petrarchan (abbacddefgefg) rhyme schemes.

 
How I wrote the sonnets for Paradise Drive.

Writing the sonnets for Paradise Drive was a decade-long endeavor that began in grad school. For a good year, I read almost nothing but sonnets and tried to do what other poets like T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams had done before me—compose a new one every day. I filled notebooks with hundreds of drafts and from these managed to extract a handful worth working on. I’d get obsessed with a topic for a while—the rash of suburban housewife suicides in my county, headlines in the local paper, dog ownership or rat abatement in Marin—and write several sonnets on it. Some became multi-part sonnets, like “The Seven Deadly Sins Overheard at the Cocktail Party” (a blast to write). Others I discarded entirely, saving only the best of that stream of efforts for future revision.

Over time, I found that writing sonnets was like learning a language. I became more fluent, sometimes dreaming in the form, or composing grocery lists in 14 lines. My kids complained that my emails to them sounded like sonnets. It got easier and easier, I found, and eventually I had more than enough material to sequence into a manuscript.

Later, after Paradise Drive was published, I made a conscious decision to break with the form. Some teacher or editor had expressed concern about how this might limit my creativity, and I began to worry about getting pigeonholed. That was bad advice, it turns out, and a bad decision, and I am here to tell you now that whenever something is working (“not broke”) in your writing practice, don’t fix it! The consequence of that decision was that I did not write much of anything for two years, and it was an almost unconscious return to the fourteen-line form that finally got me moving again.  

Writing in fixed forms, paradoxically, encourages “play.”

While writing the sonnets for Paradise Drive, it sometimes felt like cheating because it became so much easier for me to write in this form than otherwise. Writing, and especially revising, sonnets felt relaxing and non-threatening, like play. It was fun. After a day of slogging away on my “serious work,” I’d pull out the evolving manuscript and revise—often cackling out loud to myself—in hours that slipped by like rain down a clean windowpane. Often, until dawn. It never felt like work, only like flow, and joy.  

While revising, I might try to massage a poem more into a Shakespearean or Petrarchan template, regularizing its rhyme schemes and meter. For example, I rewrote one very free-form poem (“All Dirt is Holy”) from scratch as a metered and rhymed sonnet. Another, “Preparation for Pirouette,” evolved into strict terza rima, perhaps the most ambitious form I’ve attempted. Other times during revision, I’d bust out of the form, writing more in the manner of the unmetered and unrhymed “American Sonnets” invented by Wanda Coleman and reprised so wonderfully by Terrance Hayes (American Sonnets) and Diane Suess (Frank: Sonnets).  

My poem about 9/11, “The Fire is Falling,” got loosened up in this way, and so did one very hard-to-write poem about the suicide of a mom I’d shared bleachers with at little league games—“Anastrophe Elegy”—which ended up reading like a sonnet that had detonated from within. I re-wrote many sonnets more than 100 times, retrying different versions until I hit on the one that felt right. In some cases, the versions that ended up in the book did not even have 14 lines, but they still felt like sonnets. It’s easier to play a game, I guess, when you know the rules, and yeah—knowing the rules also makes breaking them a lot more fun. And, as we all know, this kind of playfulness and delight is wonderful for spontaneity and creativity in writing. 

Why is this so? One reason may be that writing in form tricks you into thinking you are doing a puzzle or game—as opposed to writing the Next Great Epic Poem—a mindset that recuses the poetic ego and lowers the stakes. I recall being especially absorbed, for example, in making anagrams of the second word of the title of “Why Pilgrim” while I was writing that poem. Another reason may be that working in form relieves Finch’s existential pressure of the infinite and the more particular writerly terror of the blank page. What—all you have is one measly rhyming couplet? Great! Your sonnet has something to write towards, or your villanelle is already half-done. As Jericho Brown has said, working in form “gives you your next move.”

A poem written in a fixed form, paradoxically, can

recreate a feeling of freedom.

For poets afraid that form will generate results that are stilted and dull, I want to discuss another poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death,” by William Butler Yeats. If Wordsworth’s poem takes on the concept of freedom in chains, Yeats actually enacts it to recreate the experience of being free while being confined, in his.
 

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Yeats does not talk about form in this poem, though I’d argue that it is as much an ars poetica as a poem about war. The poem’s formal constraints create oppositions that embody wartime political complexities and also embody the inner state of an artist. These oppositions are structural as well as conceptual, built into the poem’s grammar, syntax, meter, and other aspects of form and strategically engineered to create qualities of balance and buoyancy. One structural opposition is a strict alternating end rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef ghgh) that engenders a teetering sensation and neatly divides the poem into four parts, each working in counterpoint against the other. Another is the turn at the end of line 8 that bisects the poem into a first half where the aviator looks out and down, and a second half where he looks inward to enact a new drama with a new set of tensions.

Yet another opposition is embedded in the meter. Most lines contain four iambs, but some are substituted by trochees. The poem opens in perfect tetrameter, “I know that I shall meet my fate,” but wobbles immediately with the next line’s inversion of its first foot: “Somewhere among the clouds above,” with other examples in lines 3, 4, and 12. First-foot inversions are not unusual in iambic meters, but they do disrupt the prevailing pattern enough to prevent a poem from falling into deadening singsong. In Yeats’s poem, the tension between the prevailing metrical pattern and its variations engineers a stutter—a randomness—that supports a feeling of flight without direction, a movement more like a butterfly than like the smooth, numb trajectory we experience in modern commercial airliners.

The freedom here is something Yeats engineered so that it could be experienced by the reader. When I felt “the weight of too much liberty” during the unstructured hours created by the pandemic, I found myself returning to “Irish Airman” to enjoy its feeling of liberation—within confinement. The pilot is held in a tiny cockpit in a machine most likely taking him to his death, and the poem itself is tightly built, strictly following formal metrical and rhyme schemes. And yet, what it urgently conveys is freedom: air, light, delight, un-vectored flight.  

Think of form in the active sense, as a verb.

I once used this notion to title a lecture on poetic form [“Form is a verb!—How can ‘form’ inform and expand our poetry practices?”]  Here are a few ideas explored in that lecture.

~ Form unclips the carabiner of rational thought.

Form can also be generative, can create the conditions in which innovation can happen. One way it does this is by what I call “unclipping the carabiner of rational thought.” As a former lawyer, I was rigorously trained in left-brain thinking and writing, and it’s taken me years to loosen that harness. But, when I’m trying to think of a rhyme for a word, logic and rationality fall away. I find the word that feels and sounds right, and only then begin to try to figure out how to fit the word into the poem so it supports overall meaning or otherwise makes sense. Or, doesn’t—thinking in rhyme helps unlock me from the conviction that poems have to be logical, or “mean something.” Even staying within the territory of rational thought, though, finding that rhyme can take the poem into a wholly new and unexpected direction.

~ Form offers the necessary distance for writing about painful material.

Writing sharpens your attention like nothing else. “I don’t know what I even think about a given subject until I write it,” Joan Didion says. But focusing acutely on a painful subject can be agonizing, so much so that the writing cuts too deeply and becomes something we resist. Maybe you want, as do two mothers I know, to write about a son’s death during Covid. Maybe the subject feels too enormous to take on. A formal poem could provide the distance needed to approach so terrible a subject, the shield that lets you see Medusa in reflection rather than being frozen by viewing her horror directly.

~ Writing in form recreates a sense of community.

Nelson also says in her essay that “form itself is communal.” In the canon, poets exist in the present, past, and future all at the same time. T.S. Eliot recognized this and advised poets to connect to tradition through the “great labour” of studying it. As Nelson notes, the work is two-fold: “there is the labor of studying the literature, then there is the additional labor of rising above its time-bound limitations.” Writing in form is a way of connecting us to, and feeling in communication with, all the other poets attempting the form. This was another idea that sustained me during Covid confinement, where I learned to appreciate so many different kinds of community—Zoom events, online Jack Box tournaments with my East Coast kids, an international “group read” of War and Peace, or just eavesdropping on the bird gossip at the feeder in my backyard.

* * *

In well-wrought formal poetry, manipulations of form can be the engine powering the plane of your poems, and they might allow you to build a plane the world has not yet conceived. Writing in form can bestow a sense of freedom and of community that is quite comforting during a pandemic. Working in form has also been comforting on a deeper level during these turbulent times, infusing my workday practice with a sense of order and beauty not unlike T.S. Eliot’s momentary fragments that “shore against the ruins.” I hope I’ve convinced you that trying poetic forms can enhance your creativity, not inhibit it, and can also offer temporary respite from the problems plaguing us now, even ones as serious as war, climate change, political polarization, and global pandemic.

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Rebecca Foust’s new book, ONLY, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in September 2022 and received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly in July. Foust is the author of four books including Paradise Drive (Press 53 2015) and three chapbooks including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin (Swan Scythe Press 2019). Recognitions include the Pablo Neruda, CP Cavafy, and James Hearst poetry prizes, a Marin Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Recent poems are in The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere.