WR 610 - Form in Poetry

Credits: 4 credits
Explores how poems are shaped by attention to metrical lineation, rhythm, stanza structure, and verse forms. Students study traditional English approaches such as blank verse and the sonnet, to highly repetitive modes like the villanelle, the sestina, and the American blues poem, to recent imports such as the pantoum (Malaysia) and ghazal (Persia), and newer inventions like the bop, duplex, contrapuntal. Students also examine the fundamentals of composition by field (open form). All poems, not just formal poems, require choosing and often discovering generative and expressive limits in order to secure a uniquely viable artistic shape, or as Robert Hass observes, “the form of a poem exists in the relation between its music and its seeing.” All poems, including “free verse” poems, are formal in this regard. In addition to studying rhythm and meter, poetic structure and verse forms, and writing analytically about them, students are encouraged to write poems that exhibit a versatile practical knowledge of formal structure and measure-the essentials for mastery in the art of making poems. Emphasis therefore is placed on writing with form, rather than in form-as though a form were merely an empty template or vessel into which content is poured. Students read widely and liberally in the forms of poetry and are required to produce two substantial essays on some formal aspect of poetry, as well as respond to and present on a range of formal structures and strategies. When the word “formal” is used in this class, students assume the lead provided by the late Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali when he observes”Subject matter is artistically interesting only when through form it has become content. The more rigorous the form, realized formally, openly, or brokenly, the greater the chance for content….Content (in turn] is the poet’s formal investment in the subject.”