Category Archives: using form

Using form: Odd Sonnet: Brian Bilston, ‘Neither Rhyme Nor Reason’

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To make poems rhyme can sometimes be tough
as words can seem to be from the same bough,
yet each line’s ending sounds different, though,
best covered up with a hiccough or cough.

Was this upsetting to Byron or Yeats?
Dickinson, Wordsworth, Larkin or Keats?
Did they see these words as auditory threats?
Could they write their lines without caveats?

What does it matter when all’s said and done
if you read this as scone when I meant scone?
It’s hardly a crime. There’s no need to atone:
language is a bowl of thick minestrone.

So mumble these endings into your beard –
this poem should be seen, rather than heard.

*****

Brian Bilston is a poet who knows it. He writes about the human condition, relationships, and buses. Agent: Jane Finigan (email: info@lutyensrubinstein.co.uk)

Photo: Brian Bilston, Facebook

Amit Majmudar, ‘Poem that Almost Rhymed’

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Sometimes I visit bodies where I almost roamed
and the curves are made of clouds I almost dreamed,

a consummation missed by just a touch,
an air-to-air refueling broken off,

the hose retracted and the thirst abandoned
as both planes bank in opposite directions.

I hold my almosts in a contact list
of hands I never held, and never lost,

my store of acorns, little lids on ache,
my unmates boarding, one by one, an ark

that sails them, as it must, away from this life,
where I have these three kids, this house, and this wife,

although it could have been somebody else,
a past I passed on quickening my pulse.

When I pull my present closer by the waist,
almost wears the skin of never was.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “Poem That Almost Rhymed operates by slant rhymes, mimicking phonetically the speaker’s romantic near-matches that ended up being near-misses. “Close but no cigar,” as the saying goes: the  speaker reflects on friends who almost made love using words that almost chime in melodiously coupling couplets. Incomplete. The sexual imagery is clear but hopefully sophisticated enough not to seem vulgar–particularly the coitus interruptus implicit in the image of mid-air refueling. The last slant rhyme “waist” almost consummates with “was”–two more letters, and the rhyme would fulfil itself as “waste,” the word that epitomizes the underlying regret of the speaker, who acknowledges his happiness but knows, too, that his happiness could have taken another form, perhaps (sigh) one that would have been an ever-so-slightly better match….”

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). “Poem That Almost Rhymed” was first published in Bad Lilies. Majmudar’s next collection, Things My Grandmother Said, is scheduled for early 2026. 
More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

“Missed Connection [day 111 of 366]” by Wondermonkey2k is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Heart Attack’

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Lust –
Thrust –
Bust –
Dust.

*****

One of the things that intrigues me is the way certain word endings fall into groups, evoke a common mood, sometimes seem to tell their own story. Some of these groups seem natural with overall positive “light, bright, flight, height, white” or negative “dusty, musty, fusty, gusty”; “bumble, crumble, grumble, fumble, stumble, tumble” connotations… but I acknowledge that with the first set I’m ignoring “blight, night, shite” and so on. Some seem random, especially perhaps when the different spellings suggest unrelated origins: “beauty, duty, fruity, snooty,” but still lead to a story.

Happily, I’m not alone in these idle thoughts. Melissa Balmain’s Tale of a Relationship in Four Parts comes to mind… and from Maz (Margaret Ann Griffiths) we have ‘The Drowning Gypsy’:

Flamboyant
Clairvoyant
Unbuo
o
o
o
o
y
a
n
t

Maz’s work is collected in ‘Grasshopper‘; Melissa Balmain’s poem is collected in ‘Walking in on People‘ from Able Muse Press; ‘Heart Attack’ was recently in The Asses of Parnassus.

Photo: “heart-attack” by Pixeljuice23 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Rachel Hadas, ‘Rag Rug’

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It has arrived—the long rag rug
multiply folded. On top, one alien hair.
I put my face to the folds and smell despair
palpable as salt air
in all those rooms and houses, small and smug—
enclosures I passed through on my way where?

Whoever did the weaving appears old
in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face,
can only conjure up the faintest trace
of an abstracted grace,
clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold
these precious things, in some unheard-of place?

I perch her on a hill, precariously
beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom.
Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room
(no bigger than the loom)
is proof against the violence of the sky
From it I further spin what I once called my home:

Endless horizons fading into haze,
the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear;
snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere,
the brightness of the air,
terraces, valleys organizing space
and time’s cessation. So this package here

I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today
(rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace
my strands of language barely can express;
dishrags of dailiness
dispersed and recombined and freshly gay)
comes to me imbued with images,

slowly and faithfully across the water,
across the world. It represents a time
I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme
as soon as I went home,
if that is where I am. These rugs recover
the sense of stepping twice into a single river.

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: “Rag Rug, written probably around 1980 or sometime in the early Eighties, describes my experience opening packages of rag rugs handwoven by a woman or women in Samos, the Greek island where I’d lived between 1971 and 1974. The rags in question were blue jeans, pajamas, tablecloths, you name it – I’d cut these into narrow strips which I sewed together and rolled into a ball, and when I had enough such balls I mailed them to my former mother-in-law in Samos; she eventually sent me the finished project, long rag rugs perhaps eighteen inches wide, colorful, washable, which eventually faded and blended as madras does. The evocative smell of the cloth; the memories of the island and my life there; the fact that poetry, like the making  of these rugs, like quilting, is a piecing together, recombining and recycling of fragments – reading the poem now brings all this back.”

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “Colourful rag rug” by theihno is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Simon MacCulloch, ‘Mouth Harp’

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The doctor raised an eyebrow. He’d pronounced the sentence (death)
And expected her to die now; yet the patient still drew breath.
The woman was a smoker, and the cancer had a hold
That was strong enough to choke her. She was ninety-three years old.
Her lungs must be a sump, awash with nicotine and tar,
And with a clogged-up pump like that she wasn’t going far.

Well, any trouble breathing? Not at all, I just can’t walk!
(I see her, thick smoke wreathing, still unpausing in her talk.)
A cough, perhaps? Not really – nothing wrong that I’m aware.
The doctor starts to feel she must be using different air.
There’s nothing more to say, his grim prognosis is complete;
The science of today must now acknowledge its defeat.

Back home, I watch my mother as she settles in her chair,
Sips coffee, lights another and inhales without a care.
I pass her the harmonica, she takes it, has a blow,
And jaunty and euphonic her recital starts to flow.
The angels have their harps but death’s a word they never knew;
Down here it’s flats and sharps and death’s a song on air turned blue.

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “A largely true account of the somewhat surreal day on which my uncomprehending late mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I’m still quite proud of having rhymed “harmonica” without anyone called Veronica to help out.”

‘Mouth Harp’ was originally published in The Cannon’s Mouth 92.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of print and online publications, including Reach Poetry, View from Atlantis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Spectral Realms, Black Petals and others.

Photo: “Music Maker” by darkday. is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Villanelle variation: James B. Nicola, ‘My MFA’

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I thought I’d go and get my MFA
since college never taught me how to write.
It’s not that I had anything to say;
 
I needed somehow, though, to spend the day
and, existentially I guess, the night
as well. So I went for an MFA
 
in Creative Writing. I did OK,
creatively. My grammar was a fright,
and there was nothing that I had to say,
 
but you got extra points for this. The way
you said squat was what mattered. Outasite, 
I thought, which, when I got my MFA,
 
I didn’t know was not a word. But stay,
they’d said, you can’t create if you’re uptight.
There is no wrong or right. And who’s to say
 
that parts of speech, or lie in lieu of lay,
or topic sentences, are not a blight
on Creativity? What could I say?
I’d paid a lot to get my MFA.

*****

James B. Nicola writes: “Purists take note. ‘My MFA‘ is not quite a villanelle, since the repeated lines vary so much. I suppose Elizabeth Bishop started the ball rolling with ‘(Write it!)’ in the last line of her now-famous villanelle (or is it?) ‘One Art.’ Like her, I am originally from Worcester, Massachusetts; perhaps that explains our consaguinity.”

James B. Nicola’s poetry has appeared internationally in Acumen, erbacce, Cannon’s  Mouth, Recusant, Snakeskin, The South, Orbis, and Poetry Wales (UK);  Innisfree and  Interpreter’s House (Ireland); Poetry Salzburg (Austria), mgversion2>datura (France);  Gradiva (Italy); EgoPHobia (Romania); the Istanbul Review (Turkey); Sand and The Transnational (Germany), in the latter of which his work appears in German translation;  Harvests of the New Millennium (India); Kathmandu Tribune (Nepal); and Samjoko (Korea). His eight full-length collections (2014-2023) include most recently Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award.

‘My MFA’ was originally published in the current Lighten Up Online

Photo: “creative-writing-ideas Atlanta GA” by agilemktg1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

RHL, ‘On a Modern “Poem”’

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The thoughts are fresh, the images are good;
the style is clean, the tone both wise and terse;
the whole thing would be memorable, it would…
if only it had been expressed in verse.

*****

I’m always embarrassed if I have an idea for a poem, and I fail to find an expression of it in rhyme as well as rhythm. That’s because, of the hundreds of poems or pieces of poems in my head, all but a tiny handful are remembered because they are expressed in verse. You can remember the gist of an idea on the strength of the idea; but if you want to remember its exact expression, word for word, it’s far easier if it’s in verse. For this purpose, blank verse is better than prose; but rhymed verse is superior.

You may have lots of partial memories of Winnie the Pooh from childhood – the Hundred Acre Wood, Eeyore’s moans and groans – but actual word-for-word memory is likely to attach to the few snippets of verse in the book, such as:
Isn’t it funny
How a bear likes honey.
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
I wonder why he does?

My little gripe above was originally published in Light earlier this year.

Photo: “Al declaims” by jovike is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Julia Griffin: Translation: ‘C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting For The Barbarians’

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Why are we here in the agora, say?

We’ve got the Barbarians coming today.

Why are the senators resting their jaws?
Why don’t they legislate?  What about laws?

We’ve got the Barbarians coming today.
Nobody knows how it’s going to play;
If any legislate, it will be they.

Why is our Emperor out of his bed,
Sitting in state at the gate there instead,
Wearing a gorgeous great crown on his head?

We’ve got the Barbarians coming today.
They must be met in an elegant way:
Greeting their chieftain, the Emperor’s goal
Is to award him an exquisite scroll,
Giving him titles to make his eyes roll.

Why do our consuls and praetors appear
Dressed to the nines in their purplest gear?
Why are there amethysts all up their arms,
Emeralds everywhere, greener than palms?
What are those fabulous sceptres they hold,
Fancily fashioned in silver and gold?

We’ve got the Barbarians coming today.
This sort of thing’s their idea of cachet.

Why are our orators keeping us waiting,
Not, as per usual, loudly orating?

We’ve got the Barbarians coming today.
Oratory bores them.  They like a display.

Why does it suddenly seem such a mess?
Why the confusion, the seriousness?
Why is there emptiness now in the square?
Why the pervasively secretive air?

Not one of them came, and the day is now done.
People are saying the war has been won;
Hence there are no more Barbarians.  None.

No more Barbarians – what shall we do?
I’ve not come up with an answer yet.  
                                                         You?

*****

Julia Griffin writes: “I’ve always loved Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ and had the thought that it would go well into rhyme.  This somehow necessitated changing the ending a little…” Her translation appears in the current Lighten Up Online.

See also the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_the_Barbarians_(poem)

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia/ south-east England. She has published in Light, LUPO, Mezzo Cammin, and some other places, though Poetry and The New Yorker indicate that they would rather publish Marcus Bales than her. Much more of her poetry can be found through this link in Light.

Photo: “Barbarian looking but a real cool dude (8197985443)” by Frank Kovalchek from Anchorage, Alaska, USA is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Nonce form: Stephen Edgar, ‘In Search of Time to Come’

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There’s not much noise above the sputtering fire.
They don’t speak much.
The children are settling to a private croon,
Though the baby whimpers, palping blindly to clutch
At a breast. Farther back, picked out by a
Final index finger of the sun, someone squats.
They’ll be changing their abode quite soon,
No doubt.
The time requires a tacit finishing touch,
From women working at rough pots
And men scraping a hide to peg it out.

This mood, this life, is like a circle, turning
Always back
On itself: expectation interlocking
Ritual; impulse to novelty, for lack
Of its not yet invented learning,
Subsiding again to things that they take pleasure from.
A hum. A mother’s body rocking,
They are, you would say, at home.

Only the cave mouth, that changeable screen,
Opens a gap
In the circumference; and when the light
Is gone, they have no words by which to trap,
Or the notions by which words could mean,
What that black window’s showing for them to detect,
As they look, perplexed, into the night
And stare,
Then turn towards each other’s bodies to tap
Their comfort. Someone, they suspect,
Is out there; and they’re right. We are out there.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “I can no longer remember the specific circumstances which gave rise to this poem, but it was possibly some television documentary about ancient hominins. As Philip Larkin said in a rather different context, “Truly, though our element is time,/ We are not suited to the long perspectives/ Open at each instant of our lives.” The vertiginous gulf of time between ourselves and our earliest ancestors is a subject that has always fascinated me, and I have written other poems dealing with it; indeed, my next book opens with a poem on a similar theme. The difference with In Search of Time to Come is the notion of these ancient humans attempting to peer forward into the deep future, rather than modern humans gazing back into the deep past.

“The poem is metrical with full rhyme. The stanza form, for stanzas one and three, is one of my own devising, with varying line lengths and complex rhyme scheme. Stanza two varies the pattern, breaking off after eight lines, with a slight adjustment to the rhyme scheme. Why? I can’t remember; it was a spontaneous idea that occurred to me in the writing.

As far as I can remember, this poem had no magazine publication and first appeared in my second book Ancient Music (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1988), which is out of print. It has been republished in The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2020), which is available on the Black Pepper website.”

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Leave the door open!” by In Memoriam: VernsPics is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Stephen Edgar, ‘Dawn Solo’

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First light beside the Murray in Mildura,
Which like a drift of mist pervades
The eucalypt arcades,
A pale caesura

Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes
To usher in the dawn are heard
From a pied butcherbird,
A phrase that floats

So slowly through the silence-thickened air,
Those notes, like globules labouring
Through honey, almost cling
And linger there.

Or is it that the notes themselves prolong
The time time takes, to make it stand,
Morning both summoned and
Called back by song.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “This poem needs little comment, I think. The bird in question is the pied butcherbird, as the poem says, considered by some to have the most beautiful song of any Australian bird. Let me quote some field guides to Australian birds: “superb, slow, flute-like mellow notes”; “song is one of our finest: a varied sequence of pure fluty whistles, sometimes interspersed by throaty warbles”; “fluted, far-carrying notes that seem to reflect the loneliness of its outback haunts”. Perhaps that third quotation best suggests the quality I was trying to capture. The notes seemed to be in slow motion, slowing time. I was attending the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Mildura is on the southern bank of the Murray River in northwestern Victoria. This was the first occasion on which I had heard the pied butcherbird.

“The form is a quatrain rhyming ABBA, with lines progressively shortening from pentameter, though tetrameter, trimeter to dimeter. It was first published in Australian Book Review and then in my twelfth book The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2020), which is available on the Black Pepper website.”

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)” by aviceda is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.