Category Archives: using form

Using form: Susan Jarvis Bryant, ‘Sorceress’

She is polished and pernicious
Her demeanor is delicious
She will soften the suspicious
     With her smile

She’ll abash you then disarm you
She’ll harass and she’ll alarm you
Then she’ll nonchalantly charm you
     That’s her style

She’ll reject and then she’ll choose you
She’ll respect and then she’ll use you
She’ll protect and then she’ll bruise you
     In a flash

She’ll dismiss you then possess you
She will curse you then she’ll bless you
She’ll distress and then impress you
     With panache

She’ll accuse and then assuage you
She’ll abuse and she’ll upstage you
She’ll amuse and she’ll enrage you
      Every day

She’ll assist you then she’ll spurn you
She’ll enlist you then she’ll burn you
She will twist and she will turn you
     Every way

She will praise and then berate you
She will raise and then deflate you
She’ll amaze and still frustrate you
     You can’t win

She’s capricious and malicious
She is smoothly surreptitious
She conceals a core that’s vicious
     With a grin

*****

Susan Jarvis Bryant writes: “This is one of those poems that simply wrote itself. It’s a nonce form that appeared in my head as a song without lyrics. The lyrics came easily. I love the way words fit together to create music – a melodious flow that lifts images to a greater height. Passion always assists me in the creative process, and this poem is written about someone in particular… someone that irked me greatly… someone I will never mention. I’ll just nod and smile a satisfied smile when reading the poem. Poetry composition can be immensely cathartic.”

‘Sorceress’ was originally published in Snakeskin.

Susan Jarvis Bryant is originally from the U.K. and now lives on the coastal plains of Texas. Susan has poetry published on The Society of Classical Poets, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, Light, Sparks of Calliope, and Expansive Poetry Online, The Road Not Taken, and New English Review. She also has poetry published in The Lyric, Trinacria, and Beth Houston’s Extreme Formal Poems and Extreme Sonnets II anthologies. Susan is the winner of the 2020 International SCP Poetry Competition and was nominated for the 2022 and 2024 Pushcart Prize. She has published two books – Elephants Unleashed and Fern Feathered Edges.

Photo: “Day 47-Split Personality” by Bazule is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Using form: Parody with a message: Marcus Bales, ‘The Easy Way Taken’

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Two friends diverged in a yelling mood
And sorry I could not keep them both
And still maintain one attitude,
I scrolled down through one’s page, and viewed
Some green and gold of writing growth.

Then saw the other was just as good,
With maybe even a better claim
Because so well misunderstood
Within the writing neighborhood,
Though as for that they’re much the same.

And each that morning equally laid
The blame upon the other’s back.
I had no way to tell who’d made
The first or worst move; I’m afraid
I have no feel for clique or claque.

Online I have too many friends
To keep good track, so, nothing loath
To making enemies or ends
Where there are no real dividends,
I shook my head – and blocked them both.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Most of the fraught relationships online are due to people not being able to write very well on one end, or read very well on the other. Stuff that in in-person conversation would go completely unnoticed is taken up as deliberate slighting. Mostly its merely awkward phrasing, or one interlocutor is already two comments past when the reply to the third interaction scrolls by and it’s misinterpreted as an instant response to the most recent reply when it was really intended to answer something two or three comments back.

“Now in the case of political disagreements where the polarized sides are already firmly established and one side or the other or both are determined to fight that’s a whole other thing. There it’s got nothing to do with how well or ill something is read or written and everything to do with the sport of online woofing.

“It’s one of those things where over the years people block and get blocked and complain to their friends about either end of it and then it all goes away pretty fast as the opportunity to be triggered — again at either end — fades with the blocking.”

(The original poem on which this parody is based, for those not familiar with it, is Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken‘. – RHL)

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Yotsuba & Tech Support” by Liberty Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Rondeau: J.D. Smith, ‘Sans Issue’

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What ends with me? A set of genes,
The notion that my slender means
Might turn into a son’s estate,
The hope that, at some distant date,
Beside my grave, my line convenes

To recollect my days’ routines,
My counsels, and the vanished scenes
Whose witnesses would recreate
What ends with me:

The consciousness that struts and preens
In holding that its passing means
An altering of our species’ fate,
My thought possessed of untold weight.
Yet, on that thought, the question leans–
What ends with me?

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “After reaching a certain age and making certain commitments, I found myself coming to grips with never being a parent. As in other instances of following form, the repetitions of the rondeau gave me a way to enclose and develop my response to the situation.”

J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals.
X: @Smitroverse

Photo: “Creating a meaningful and fulfilling life without children #sketchnotes #gatewaywomen #jodyday” by etcher67 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Shakespearean sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Foreshadowing’

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You’re a holiday.
—”Holiday,” The Bee Gees

One month from when you met me, when you brought
the first of many gifts, a 45
of plaintive praise and longing, who’d have thought
that forty-five years later we’d survive
on weekends, holidays, and summer breaks,
a foretaste of the end in every start,
anticipation ballasted with aches
as we put love on hold and live apart?

You are a holiday. The working week
unspools like toilet paper from a roll.
My attitude goes airborne when we speak,
and when we meet, my heart swoops like a shoal
of fish. Would we have lost this giddy glow,
living together? Better not to know.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “It makes me feel ancient to realize that for younger readers I will have to explain that a 45 was a record with one song on each side, which played on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute. Love poems themselves tend to feel old-fashioned these days, though this one is about a relatively modern problem, the long-term, long-distance relationship in which both people are employed full time at jobs far apart from one another. The form, a Shakespearean sonnet, mirrors the content, in that the rhymes are separated from one another until the end, when they are reunited. The poem was originally published in the online journal of female formalist poets Mezzo Cammin, and it later appeared in my second book of poetry, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

Photo: “File:45 record.png” by laurianne is marked with CC0 1.0.

Sonnet variation: J.D. Smith, ‘Lullaby for the Bereaved’

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Your hours of tears won’t let you follow
Those who’ve left you alone.
Tonight your head lies on a pillow,
Not beneath earth and stone.

The dead won’t be returning,
Not for all of your pleas,
Not for all your candles burning.
Get up off your knees.

The deceased, removed from their rest
Can take up all your hours
Until your mind, denied a fair rest,
Is deprived of its powers.

The road set before you is rocky and steep,
So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”

Photo: “Grief” by That One Chick Mary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: William Trowbridge, ‘Song of the Black Hole’

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radially extracted by NASA

You can almost see Vincent Price, black-robed,
hunched above the console of a jumbo organ
in the bowels of his creaky haunted manse; or
maybe a stadium of damned souls, strobed
in lurid red and howling nettle-robed
as they plummet into Pandemonium, pore
and pith aflame. It’s no troubadour,
undoubtedly, this vast atonal gob.

As with the Roach Motel, we’d check in,
but never out—us or anything, since
it can swallow errant planets whole, and still,
however much the mass, can’t eat its fill.
Though it’s larger far than Jupiter or Mars,
we can barely see it, thank our lucky stars.

*****

William Trowbridge writes in Rattle, where this poem was published: “I’ve spent most of my years as a poet writing free verse, though lately I find myself turning toward form. Unlike those who see formalist verse as dry and effete, I find it can generate power by means of barriers to play against—‘the net’ as Frost put it, by which he also meant boundary lines. If you pour gunpowder in a pile and light it, a mere flash occurs. But pack it tightly into a container, and you can get something more powerful. And, as opposed to the notion that form is restrictive, I agree with Richard Wilbur that it often liberates one from choosing the easy word in order to discover the better, surprising one. I haven’t moved into this part of town yet, but I stop there more and more.”

William Trowbridge’s tenth poetry collection, Father and Son, was published by Wayne
State College Press Press in April. His poems have appeared in more than 45
anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac, AnAmerican Life in
Poetry, and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review,
The Southern Review, Plume, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and
New Letters. He is a mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA
in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more
information, see his website, williamtrowbridge.net.

YouTube: Data Sonification: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray), NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Stephen Kampa, ‘Someone Else’s Gift’

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Always to long for someone else’s gift—
To blow that blistering alto sax, to lift
Into the flash-bulbed air

For a reverse slam dunk while stunned guards gawk,
To have a punster’s cheek or porn star’s cock,
To capture, share by share,

Gold-plated Wall Street fame, to meditate
Beyond nirvanic depths or radiate
Beatitudes of prayer

Like any frescoed saint, even to make
A perfect triple-decker dark-fudge cake
Or master the éclair—

Means answering a roguish shout we follow
Down some smashed-bottle alley to a hollow
Recess, a doorway, where

If luck has tailed us on that lonely walk,
When we knock, because we have to knock,
No one will be there.

*****

‘Someone Else’s Gift’ was first published in Literary Matters, and then in Best American Poetry 2024. As I was unable to capture the original indentation, I have taken the liberty of introducing line spaces as an alternative way of clarifying the structure; it will sound the same when read aloud… – RHL

Stephen Kampa has three books of poems: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press, 2014), Articulate as Rain (Waywiser Press, 2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (Able Muse Press, 2023). He teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL and works as a musician.

Photos: “Dreams” by яғ ★ design is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
“Dark Alley #2 [Explored]” by _Franck Michel_ is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Weekend read: Maryann Corbett, ‘A Valediction: of Maintenance Work’

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Time was, we spent our muscle and our nous
propping an aging house
against the pummeling of its hundred years.
Clean paint, neat gardens, upkeep rarely in arrears,
sober as Donne. Yet now each year afresh
burdens us with new failings of the flesh:

Legs that once mounted ladders without qualm
tremble. Nor are we calm
confronting pipework; torsos will not shrink,
backs bend, or shoulders fold to grope below a sink.
Hands shake; eyeballs glaze over. What appalls
is that our bodies buckle like our walls:

plaque in arteries, soot in chimney stacks,
stubborn and troublous cracks
in teeth, in plaster. House! Ought we to call
ourselves—and you—new poster children for the Fall,
for that hard doctrine grumbling down the ages
that Sin’s to blame, with Death and Rot its wages?

Entropy as theology—would Donne
jape at it? Wink and pun
as in his randy youth? Or solemnly
robed in his winding sheet, sing Mutability,
spinning into the praise of God in Art
the fact that all things earthly fall apart?

Or pull from air some bit of modern science,
yoking (even by violence)
thermodynamics, shortened telomeres,
transplants, genetics, sex, the music of the spheres?
Strange physics and wild metaphors—all grand,
but Rot and Death, plain woes we understand,

are better fought with checkbooks than with verse.
We’ll sit, these days. We’ll nurse
our beers, while able bodies stir their dust.
A distant siren whines—we sigh; it whines for us.
Let plumbers, painters, carpenters begin
this season’s round of battling Death and Sin.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Last summer, Clarence Caddell was just beginning work on a new magazine, The Borough, and was planning a second issue while the first came together. He had in mind an issue centered on Donne, and he commissioned me to contribute a poem. I’d read the wonderful biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell not many months before, so a lot of the life was fresh in my mind–but it was also the season of endless repair that is the eternal truth of owning a house that’s 113 years old. It wasn’t hard to pull together a poem about the woes of home ownership with tidbits that “everyone knows” about Donne–his worldly-to-holy conversion, the familiar line about his yoked-by-violence metaphors–under an allusive title, and in a stanza form a bit like one of his. (Alas, this blog can’t show you the indents that would best imitate Donne’s way of laying out a poem. You’ll have to imagine all the trimeter second lines indented and the hexameter fourth lines hanging out farther left.) In the end, Clarence had to use the poem to fill out his first issue, so it sat alone, unassisted by an issue theme.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Photo: “House Repairs” by JessNityaJess is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Terza Rima: Louise Walker, ‘The Swing’

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I hold you on my lap; I think you’re dead.
Next to us hangs a rusty, creaking swing.
I look down as my white dress blooms with red.

Such fun to pull the seat right back, then fling
it free. You’re two, I’m four, so I’m to blame;
now I’m screaming bloody murder to bring

someone to the garden to witness my shame
where swaying grimly like a tolling bell
the swing is the proof of the deadly game.

It’s a story my mother liked to tell
while tracing the faint white mark on your brow:
how she found me soothing you after you fell.

The truth is, I can’t remember why or how
I hurled that dead weight directly at you.
Did she wonder at all, as I do now

if I pushed it so hard because I knew
the swing’s unpredictable to and fro
showed love and jealousy can both be true?

You never reproached me, but even so
I still bear the scar of that reckless throw.

*****

Louise Walker writes: “The Swing was my second effort at writing a poem in terza rima; my first was a complete disaster, written in response to an assignment set by Cahal Dallat during a course I did with Coffee-House Poetry earlier this year. That novice attempt followed the rules of the form perfectly, with 3-line stanzas rhyming aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf gg. However, my poem was pompous, stilted and vacuous. It also took me an entire day. The next morning, a memory from early childhood came to me and I thought I would try terza rima one more time. To my surprise (and joy!) the poem called ‘The Swing’ came very quickly, was a pleasure to write and didn’t require my usual endless revisions and tweakings. What’s more, I found that the terza rima form became a little engine for generating my poem – for example, searching for a rhyme for ‘you’ threw up the word ‘fro’ which made think of the swing as a metaphor for the oscillating feelings of a child when a younger sibling arrives. I also found that the chain-like effect of the form, swinging back for rhymes, and then forward, suited the subject matter perfectly. Deep in my subconscious, the terza rima form had been working its magic overnight!

I was not at all delighted to get the terza rima assignment at first, but I learnt such a valuable lesson: sometimes one has to write a really bad poem to be able to write a decent one. ‘The Swing’ became an important poem in my recent debut collection ‘From Here to There’ published by Dithering Chaps, which has at its core my journey from childhood, through the death of my brother in our twenties, then onwards.”

Louise Walker was born in Southport and now lives in London. After reading English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she was a member of the Florio Society, she taught English for 35 years at girls’ schools. Her work has been published in journals such as Acumen, Oxford Poetry, South, Prole and Pennine Platform. Highly Commended in the Frosted Fire Firsts Award and longlisted in in The Alchemy Spoon Pamphlet Competition, in 2023 she was shortlisted in the Bedford Competition and won 3^rd prize in the Ironbridge Poetry Competition. Commissions include Bampton Classical Opera and Gill Wing Jewellery for their showcase ‘Poetry in Ocean’. She has recently published her debut collection with Dithering Chaps:
https://www.ditheringchaps.com/from-there-to-here
Instagram @louise_walker_poetry

Photo: “The Garden Swing” by theirhistory is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Spenserian sonnet: Charles Martin, ‘On the Problem of Bears’

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Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech,
Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs,
And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach
And almost never get Distinguished Chairs
Unless they come across one unawares
Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred.
Some of them have been known to have affairs
With a man or woman lured into their bed—
This often ends up badly with one dead,
The other executed for the crime,
Or given a life sentence in a zoo.
Bears are familiar with existential dread,
Bears put their pants on one leg at a time:
The problems bears have are your problems too.

*****

Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended.

“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”

Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.

Photo: from the Bantam/Seal cover of Marian Engle’s novel ‘Bear’, referenced in https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-the-classic-canadian-novel-bear-remains-controversial-and-relevant-1.5865107

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