Tag Archives: using form

Using form: Quatern: Susan McLean, ‘Cropped’

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He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
so don’t implore him not to clip or prune
the fig trees and camellias. His pursuit
of geometric form makes him immune

to luscious tastes and beauties others crave.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
so once the buds appear, don’t try to save
them from his trimmer. All your pleas are moot.

He holds a tidy yard in high repute,
a verdant symbol of his mastery.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit,
but takes some pleasure in your misery

as he destroys what you had hoped to see.
His need to have control is absolute,
and you can’t argue with machinery.
He doesn’t care for flowers or for fruit.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This poem started with my desire to write a quatern, a form that I had encountered in Chad Abushanab’s workshop on rare poetic forms at the Poetry by the Sea conference in 2024. A quatern is four quatrains long, and the first line of stanza one becomes the second line of stanza two, and so on. As for the poem’s content, it grew out of a dispute about gardening practices with someone I know well. I was unable to convince him to change his ways. I should add that his ascribed motives are all conjectural on my part, not based on anything he said. But poets don’t really lose an argument; they just take the opportunity to restate it as a poem. This poem first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Snakeskin.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: Snakeskin

Ekphrastic SF poem: Simon MacCulloch, ‘Rocket Ride’

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A dinosaur straddles a rocket
And whether the pilot within
Was trying to launch it or dock it
To finish a trip or begin,
It looks like a fight that the dinosaur might
By weight and ferocity win.

But how did it mount there? Its wings
Though bat-like are really too small
To soar to the perch where it clings
Indeed, to get airborne at all
It better hold tight as the rocket takes flight
For if it slips off it will fall.

The monster can only have boarded
The spaceship when close to the ground
(Its huge-muscled hind legs afforded
The strength for a crouch and a bound)
And as it gains height in the star-speckled night
It will squat, legs and tail firmly wound.

A rodeo cowboy! Each buck
Of boosters a challenge to greet!
A contest of power, skill, luck
To see if a lizard can beat
This beast that takes fright at the terrible sight
Of a dragon that thinks it’s in heat.

For that is the heart of the matter:
This brute who bears down from above
Will scrabble and buffet and batter
Then, spent, wrap as close as a glove
With licks to invite its cold mate to requite
Its misallied dinosaur love.

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “Rocket Ride was inspired by Peter Andrew Jones’s book cover painting for The Second Experiment (Granada Books, 1975); the poem was first published in Aphelion.”

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.

Image © Peter Andrew Jones 1975


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.

Using form: John Gallas, ‘travellin feet: a Camaguey sonnet”

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Im walkin in my feet to Camaguey.
The sun comes up. Im cracklin like a chicken …
Takin time …
. Now somethins comin, kickin
clouds of yeller grit behind me – Hey!
Stop! … It dont. Who cares? It whirls away.
I seen inside the flyin cotton curtain –
Business sat with Care …
. My toes are hurtin …
Whoa, I got to walk another day.
How quick they drive to worry … What I got
the other end improves with evry ache,
an every dusty extra hour I take.
Im good n weary. An Im good n hot.

Whyever hurry? … Happiness will keep …
an sorrow passes – Sleep my baby, sleep.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The Coalville Divan – 100 sonnets – included this one. The 100 are based on Old Persian Proverbs (an ancient 1920 book I found in a junk shop). A heady experience, like being addicted to Rum or something, to enter a period of writing highly formal, all-the-same-form poems. I loved it, and it built on itself as I went along, but I needed something different after the 200 tankas of ‘Billy Nibs’ (Carcanet 2024) and had withdrawal symptoms (wanting to make the tankas rhyme!).
“The proverb for this one was ‘To walk and sit is better than to run and burst’. I set it in Cuba because I’d just been there for a month. I had 2 rhyming dictionaries, 2 thesauruses, atlases, and Wikipedia while I worked on these, each one set in a different country. The challenge, I guess, is to sound accomplished/natural whilst obeying all the rhyme/metrical rules very exactly.”

John Edward Gallas FEA was born in Wellington in New Zealand and is of Austrian descent. He attended the University of Otago in his native New Zealand, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford to study Medieval English Literature and Old Icelandic and has since lived and worked in York, Liverpool and various other locations in England as a bottlewasher, archaeologist and teacher.

John Gallas’ works are listed at https://www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk/

Photo: “Tired Man Walking” by RobertoCobianchi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 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.

Aaron Poochigian, intro to ‘Mr. Either/Or’

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Washington Square, playground of NYU,
and you are in the grass, your shoes and socks
like sloughed snakeskin around you. Speed-chess players
at concrete tables cuss and slap their clocks
as cops with nothing nine-one-one to do
roust dormant derelicts from greenhouse layers
of coats and trash. Nearby, a Gingko tree,
and under it a blonde in horn-rimmed glasses
eating up The Stranger by Camus.

You almost feel at home in this milieu;
for five years now you have been skipping classes,
tipping beers and averaging a ‘C’
to mask your hazardous identity,
the wicked one, known only to a few
code-numbered codgers in the F.B.I.
Somewhere at Quantico a dossier
redacts your selfless service as a fly
collecting wide-eyed snapshots for Defense,
a freak inferno burning evidence,
a ricin prick, a ‘beddy-bye’ bouquet,
and all too often the unlucky guy
sent in the long last seconds of suspense
to snip the ticker and defuse a war.

Who knows? Someday it might be nice to play
one person, but for now you live as two:
student and agent, Mr. Either/Or.

*****

Aaron Poochigian writes: “I think of the ‘Mr. Either/Or’ books as entertainments, airport novels to be devoured like genre fiction. I mixed together Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, and the adventures of Mr. Either/Or are what came out. I only hope that they are fun.

“The section published here introduces you to the main character, Zach Berzinski, an FBI agent undercover as an NYU student. This chapter is especially dear to my heart because it describes Washington Square Park with its cast of buskers and undergrads. It’s one of my favorite hang-outs. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp and other Bohemian artists declared the park ‘The free and independent Republic of Bohemia’, a sovereign polity outside of the USA.” 

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and Poetry.
aaronpoochigian.com
americandivine.net

Using form: sonnet variation: Amit Majmudar, ‘List of Demands’

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All the twists in all the tongues, all
the zeroes, all the ones, all the arms of all the goddesses, all
the names of the nameless and bodiless, all the ways the all-
one embodies, all at once, the alls there are, all
our alleles and alphabets, all the forms, yes all,
even the sestina, all our alternating lives and deaths, all
the kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, all
the peoples borderless as breaths, all the altars, all the all,

none of the zealots with knives for minds, none
of the wars, proxy, holy, shadow, cold, none
of the for-profit prophets in pulpits of gold, none
of the land grabs in the names of the long lost, none
of the one true anything, book or way or son, none
of that nonsense, absolutely none.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “The monorhymed sonnet (each line of the octet ending with the same word, each line of the sestet ending with another) is a chance to goad one’s creativity with a constraint just light enough. You have to come up with lines that stay interesting to the reader even though the reader knows how each line is going to end. In that, the line resembles, say, a formulaic genre novel where the hero gets the girl and defeats the villain at the end. Or one of Conan Doyle’s detective stories: You know that Holmes is going to solve the mystery. The number of characters is so low in a Holmes short story that the culprit has to be one of the few people introduced. But the delight is all in how he figures it out. Poems can work like that, too. The foregone conclusion of all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, none, none, none, none, none, none is the equivalent of the certainty that Holmes will crack the case. The internal rhymes and alliteration, the images, the poem’s message exalting pluralism over zealotry—these are, collectively, the equivalent of the mystery and the ingenious solution to the mystery, the Sherlock-unlock, the puzzle (hopefully) satisfyingly worked out.”

‘List of Demands’ was first published in Plume.

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). A new poetry collection, Things My Grandmother Said, is forthcoming in 2026. 
More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Photo: “Inclusive community (citation needed) (2205859730)” by Matt Mechtley from Heidelberg, Deutschland is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Using form: RHL, ‘(on the value of learning languages when) Roughing It In Europe’

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One two three four
Is OK, but you need more:

Un deux trois quat’
If you want a welcome mat

En to tre fire
With the krone getting dearer,

Bir iki uç dirt
Selling off your jeans or shirt

Wahid zoozh teleta arba
In a cafe by the harbour

Üks kaks kolm neli
For some food to fill your belly;

Jeden dwa trzy cztery
Language may be shaky, very,

Uno dos tres cuatro
But they’ll love you if you’re up to

Eins zwei drei vier
Trying freely, laughing freer.

*****

This is one of my youthful hitchhiking days poems… It has just been republished in Firewords Campfire, but was originally in Unsplendid (and then in Better Than Starbucks, and Orchards Poetry Journal).

Firewords paired it with a short story, and commented they were “very different adventures, both centred on the art of connection: one through clumsy but charming attempts to bridge language gaps abroad, the other via a game that becomes a quiet battleground for attention, memory, and something close to intimacy. In both, every word counts.” It is always interesting to hear other people’s takes.

Artwork by Jay Carter, an illustrator from Lancashire who enjoys creating bold, colourful images, often finding inspiration in books, films, history, nature and travel. jaycarterillustrator.com