Liberty through Contraints

Pleasures of poetic forms

“The wall is poetry. Life is on the other side. The wall is what separates the poet from life, but it is also the means by which life is apprehended and understood.” —Christian Wiman

Knowing I’ll be travelling for the first two weeks of class in January, I’ve been getting a jump on my reading. As I read, I’m looking out for illustratable concepts so I can continue my experiments with the fusion of text and image.

Christian Wiman’s essay An Idea of Order explores the question of whether or not poetic forms have much relevance for contemporary writers. (Note - the essay was published in 1999, so it’s more or less contemporary in a turn of the century kind of way). In his essay he writes,

The wall is poetry. Life is on the other side. The wall is what separates the poet from life, but it is also the means by which life is apprehended and understood.

Beyond the fact I liked the quote and at first couldn’t imagine quite how to come up with some kind of visual representation of the idea, I like the essay in general. I LOVE poetic forms - the way they force some kind of discipline on the generally chaotic non-shape of my thoughts.

So much so, in fact, I wrote (with co-author Carol Thornton) a whole book about the delights of poetic forms.

There are lots of options for poets to explore - Rispettos, Tankas and Triolets all make an appearance as well as Monostitches, Clogyrnachs, Sonnets and more.

But why stop there? There aren’t a lot of poetic forms that begin with the letter ‘Q’, so for fun, I invented one.

If you’d like to try one yourself, here are the rules (and an example):

If you decide to write a Quatorcché - please share! I’d love to see what you come up with. If Quatorchés don’t ignite your inner poet, do you have a favourite form? Or do you believe that traditional forms have no relevance for poets today? Let me know in the comments or write a long response and share the link!