OK Ladies, Now Get In Formation: Tips on Quickly Elevating Form For Emerging Writers

Poet Ocean Vuong—author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (among others) has a quote on form that I’ve always referred back to: “Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further.”

As an editor reviewing packets of poems, form is a crucial part of how I view a body of work. A poet who uses the same form for all five of their poems is less interesting than a poet who is consistently innovating—it’s exciting to see emerging poets push themselves, explore boundaries, and simply play, even if those experiments aren’t always 100% successful. Oftentimes, I’m more likely to upvote a poem or set of poems where the author has taken some risks than a group of poems from a poet who has perfected a particular form and now can’t deviate from it.

Form can be a lot of different things. It covers a lot of ground. We have traditional forms like the sonnet or the sestina, the kind of stuff your high school English teacher hammered into you in the twelfth grade, but there’s a lot more out there—cut-ups, erasures, found text, to name a fun new modern technique or two. We get lots of prose poems like this one from Marianne Chan (My Therapist Talks About Biddle City by Marianne… | Poetry Magazine) and many poets like to play with indentations like Richard Siken (Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out by… | Poetry Foundation). The fun part is that there’s almost no limit to what’s possible. This poem by Karisma Price, for example, is just the tip of the iceberg: My Phone Autocorrects “Nigga” to “Night” by Karisma… | Poetry Magazine.

Most emerging poets haven’t gotten this far and most of the forms we get are simple columns of text. These are the poems that are in the most need of some more considerations about form. A good tip—whenever I finish the draft of the text of a poem, regardless of what form I’ve written it in, I make a copy, and change the form into a whole bunch of new versions. I change it into a prose poem, put it into tercets and couplets, or see what happens if I mess with the order of the different parts. Even if I don’t end up using what I’m experimenting with, I always end up learning a lot about the way I write and how I make connections, observations, and descriptions. It’s a helpful habit and it’s shown me unexpected results.

We also often see poems which have nontraditional spacing. This can add all kinds of emphasis to a piece of writing (see Frontier Poetry column LINE LEVEL with featured poet Joshua Garcia for example: LINE LEVEL #4 | Frontier Poetry – Exploring the Edges of Contemporary Poetry). Intentionality is the most important concern in these situations. Rather than adding a random indentation curious to see what happens, take control of your poems and even if you are experimenting, create goals for yourself. Are you trying to add emotion? Create a specific sense of rhythm? Break down a line into its component parts?

Approaching your poetry with a sense of intention, rather than a faucet which ebbs and flows, will prepare you for publication and demonstrate your dedication and interest to editors and writers alike.

Titles are the final piece of this equation. Many poets tack their titles on at the end of their poems, or don’t think about titles until they’re preparing their submissions. A title can make or break a submission. A great title can turn an okay poem into a great one, and a bad title can leave a great poem with a sour taste in your mouth. Coming up with a title which complements your poem without giving away too much about the work itself is a tricky thing, but a title should anchor your poem, rather than detracting from it.

For Palette, we like to experiment. We like to see new and unexpected things. We want you to take risks and engage with the world and language and with truth. But as writers we also have to think about our reader. How hard do you want your reader to work? Making sure that your reader is able to follow along is an important aspect of continuing to think about form. Some writers have a higher threshold than others and finding what works for you is all about negotiating that question.

Reading through some of our previously published work will help guide you as you continue on your publication journey. Finding that balance between your voice and the form it takes to amplify that voice is at the core of finding yourself as a poet—and as a human being.

Further Reading:
“A Billion Things In One,” Kristen Renee Miller (Visual Poem)
“Aubade with Burning City,” Ocean Vuong (Highly Original Form)
“Essay on Thunder,” Sumita Chakraborty (Prose Poem)

Prompt: Take one of your recent “finished” poems and create three new versions of it—without using ANY new material.