poetically challenged

A tanka is a poetic form that is built on the haiku. The haiku’s 5-7-5 syllable structure forms the beginning of the tanka. A second poet then responds with a 7-7 couplet, completing the tanka.

A renga chain is a sort of ongoing tanka, where a string of poets can respond to one another. For fun, I started a blogging renga chain some months back. It has been fun watching the chain lengthen out over the months. Every now and then, someone comes along and adds another link.

Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms provides a wonderful introduction to the poetic process. He introduces traditional poetic forms, and discusses what goes into the making of a poem. The book is mostly made up, though, of a large index of traditional forms and their descriptions.

Even though I think Turco is a little too insistent on traditional forms being the only good forms of poetry, I still find his book a useful resource, and it is one that I often find myself picking up to peruse yet again. It’s been a very valuable tool for me in my writing process.

In another place, I’ve been giving thought to writing to form, and how it shapes the poetic endeavour. I have used this method quite a bit as a means to develop my own practice of poetry. Like playing games, I find writing to a specific form a good way to push oneself to think poetically, so to speak. It is part of the discipline I see needed for poetry, to hold us over on those days when inspiration seems in short supply. I wonder, even as I do this very thing, how to avoid formulaic writing when writing to form. It seems to me that this must come about through the steady practice of a form, which should grow into the manipulation of that form. Merely sticking to a form is likely to end in little more than the formulaic. But steady probing and exploration can often yield some very fun experiments. And once in a while, one might even hope to see some good poetry emerge from it all. Magazine Publishers Database