Thoughts on Form

This morning I wrote a villanelle.

It was a very bad villanelle.

But just the process of having to stick to the form of it, the rhyme scheme, the meter (pentameter, but not entirely iambic), was so enjoyable, I can see why some poets are primarily formalists.

I like puzzles. I like the satisfaction of things clicking into place after you turn them this way and that. Not Rubik's Cube, so much. But crosswords, certainly. When I was a child, if I was really stuck on a crossword answer, I would find a word that fit the necessary spaces and went with the intersecting words even if it did not match the clue. Just for that sense of completion. No blank squares.

I also love jigsaw puzzles, and once I start, I never look at the picture. So while I seem to tolerate a certain level of cheating, or at least I did, when it came to crosswords, I don't allow myself to "cheat" with jigsaws. Probably because there is no excuse not to complete a jigsaw, but there may legitimately be a hole in one's knowledge for crosswords that only a search online or in a Dictionary will answer.

Writing formal verse is similar to solving a puzzle. But it's a puzzle that you make up as you go, in some senses. You have certain rules by which you abide, or certain rules which you knowingly break. But the content is all yours.

For me, form follows meaning, and it's easier to look at something I'm writing and say, "this wants to be a sonnet" than it is for me to say, "Right. Time to create a pantoum about silkworms." For example.

However, I feel as though the fact that I'm an auditory learner serves me well when I create formal poems. Not today's villanelle, to be sure. But in general. And I can see that some journals still welcome poems in form. So I shall persist. Besides, it's so fun.