complete assignment by tomorrow; i need 2 poems written

CHAPTER TEN FORMS

You’re familiar with the four traditional genres used by writers in contemporary Western literature: poetry, drama, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This chapter seeks to extend and deepen your practice in the genres and also to invite experiment and invention as you define yourself as a writer. This chapter presents fourteen different forms, many of which can be deployed in more than one genre.

Specific subcategories in a genre are called forms. For example, a writer working in the genre of poetry may choose to create poems in the sonnet form or free verse form. A playwright may use various forms, including two-parters, ten-minute plays, or one-act plays, a common short form of play. Other writers push the boundaries of genre and work in between the traditional categories, writing in forms such as prose poems, spoken word, monologues in verse (rap is one example), or stories so short that on the page they’re indistinguishable from poetry. Other forms of creative writing refuse to fit neatly into the four main genres: comics, graphic novels, vouvelles, and text-and-image experiments, to name a few. Practicing various forms across the genres—traditional and nontraditional—expands your skill and your vision as a writer. It’s often been said that there’s nothing new to say, only new ways to say it.

Twitter is the perfect form for poetry. — AI WEIWEI

Some new writers come into creative writing with very fixed ideas about the genres they love most: I am a poet, or I was born to craft plays. Some students dread certain forms, perhaps the sonnet or the essay, because of a negative experience earlier in their education, or just a lack of familiarity with the breadth and range possible. However, crosstraining in the genres is extrarodinarily helpful for writers’ growth, development, and success, just as it is crucial for athletes to challenge themselves with various types of physical activity, helping them build endurance, strength, and flexibility. Football players study ballet. A fiction writer improves her ear when creating a scene for a screenplay. Poets learn necessary aspects of narrative structure by writing short stories. Creative nonfiction writers must practice the basics of scene and characterization in order to create vivid, compelling, character-rich essays; so for them, immersion in the craft of fiction is essential. And many writers quickly discover they are capable of much more than what lies within the bounds of an early genre choice. We often outgrow our early tastes as we read more widely and write more boldly; thus practicing in each genre is a requirement for creative writing students. Many would argue, though not all would agree, that pushing against genre constraints and placing a high value on experiments, mash-ups, creative collaborations, and genre-bending exercises is not only useful for a writer’s growth; it’s also rewarding and fun.

When you are first learning how to improve your craft as a creative writer, it’s helpful to practice strategies for writing clearly, writing with energy and tension, enhancing the use of pattern, and increasing depth, putting the techniques first and postponing genre decisions. By the end of your course, you want to be able to create effective, fresh, cohesive work in any genre you choose.

You may try these genre-based projects throughout the course, choosing, say, one a week, in order to apply the techniques you are learning in Part Two, Strategies, as you progress. Or, at the end of the course, once you have practiced a wide range of creative writing activities, you might create a portfolio of pieces, choosing from the genre-specific projects in order to practice and demonstrate every strategy you’ve learned so far.

WRITING IN THE GENRES

Table of Forms

	Poetry	Fiction	Drama	Nonfiction
Abecedarius	X	X		X
Anaphora	X	X	X	X
Braid	X	X	X	X
Graphic		X		X
Flash		X		X
Ghazal	X
Journey	X	X	X	X
List	X	X		X
Monologue	X	X	X	X
Play/Screenplay	X		X
Pantoum	X
Sestina	X
Sonnet	X
Villanelle	X

Experiment

It’s best to try each form at least twice. The first time you try a new form, attempt to conform to the guidelines carefully. The second time you try a new form, it’s healthy to intentionally break the rules (once you know exactly how they work). Your reader will consider it poor “form” if you make a hash of the guidelines, breaking the rules willy-nilly. But artfully experimenting with form in order to create a fresh new form keeps creative writing creative. As you work, it’s okay to make mistakes. Experiment. Start over. Make a mess. Play.

Passion, beauty, intensity—everything I care about in art—is made possible through the discipline of distance. Or, to say it another way: Powerful feeling in art takes place only through the particular kind of distance known as form. — STEVEN MILLHAUSER

Interestingly, a recent study on perfectionism tested two groups of college students in their ability to read and then summarize a paragraph in a timed trial. The first group was made up of self-proclaimed perfectionists—hard-driving overachievers. The second group self-identified as “take it easy, like to have a good time” students. Professors who didn’t know the groups’ identities read the results of both groups. The self-proclaimed perfectionists performed significantly worse than their counterparts! They had trouble getting started. They kept starting over. They freaked out and often couldn’t grasp the main point of the paragraph. The more easygoing students actually understood the deeper meaning of the reading and quickly wrote clear summaries.

When it comes to forms, not trying too hard actually turns out to be a good thing.

Finished Forms

The forms that follow are sequenced alphabetically. You might want to try each form, or perhaps you will focus on three or four genres: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drama. Not only does each form require you to use all the strategies from the course—Images, Energy, Tension, Pattern, and Insight—but the forms, because they are complex shapes requiring several writing sessions and an ability to layer techniques, work well for revision practice, too. These more sophisticated projects ask you to read, then learn a form, and then work in steps as you build the form.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure. — NATALIE GOLDBERG

The forms are presented here like blueprints or recipes. Good cooks know that the secret to a great dish is high-quality ingredients. If you start with wonderful images and sparky words for spice, you will have a great stock to work from. Stir in tension and mix with energy; most of these forms generate pattern organically. Above all, have fun, taste as you go, and if it doesn’t come out right, no worries! Just toss it and start again (that’s what great chefs do). In art, as in cooking or love, we call failure learning.

A Note on Poetry

Many students, at first, find poetry to be the most challenging genre. Then, after learning and practicing a few times, they often produce such compelling work in the more demanding forms of verse that they change their minds, opening up to poems in a new way or even converting from another genre over to poetry. One student writer, Lakin Smith, said this about poetic form: “I’m not going to lie. At first I hated the sonnet. I hated the pantoum. I really hated villanelles. And then, at the end of the class, when I looked back over my work, those are my best pieces. I don’t write that way—I’m not that confined all the time now—but what I learned about being compressed and imagery changed the way I write forever.” Other students have observed that poems often come out more successfully because the forms require more time and effort. The forms are sometimes harder, but because they require concentration and effort, many students find that once they “crack the code,” poetry is a rewarding genre.

ABECEDARIUS

An abecedarius is a piece of writing that is organized using the letters of the alphabet. For example, in a short story, the first sentence starts with the word “A” or a word beginning with “a,” the first word of the second sentence begins with the letter “b,” the first word of the third sentence begins with “c,” and so on for twenty-six sentences; the first word of the final sentence begins with “z.” In a poem, the first letter of each line is “a,” “b,” “c,” “d,” “e,” and so on, and the poem is twenty-six lines long. The lines may be of any length, but poets often keep the lines about the same length.

Throughout history, people have used the alphabet to send coded messages and to communicate profound secrets, as well as to write trivial, superficial, goofy poems. The 119th Psalm is an abecedarius in Hebrew; Geoffrey Chaucer, Ezra Pound, and many other writers throughout the ages have used the form to great effect. The abecedarius can be silly or simplistic, but it can also be quite complex, beautiful, and intricate, with long lines or even paragraphs or chapters using the letters of the alphabet in sequence.

One tip: Avoid using words that correspond to the letters from your very first abecedarian book: “A is for Apple, B is for Boy.” The hardest words are those starting with the letters “q,” “x,” and “z.” What are the most predictable choices? Queen, xylophone, and zebra.Avoid. Those. Words. If your reader can predict your word, your choice probably isn’t fresh enough; predictable choices can bore readers. And a successful abecedarius doesn’t strain: If you don’t use the word zuegmas in your daily life, then you probably won’t be able to create a smooth, thoughtful abecedarius. The alphabetical words should blend in with the rest of the poem so the reader doesn’t even notice the abecedarian form. Another helpful tip: Consider what’s known as the “fifth exit on the highway” principle. Instead of going with your first choice, getting off at the first exit you see, try to stay on the highway of creative thinking until the fifth exit. If you go with your fifth choice, you can avoid what everyone else chooses, and your work will stand out as original. For example, for the letter “x,” what are the first four words that come to mind? Xylophone, X-ray, X-mas … Now you’re drawing a blank. No problem. It’s legal to search online, using a word-finding tool. But it’s just as helpful to keep working, from your own life, to get words that you actually use. Xanthum gum. On my desk right now is a snack wrapper with that word on it: xanthum. I see that word every day. So I look it up, and my abece-darius is about to have a topic: food allergies. But before I start writing, I make lists of words that start with the remaining tricky letters. And I want lists of five to ten words so that I have some freedom to make different choices, depending on how my poem is unfurling.

Ex-boyfriend. Does ex count as the letter “x”? It sounds as though it starts with an “x.” Because the sound of words is as important as how they look on the page, I’m going to use ex-boyfriend and give expat, ex-in-laws, exegesis, and examination a whirl, too. Those later choices—not the first things that come to mind, but the fourth and fifth words you come up with—are the “exits” you want to take for this form, and for all forms.

Reading Abecedarii

Read Jessica Greenbaum’s “A Poem for S.” ( p. 335 ). Now read the poem aloud, and again. It’s a complex and richly textured poem. Did you notice the abecedarius form when you first read the poem? In a good abecedarius, the reader will be so caught up in the images and insights and pattern and sound work that she will not notice your form. Observe how the use of enjambment—ending lines in a poem mid-sentence, rather than ending lines with periods, at the end of a sentence—adds to the form: When we listen, when we read, we don’t notice the letter scheme as much because of the enjambment.

In this abecedarius, the title begins with the letter “a.” The poem is a kind of letter to the speaker’s friend, S., whose wife is sick. And letters—and the words made from letters—are important in the poem’s subject matter as well. Green-baum takes a story, a religious story, that has to do with how God and letters and wisdom and beginnings and endings all interrelate. It’s powerful, heady stuff. As you read the poem, try to simplify each line so that you can trace out the main action in the poem.

What letter is missing? Can you guess why? Some readers have posited that having to ask the “why” question is part of the power of the poem. That’s what “S.” is asking: “Where is the why in all this pain?” It seems like a solid theory and provides an interesting way into the subtext of the poem. But when Jessica Greenbaum was asked recently why the poem didn’t have a line beginning with “y,” she said, somewhat apologetically, “That was a mistake. I didn’t actually even notice until after it was published.”

In a successful abecedarius, the pattern won’t be prominent—the goal is to have the reader not notice, right off, the actual rules of the form. Greenbaum’s poem has so much energy and such strong imagery that the framework disappears into the background, as it should. Thus, the recipe serves the writer, helping her come up with images she wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. That’s the goal of this recipe, and every single recipe in this chapter: to push you out of familiar ways of thinking, to shake up your typical moves. The goal is surprise—surprise for you, the author, and surprise for the reader.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. — PAUL EHRLICH

“Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” is the title of an abecedarius by poet Natalie Diaz that is easily found online. What do you notice about the title of this poem? Every letter of the alphabet is used in the title. In her title, Jessica Greenbaum writes a letter to her friend and uses his initial to cue that “this poem is about letters.” The abecedarius is a form that allows you to play with language and letters in all their glory. It embraces puns, double meanings, hidden messages, acrostics, codes, and wordplay.

Lastly, the abecedarius is related to the acrostic, in which the first letters of the lines spell a word. In a double acrostic, the final letters of each line or sentence also render the alphabet (forward or backward) or spell a word that has special meaning once you’ve read the piece.

Creative writers can use the alphabet not only to generate and shape poems, but also to generate and organize prose pieces.

PRACTICE

Read Dinty W. Moore’s memoir “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged” ( p. 305 ). How does the alphabet help him structure his story of fatherhood? Why do you think Moore used the alphabet to structure a piece on parenting? If he hadn’t used the alphabet and instead wrote the essay in randomly arranged paragraphs, how would your reading of the essay change?

Many writers find that using an artificial shape, such as the alphabet, prompts them to come up with images and insights they would not have otherwise been able to write. Go back through Greenbaum’s poem and Moore’s essay, and see if you can locate any examples of surprising images that surely were inspired by the use of the alphabet and may not have been possible without the abecedarius form.

In addition to the Natalie Diaz abecedarius mentioned above, you might also enjoy Edward Lear’s “Alphabet” and Edgar Allan Poe’s fascinating “A Valentine to _______ __________,” an acrostic that uses the first letter of his beloved’s name as the first letter of the first line, the second letter of her name as the second letter of the second line, and so on, so that her name is spelled out on the diagonal from the top left to the bottom right of the poem. Another type of alphabet poem makes every word in the line begin with the same letter (“Andrea ate aardvark and”) and progresses through the alphabet line by line.