1. FORM AS SANCTUARY, AS SHAPELY REPETITION
If poetry is, at least in part, a quest for form, then form is a poem’s architecture. The words of a poem may be its raw materials—the wood, the stone, the glass—but form is the magic that makes it possible to enter inside those word shelters, to find a place to abide. A refuge. Form is sanctuary, interiority, the house of magic. It is event meeting eternity.
And what is form but a shapely set of repetitions—whether the repetitions are of sounds at the end of lines (rhyme), or of a regular stress or beat (meter), or of whole or parts of lines (as in a pantoum, villanelle, ghazal). Is not music about pleasing and surprising repetition of sound? Poetry is a form of music,…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, January/February 2024