Form Blog Post.... Take 5

In Mary Oliver’s chapter addressing form, she poses many interesting thoughts about the use of form in poetry. From a novice poet’s perspective, I found this chapter to be extremely informative, while still reviewing some basic concepts; it allowed me to do more in-depth thinking about such poetry tools. The main focus of Oliver’s chapter was to give more ideas of have form can be used as vehicle for creating a masterpiece based off the traditional track of poetry (like couplets, tercets, sonnets, etc.). Personally I often have only thought of poetry in two ways: free verse and rhyming, which may be one reason I have had limited poetry writing abilities up until this point. I am often concerned about getting my ideas across and not concerned with the structure of the poem, but Oliver states that even amidst craziness within the poem and attempting to get your ideas across to the reader, a poem is still “…a gathering of words and phrases and patterns that have been considered, weighed, and selected.” What further established a better feeling about structure was her more in-depth discussion on stanzas. She describes that the use of a normal stanzas is to end a thought, just like in prose; however, the use of breaks within a piece of writing can be even more powerful. Oliver suggests that ending a stanza at the end of a sentence can strengthen natural pauses, while running a sentence through a final line of one stanza to the first line of the next can hasten the tempo of the writing. This seemed very interesting, for I often take the approach of ending a stanza to finish a thought off, but instead of doing so I could create a better feeling for my readers by ending a stanza in different areas to change the pace of my poem. “Neatness can create the power of the poet,” Oliver restates often to help us remember to not just run willy-nilly with our structure, but to use it creatively. We don’t have to always follow the traditional structure that we study in elementary poetry writing, but instead can use some form techniques here and there to create interesting and new pieces of poetry that are unlike all writing in the world.