A couple weeks ago I attended a poetry workshop at Split This Rock – if anyone is looking for a great, free poetry workshop look no further, this is by far the best in the area. Every time I attend I walk out with a new poem or two and always with a heightened sense of creativity. In the workshop I recently attended the leader of the workshop, Joseph, talked about forms of poetry and how intimidating it can be to write within the constraints of form – sonnets, haiku, etc.

I’ve written a couplet, which is usually a love poem – you can read mine, titled Secondhand Love, and I recently wrote a contrapuntal poem which was challenging to say the least – my favorite contrapuntal poem is No Country for Black Boys by Joy Priest – it is absolutely worth a read.

Joseph said one way to overcome that fear was to make up your own form. And with that, the group started yelling out suggestions for our new form:

~written in two voices

~ no “I”

~ no “-ing”s

~ 12 lines, 4 stanzas

~ no rhymes

~ title has to be a sentence

~ no more than three syllables per word

~ insert famous person

~ no birds

~ no past tense

~ include your mother

~ must include a “nonsense” word

The items in the list above that are crossed off are the ones we decided to toss leaving the rest to create the “rules” of our form. We called it “Geminunger” because sometimes it’s nice to give things a name. With our rules set Joseph gave us our prompt – personify your lips – and we were off, fingers tapping against keyboards and pens flying across paper.

The great thing about form is you don’t have to stay true to it, you can deviate when and how you want. You can decide to toss out a rule if it doesn’t serve your purpose or you can add a rule if you want. I’ve been writing a lot of poems about my mother, the most recent titled Mother and published by Wicked Banshee Press, and so I was a little bummed to see that “rule” in the form thrown out. But I decided to (start off) sticking to the rules and see where it took me. Here’s the poem I wrote, as yet untitled:

My lips the closed door

around my metal mouth,

no smiles escaped till the braces

came off, 2.5 years of robotic contortion

revealing perfectly straight teeth.

At fourteen my first kiss, his tongue

fat inside my mouth, probing

as if he were searching for treasure.

My lips would wait another year

to try again. 

My mouth stretched tight 

as the judge granted the restraining

order. He stood across the courtroom scowling,

his electric smile the first thing

my  mouth had loved.

My mouth as wide 

as the never-setting sun 

as we pledged our lives,

the raw wilderness of Denali

our witness. 

As you can see I didn’t hold true to the rules of the form we created in class but that’s okay, I still spent several hours writing and came up with a poem that has some potential. So the next time you’re stuck in a rut or unable to get creative look up a form and write a poem within its constraints. Or if you really want to challenge yourself, make up a new form and run with it. You never know what you’ll discover.