Photo credit: Margaretta K. Mitchell
A Little Book on Form came about because I was asked one fall to teach a class at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop on form in poetry. It made sense, of course, that at such a place there would be a course not in the history of poetry or the theory of poetry or on particular poets or periods or styles — American women modernists, French surrealism, poets of the Harlem Renaissance — but about the craft.
Still. Form? What exactly was meant by form? I looked at books. They all seemed to be about rules for how to make a sonnet, or other more unusual forms, the sestina which was a kind of intricate early Italian song form that involved ending every line of a poem in six stanzas with the same six words...