Choosing a Form

[Leanne]

When you're just learning forms, your best bet is to practise them until you get a feel for why certain elements work and how they can best be used. It's also a good exercise to try rewriting free verse into form -- some free verse poems will lend themselves more strongly to certain forms, for example a poem with a particularly strong line that could stand repeating might be made into a ballade or kyrielle, two strong lines and you've virtually got yourself a villanelle . Sonnets work best for lyric (non-narrative) concepts, the abstracts of emotion or philosophy. For narrative poems, you might like to start here. Short, poignant concepts lend themselves nicely to the rondelet or virelai.

When you've been writing in form and free verse for a while, patterns will start to emerge and you'll find it easier to identify which vessel is better for your poem. As Philatone suggests, elements of form can be blended into a free verse piece -- like I keep telling people, learning about form poetry, meter and rhyme and such, can only strengthen your free verse. Besides, the fusion of free verse and form can create some really cool poetry (or some really horrible garbage).