A Matter Of Form

My Poetry In Practice classes started their 20th year at the end of September. Back in the summer of 1994 I dropped into an office in Buccleuch Place to suggest I might run a poetry workshop for a term. We started with the course title Improve Your Poetry - and just kept going.

We've just been shifted down to Paterson's Land, in the bowels of the old Moray House College of Education. Strange to be back in the building where in 1972 I qualified to be secondary-school teacher. Stranger perhaps for class member Tom Sommerville who, as a Moray House lecturer, used to teach people how to teach.

At Poetry In Practice we consider all manner of poems but I've always had an interest in forms and, over the years, we've looked at ballads, sonnets, villanelles, cinquains, triolets, rondelets, englyns, pantoums, sestinas, haiku, tanka, renga, and even the tetractys. I think my early interest in forms intensified when I managed to get a rather loose sonnet published in Chapman in 1984 and another won a bottle of whisky from The Spectator.

I still suffer from an occasional attack of loose sonnets.

On the topic of forms, Envoi published some of my thoughts back in 1997:

I sense
again my mood
precludes me from penning
anything other than cinquains
today.

And so
I scribble, sit,
and squander hours away,
awaiting the Muse, while thinking
cinquains.

Cinquains,
cinquains, again
and again. Two, four, six,
eight - syllables begin to grate!
Pantoums?

Or odes?
I'll try like hell
for a slick villanelle.
But no. I'm stuck with this cinquain
feeling.

What can
I do to keep
these dread cinquains at bay?
Dip into my poet's handbook?
Aha!

I've found a five, five,
two affair to fill
my day.
So now I'll contrive
when I've time to kill -
a lai !

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