Stephen Fry on Form, Part 6
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 6, on closed forms.
This section covers four closed forms, the villanelle, sestina, pantoum, and ballade. These four forms have some fairly complicated rules, but Fry does a nice job of laying them out in ways that make sense. Most of them use repetition of lines in specific patterns (or, in the case of the sestina, repetition of end words in a specific pattern). The trick of these forms, of course, is teasing out different meanings of a repeated phrase to keep things from getting stale. They also use a lot of rhyme (again, excluding the sestina), which, in the case of the ballade, calls for a lot of rhymed words if you don’t want to reuse the same words in your rhyme.
The exercises in this section involve writing a villanelle and a sestina, which to my mind are among the more difficult forms. I’d like to try all four that are in this section, but I haven’t gotten there quite yet!
Next up, more closed forms, starting with the letter R? Interesting.
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