I would like to tell you about a lovely
stanza form I've long been an ardent fan of:
it was conjured up in a simpler time by
Classical Sappho.

This stanza, as you can see, is composed of four lines. The first three lines, 11 syllables long, are called hendecasyllabics; the last line, only five syllables, has a name that seems designed to make up for its diminutive status: the adonic. In addition to its strict syllable count, the stanza also has a very particular meter: in the first three lines, two trochees, followed by a dactyl, followed by two more trochees; in the last, one dactyl and one trochee.

I first learned about this form in the fall of 1987 when, a junior at Yale and a novice at poetry, I enrolled in John Hollander's Advanced Verse Writing course. Just back from a summer working as a waitress in London—during which time I'd resolved to Get Serious about my writing and even made a few stumbling attempts—I told myself that this course would be exactly what I needed. Indeed it was; more than I could have ever guessed. And of all the forms Hollander taught us, the sapphic stanza is the one I'm most grateful to have learned. Hollander, a firm believer in specific assignments, commanded us one week to write a poem in this form; and although at first I shuddered at such an onerous task, I found, on finally sitting down to write my poem, that it almost wrote itself—so irresistible was the rhythm, so compelling the alternation between the stanza's long and short lines. I looked up after several hours and found that I'd written a four-poem sequence called "Seasonal Songs." Looking back at the poem now, I'm amused at the grandiosity of its ambition: each season stood for a different historical period, with spring's Renaissance giving way to summer's Enlightenment, autumn's Romanticism, and (can you guess?) winter's Modernity. But I can also see, with the clarifying light of hindsight, that a lifelong love affair was beginning. Here's the first stanza of the third poem:

Autumn chills in moments of sudden sorrow,
as when slow, disconsolate winds begin to
stir and trouble flourishing leaves until they
flicker and struggle.

When I graduated from college and started working on the poems that would eventually make up my first book, The Other Stars, I kept coming back to the sapphic stanza. In my poem "Stage Directions for a Short Play," for example, I wanted to contrast the calm state of my poem's protagonist, a jaded "roué," with the force that an unexpected memory of an old love has on him. The poem's sapphic stanzas, marching passionately along, helped me convey this contrast and give my roué's inner turbulence a formal counterpart. The poem ends like this:

Vases fly; silk garments begin to flutter,
then are blown, in sopping-wet scraps, around him.
Roué squeezes armrests and shivers in his
nakedness; curtain.

In another poem, "Dissolving Views," I used the stanza to give the poem's subject—people roaming around a city park, looking for love—a more traditional underpinning:

High noon in the park, as the year begins its
onward march to truly infernal weather.
"Is it hot enough for you?" yell the normal,
but on the sidelines

all the lonely hopefuls whose blood is warmer
than their beds have gritted their teeth and gathered
in their finery for another round of
amateur sleuthing.

The poem's sapphic form, I hoped, would serve as a sharp contrast to my contemporary subject, but I also felt that it could bestow on that subject a subtle dignity: what these people are doing, the form quietly reminds us, has been going on for thousands of years.

If you try your hand at this stanza, you should be warned that it's addictive. When you're in the middle of writing one, its rhythm—so close, after all, to a heartbeat—has a way of entering your bloodstream when you aren't looking. Get up from your desk and take a walk and clear your head, and you'll find that the stanza—the last line especially—is following you. Shave and a haircut; oboe concerto; Emily Brontë; over and over; where am I going? It's insidious; it's unstoppable!

The sapphic stanza has a long and interesting history. The Greek poet Sappho invented it and gave it its name; the Roman poets Catullus and Horace used it for some of their finest poems; Algernon Charles Swinburne, an accomplished classicist, wrote a beautiful poem simply called "Sapphics": read it if you're interested in a "standard" example of the form. Among the contemporary poets who have written sapphic stanzas are James Merrill, Rachel Hadas, Marilyn Hacker, Timothy Steele and (of course) Hollander. Some poets have altered the form slightly: W.H. Auden's "Fairground," William Cowper's "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity," and William Meredith's "Effort at Speech," while all recognizably sapphic, also take some liberties with syllable count and meter. But although I'm intrigued by their varied versions, I find that I'm more reluctant to tamper with the sapphic stanza than with any other form. Why? I suppose because its rhythm seems so perfect—so close to the way we think and talk at our most impassioned moments—that I don't want to spoil it, want to take full advantage of its propulsive, remarkable force. Whether you end up varying it or not, though, I urge you to try it. It's a haunting, beautiful form that will grab you and refuse to let you go until you've succumbed to its many charms. End of discussion! (This last line, you'll notice, is an adonic. Clearly I'm hooked.)

Rachel Wetzsteon has published two collections of poetry: The Other Stars (Penguin, 1994) and Home and Away (Penguin, 1998). She currently teaches at Barnard College and the 92nd Street Y.

The List

1. Saying a particular poem is "formless" is as nuts as saying it isn't "political": form and politics obtain as soon as there are words. IMHO
2. Using a highly patterned form can up the tension level even if the poem isn't sagging.
3. Formal devices—repetition, rhyme, regular meters—serve to double time back on itself, to create the illusion of spontaneity, as opposed to techniques in narrative, which frequently aim to create the illusion of more time.
4. You got mascara. Use it.
5. Obvious formal choices give readers who aren't interested in content something to look at.
6. Strict forms—like the terza rima, the casbairdne, or the syllabic double acrostic quasida—can be an asset to our hysterias, masking fear and chaos for the time it takes us to obsess a result in place.
7. It's half the score in Olympian judging. Ah, but that other half . . .
8. Disruptions of expectations for formal conventions—no nouns, say, or concretist composition, or upending grammar—can cast into doubt the hegemonic practice of flush-left, full-phrase, punctuated poems. If you want to.
9. Making up new forms can while the hours. For example, this line occurred to me: "Lazarus went by himself to the mall. / All. . .", occasioning a form in which the last word of one line rhymes with the first of the next.
10. Writing against form—a sonnet bestiary, say, or an elegy in the sputter of amphisbaenic, or backward, rhyme—can feel transgressive without risking limb.
11. Fussiness, cleverness, or adverse polish, results. But sometimes distance is what's called for.
12. The pants should be just tight enough. The thing with pants, though, is that when you take off your pants your body doesn't go with them.

The Argument

He said he "grypt her gorge with so great paine, that soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine. Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; the one Spirit's plastic stress sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there all new successions to the forms they wear."1

She said that "men will boast of knowledge, which he took from Eve's fair hand, as from a learnèd book. Then let our flames still light and shine, and no false fear control, when full-gushed waters, alive, strike on the fountain's bowl."2

In this antitheton, the last word is hers.

The Lyric (A Descort)

You might say that. Here's to form,
That pinion'd, adamantine, surfeited barrier we wield,
Or carrier employ

As the great green faerie stomps its prey—

If you obey its call you enhance your haul—
Why do you fuss on it so, and you! who took apples for joy!

1Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene, I.19; William Wordsworth, "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convert's Narrow Room"; Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais" 43.

2Aemilia Lanyer, "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum," Eve's Apology; Katherine Philips, "To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship"; Louise Bogan, "Roman Fountain."

Susan Wheeler has published two collections of poetry: Bag 'o' Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1993) and Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998). She is on the core faculty of the MFA Program at The New School for Social Research.

Here in the small hours of the twentieth century, one can read by halogen light a hundred years of bickering about free verse and form, the open and closed, the raw and the cooked, the naked and the clothed (What would Saran-Wrap be?). This binary nomenclature is pretty unwieldy, and the categories often collapse. Dr. Williams? Free verse, although he claimed there was no such thing. Dr. Donne? Formal, but someone Ben Jonson said "deserved hanging for not keeping accent." "Prufrock"? Free verse, but rhyming in uneven metrical lines. "Dover Beach"? Formal, but rhyming in uneven metrical lines. Shakespeare? Depends who's talking.

Consider the case of Heather McHugh, a favorite poet of mine. I have conducted rigorous scholarly research by asking six poets I know what her style is. They all said, "Free verse." Also, I've sometimes included her selected works, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, in a class called "Poetic Forms." The students, who invariably like her, nonetheless invariably ask, "Why are we reading this in here?" Moreover, a blurb on the book explains that "her speech is stripped down to the last contraction" and that "her poems are open, resilientŠ." I'm not certain what that means, but I'd bet people assume it describes free verse.

In my dogged research, I found one person who hinted that the question might be thornier. Joshua Weiner, in Boston Review, observes, "Although she favors the iambŠ." I would add, she greatly favors the iamb. Here is a poem called, "From 20,000 Feet":

The cloud formation looks
like banks of rock from here,
though rock and cloud are thought

so opposite. Earth's underlying nature
might be likeness—likeness
everywhere disguised

by wave-length, amplitude and frequency.
(If we got far enough away, could we
decipher the design?) From here

so much goes by
too fast or slow for sight.
(Is death a stretch of time in which

a life is just a flash?) Whatever
we may think, we only
think that we will lose. The foetus,
expert at attachment,
didn't dream that
cramped canal would open

into sound and light and love—
it clung. It didn't care. The future
looked like death to it, from there.

Despite tercets, it looks like free verse. The lines aren't cut to a standard length. But if you read across the line-breaks, you find the whole thing's in unmistakable metrical feet, all iambs, even the title. There might be one pyrrhic, but that's questionable and, anyway, would trouble nothing in a passage of blank verse. In fact, if you broke the first line at four feet and occasionally hyphenated a word across a line-break, you could type the rest out as though it were indeed blank verse. And this would be a blank verse with far, far fewer metrical variations (zero) than the metered lines of any number of card-carrying formalists. When Ms. McHugh gives readings, rather than muting it, she emphasizes this vibrant, iambic rhythm. Moreover, the poem ends with a heroic couplet in disguise. Aurally, it's as though it were:

and light and love—it clung. It didn't care.
The future looked like death to it, from there.

As Mr. Weiner notes, her poems almost always have a final rhyme. And these rhymes are spaced at familiar rhythmic distances to snap shut their newfangled boxes in old, conventional ways.

Not all of her poems are so metrically unambiguous, and others, such as "In Praise of Pain" and "Preferences," are presented in unmasked pentameter, with just a few peculiarities. But the style of "From 20,000 Feet" is her dominant mode, though often with anapestic or trochaic substitutions. Consider, for instance, "Seal," which ends:

(In this
expanded universe, the sky
is naturally

surmountable—but why?
Why lumber clumsily, above it all—
if able in an underworld to fly?)

Beautiful, no? Typographically, she has masked a perfectly iambic Rubaiyat stanza, which the eye may miss, but not the ear:

(In this expanded universe, the sky
is naturally surmountable—but why?
Why lumber clumsily, above it all—
if able in an underworld to fly?

Is this less free or more than a poem like Robert Frost's "Mowing," an iambic pentameter sonnet in which no line has five iambs? Is this "open" because of the way it's typed, or "closed" because of the way it sounds? Does she suffer the "tyranny of the iamb" because her rhythm so proliferates with them, or does she escape because she isn't clearly counting them? Are these lines raw or cooked?

Greg Williamson won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for his first book, The Silent Partner (Story Line Press, 1995). He teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

"Both the writer and the reader of long poems need gall, the outrageous, the intolerable—and they need it again and again. The prospect of ignominious failure must haunt them continually... It is no good looking for models. We want anti-models."

In his National Book Award acceptance speech, quoted above, John Berryman goes on to say, "I set up the Dream Songs as hostile to every visible tendency in both American and English poetry." One of these visible tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic was the "cult of impersonality" cultivated by T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land Berryman countered in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet by including "personality, and plot—no anthropology, no Tarot pack, no Wagner." Instead, as with the later Dream Songs, Berryman attempted "the reproduction or invention of the notion of a human personality, free and determined." The Dream Songs may be Berryman's most famous poem, but ironically not his most successful—that prospect of ignominious failure haunts them as much as the ghost of Berryman's father's suicide.

I have long been interested in poems that may be called "successful failures"—those overreaching, underplanned, ill-conceived messy delights that do not enact a perfect marbleized form (nor wish to) but nevertheless delight with their sense of surprise, of sound—their personality. They are poems you'll sit and listen to awhile, their stories too wild to ignore; or maybe you'll dial them up: long poems are nothing if not loyal.

Recently a student of mine encountered a poetic emergency. He brought in a many-voiced poem, structured not to obtain the jarring juxtapositions of Eliot and Pound, but to describe love, its many moods, its danger. But the student had no map, so I steered him to Berryman. Certainly the bearded one is not for everyone—as Marianne Moore said of poetry, I too, dislike it—but there is something in him that provides a model, or at least an anti-model, something to fight for or even against. Berryman is difficult to imitate, much less to model; we are better off trying to let his obscurities wash over us. It would be hard to be as obsessed with drink, women or blackface as Berryman, which may prove problematic even for the most tolerant reader. His use of "black dialect" is frustrating and even offensive at times, as many have noted, and deserves examination at length. Nonetheless, the poems are, in part, about an American light that is not as pure as we may wish; or whose purity may rely not just on success (the dream) but on failure (the song). Berryman allows us to admit our obsessions, both as writers and as Americans. In turn, the poems are not a song of "myself" but a song of multiple selves. Instead of a cult of personality, we have a clash of personalities—the poems' protagonist Henry speaks not just as "I" but as "he," "we," and "you."

That Henry might be "you," the reader, is the point. That Henry is not simply Berryman's stand-in is also the point: the Dream Songs are too often read as mere confession. Unlike Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, who purposely relied on the tension between their own personality and the form of the poem to give it power, Berryman relied on the shifting form to explain in part his disparate personalities.

Each of the Dream Songs consists of three sestets, or 18 lines of varying length and rhyme scheme. They scheme all right: just as the Dream Songs sets up what feels like a form, it proceeds to dismantle it; this dismantling is integral to the form. The voice shifts from high to low, from archaic language to slang, slant rhyme to full, attempting to render something of jazz or, more accurately, the blues—devil's music. What emerges and succeeds is something of a sonnet plus some—a devil's sonnet, say (the three sixes stanzas too obvious to be ignored). Berryman's heresy is against the polite modernism that preceded him. That the poem can let in all sorts of Americanisms—not just Greek, as Eliot would have it—and not as signs of culture's decay, but of its American vitality, is fearless and liberating.

I've seen other student writers using Berryman's form to hold Southern dialect; urban slang; television talk; anything. How else do we achieve a poem of many voices—one which dares to be fragmented, full of feeling and embarrassed at that feeling, held together not by meter, war or even gods, but by force of personality? Some of the poems are speeches, binges, come-ons or crank calls; all vary wildly between dream and song:

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as a man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.

What can rhyme (and reason) with a voice that calls life a handkerchief sandwich? With such a large "If"? "If" is the only close rhyme to "sandwich," which leaves us back where we began, questioning. The Dream Songs let in tragedies—the handkerchief sandwich—in ways few other poets allow. While they do not so much move as rant, they do so with a humor, heartache, and risk that we find often in life, but rarely in genteel poetry. No wonder "Henry's Confession" is no confession at all and ends with a dance in the last stanza—the handkerchief transformed from sandwich into offering, sustenance for the soul.

Kevin Young's first book, Most Way Home, won the National Poetry Series and will be reprinted next year by Zoland Books. Young's second collection, To Repel Ghosts, is based on the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and is forthcoming from Zoland.