Made Forms

Though organizing themes or contours have always been central to written poetry, recent books design and enact forms that specifically deny the traditional supremacy and intensive mythology of Western logic as wrought through the English language. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, for example, uses erasure, arrangement, and redaction to reveal the blankness of the federal government’s passive and formulaic announcements toward Native peoples and lands; Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Travesty Generator establishes algorithms and codes as disruptions around Black grief and life, where the glitch is not mere distraction, but the resistance. By examining the structure and principle of such experiments, stranger writing and closer reading can contract content and form. 

As an introductory, animating prompt, write from and through a video as it plays twice; watch only on first view, then write without pause as it unrolls again. Intermittent Delight by Akosua Adoma Owusu, Crows by Akira Kurosawa (from Dreams), and At Land by Maya Deren are five-, ten-, and fifteen- minute options for this streamed writing activity meant to loosen images and ideas. 

An earnest inquiry into made forms requires reading multiple projects to recognize what makes each cohesive and unrepeatable. Three U.S. examples are the obituaries making up the majority of Victoria Chang’s Obit, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s five triptychs from Ghost Of, and the three speculative poems from Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches. These hold various griefs at their center—of a mother and her health, of a brother and the family unit, of Black girlhood and its liberation—and ask unlatching questions: what infinite collaterals do the dying and death of a parent entail? How do the loved deny space and memory as they leave? Who would you be if you could change the ending? 

Practice the procedures of these poets, less as emulation and more to explore how words are shaped by form, to notice the considerations that arise and the limits that unnerve. All exercises can be done on paper or on the computer and can be adapted by individual writers and writing facilitators. In response to Chang, write with a thin margin in justified text (easily adjustable on any word-processing application) about the first lost object that you recall. Following the conventions of an obituary in the generous way of the example work, how does the thought move to fit the page? Then, rewrite or copy and edit the text as a block of prose with standard margins, and create different line breaks unrelated to the stipulation that birthed the poem. What stands from the original in these new versions, and what revisions arrive? 

The triptychs from Ghost Of each start with a photograph with a fissured block, a slice of image made more memorable and imagined in its deliberate removal. The next page is blank beyond the text filling that gap, and the final page displays a block of text matching the photograph’s outline, the gap blank. In response, write “over” a photograph, whether in a transparent text box on a computer or using thin paper with bright lighting. Rather than replicate the originals, write around and through the photograph as both object and subject, shifting words into silhouettes. How is the photograph translated, disturbed, or honored through this process? In what ways does the writing over itself feel violent? Then, remove the image and read the text on its own. What is lacking and what is reached by this divorce from the source? 

Ewing’s book creates a new genre she names “retellings,” which start with typed narratives that serve as a kind of reportage of racist encounters (a stranger, a cop, a neighbor), each followed by a handwritten alternative, sometimes supernatural end to the story. This reconstitution indicates a power of the imaginary, as well as its material bounds. In response, type or print an account of experiencing or witnessing a specific cruelty or injustice, using tight, short sentences focused on action. Print it out and finish the poem by hand, or, if handwritten, write underneath in cursive, describing what you wish happened next using longer, more descriptive sentences. How are the two sections allied and how are they opposed? Then, type or rewrite the poem as one block. Where do the two flow well, and when is the removal of the form jarring? What do telling and retelling establish, reconcile, and distort?

The rearrangements of forms in these three books respond to and address intersecting systems of migration, race, health care, death, and education. These activities continue the questioning of language itself, centering process over product and approaching every rendering in multiplicities. As a culmination, reflect in notes or paragraphs on what you read and generated, and outline any ideas for developing a practice or a project. How have and do invented constraints define this new writing, and how does it relate to your work in general? What aspects of English language poetry address its inherent imperial and capital authority, and what new planes of sense are made? How do systems interact with individuals, and can poetry mediate that relationship? In what way is every poetic procedure refractive, even when controlled?