Finding the Form with Kirsteen Macleod
I have a digressive brain. The tangential, undisciplined, and wandering-spirited in language attracts me. But my current poetry project is requiring a brevity that’s uncharacteristic for me.
How to find new concision? I’ve been inspired in part by a martial artist-writer friend who strikes people in the gut with incredible force, using both Krav Maga and poetry. Her effect is arresting – dropkick – and can’t be achieved in meandering lines.
I’ve been experimenting awhile with stripped-back poems. But I love to describe things in lingering detail – love the physical world – so my results have often felt distressingly skeletal.
At some point I hit upon writing three stanzas of five lines each. Not only was this fleshy enough, but it helped me to confront a writing problem I was experiencing — what to pull out from the monumental bog of personal material I was mired in.
The compression of my short-but-not too-short poems seemed to magically foreground what’s most important. Or as poet Dianne Seuss sagely writes, “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do without.”
Turns out that the form I’d fallen into, quintains, poems with five-line stanzas, are sonnet adjacent. Shakespeare’s sonnet 99 is an example, one of only three irregular sonnets he wrote– 15 lines instead of the traditional 14.
I was inspired to try true sonnets, small transfiguration contraptions for strong emotions that veer unexpectedly at the volta, the turn, where the poem changes direction. I played with six-line stanzas, and varied the length of my poems, but stayed within a species of poem I’m calling loose sonnets.
On the page, I like how my three-poem TNQ series offers more visual interest than three little square sonnets would have. The loose sonnets feel like a fitting body for my new poems to inhabit, with just the right amount of flesh and bone.
Kristeen Macleod writes and teaches movement in Kingston, Ont. Her work has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and ARC Poetry’s Poem of Year, among other prizes, and has appeared in journals such as CV2, Event, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, and The New Quarterly.