And as an accompaniment, this interview from Barely South Review between Jerome Newsome and the author Marianne Chan:
Poetry has a lot of forms. Sonnets. Haikus. Odes. How do you incorporate or use form in your poems?
Yeah. So, form for me, is extremely generative. I often begin with form as a way to enter a poem. And sometimes I have an idea in mind. For example, in my second collection, Leaving Biddle City, I have several, prose pantoums. So, the collection is made up of those prose poems, these blocks of text rather than the lineated poem. And I have several poems that are prose pantoums. A pantoum is a poem that is made of four-line stanzas and the second and the fourth line of the first stanza becomes the first and the third line of the following stanza. It has that continuous repetition throughout. I wanted to use that form, because it always makes me think about memory and the cyclical nature of memory. And the way that if you have traumatic memories, that they flashback and sometimes they become new in the context of the experience you’re having that causes the flashback, right? And so, the book is about memory and forgetting and also repetition and also revision. That’s why I wanted that form to play such a central role in the collection. There are times where I am very intentional about the form because I want the form to reflect the themes of the collection. And then other times, I just use forms as a way to begin the poem.
You can purchase Leaving Biddle City here.
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