Dear Arthur,
    I find the shape of the words on a page, or screen, are very important
to me. I wonder if it's because I've done a bit of calligraphy, which makes
you very aware of verbal patterns. I suppose I like the shape to be orderly,
rather than ragged, unless the subject-matter is ragged.
With free verse, I find it often flows straight out in a solid chunk, with
line breaks where it helps the sense, but no stanza breaks, and that's how I
used to present it, but I realised after a while that it is not easy to read
verse set out like this, and it's better to divide it up into more
manageable segments. Usually I find the poem tends to dictate the sort of
stanzas needed, but sometimes it's a matter of trial and error.
   One thing I never used before I used the lists was the 3 line stanza,
with the sentences carried over from stanza to stanza. Once I tried it, this
seemed to me an excellent form for conveying a certain type of thought
process. It's interesting that one of the rules for laying out a garden is
to plant in groups of three - it just seems a very interesting and
satisfying pattern.
   I suppose I have a natural leaning towards symmetry in most
circumstances, but sometimes the sense of a poem calls for asymmetry, and in
free verse, I think the sense takes precedence.
Kind regards,
 grasshopper


----- Original Message -----
From: arthur seeley
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 4:06 PM
Subject: [THE-WORKS] Grasshopper


Your comment about form is so very true. Although I do feel more relaxed in
a free verse mode I still go back to form occasionally, mostly the sonnet
for the exact reasons you mention. Writing is a craft and as such it can be
honed and improved through practice. Practice inside a form imposes a
discipline upon our thoughts and expression of them. We will write better
for it ultimately. Some of us are gifted, some of us perhaps think we are
gifted, all of us benefit from learning our craft and the disciplines
involved. This is true of any form of artistic expression, the skills and
crafts we learn through practice liberate the artist and facilitates the
more accurate exploration of ideas and moods and place and time.
As to the idea of form I have noticed that you yourself occasionally use a
three line strophe, sometimes a four line , sometimes a couplet sometimes a
sextet, how is that choice made? Is it a conscious choosing or is the
strophe length self -dictated in the early stages, for certain it is that
some poems write themselves and demand a life. If you wrote a poem that had
a natural five line first strophe and a natural six line  second strophe is
there something inside you that would niggle for symmetry?? So that one
would lengthen one or shorten the other??Arthur.