A rather mechanistic understanding on Ms Barnhart's part of a term 
that has a considerable history in the past 60 years. Here's the nub: 
"A closed form allows the poet to establish a pattern that will help 
him or her create the desired meaning or sound." In open form the 
poet begins with no such desires.

This is not a failing, which laxity would be. Think of it this way: 
an open form poem is a game that discovers its rules in process. I 
can't imagine any discipline less lax.

  Some of us have devoted a lifetime to refining that process.

As to the word "form," philosophers tend to define the way in which 
they use a word because most words--nouns, at any rate--tend to 
accumulate meanings. "form" seems to have begun as a form in the 
sense of a mold, a sense it still maintains, but it was early 
associated with formositas, beauty, and all sorts of other things. I 
suppose one could try to find a word with fewer meanings or arcane 
enough so that it could be applied rigidly in only one, but not 
likely. And the meaning would begin to drift.

That's the fun of language, it seems to me, that it constantly takes 
us to a new place.

Robin I think was pretty careful to say that he was describing an 
older meaning of "open form" which was "probably not to the point."

Best,

Mark

At 04:49 PM 4/16/2010, you wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Robin Hamilton <
>[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > This is probably not to the point, but what might be the original
> > distinction (which I still tend to use myself) is between iambic penameter,
> > either in couplets or rhymed, the ballad stanza, terza rima, etc., as "open
> > forms", in that there's no termination built into the form itself.  In
> > contrast to the sonnet, villanelle, ballade, haiku, etc., where when you
> > begin writing, you know where you will end.
> >
> > This isn't quite the same as the distinction between (organic) open form
> > and closed form that this thread is mostly about, but maybe it's worth
> > mentioning.
> >
>
>
>Thanks, Robin.  That is certainly a distinction that sounds more sensible to
>my ear.  I ended up looking up the term after the recent thread, and found,
>e.g.:
>
>http://www.sterlingschools.org/shs/stf/jbarnh/poetry/eop8.htm
>
>Wouldn't terms such as "strict" or "lax" be more apt for the distinction
>made in the above page?  Also, is there a purpose to say "every poem has
>form, but some is open, and some is closed."  Doesn't the very word "form"
>become otiose in that case?
>
>
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Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University 
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"Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of 
Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so 
effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United 
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