Experimenting with a new form pays off in one reader’s poem, explored by Alison Chisholm

Alison Chisholm

POETRY WORKSHOP

When the subject of a poem presents itself to you and asks to be written, it may already have a form in mind. You start to set a few words on paper, and all at once they fall into a particular pattern. Sometimes the pattern works, and occasionally you need to rein in the idea, give the emerging poem a good talking-to, and re-work it in a different style. At other times you have to impose a pattern on it from the start – free or formal, short or long. Sometimes, though, the form comes first. You decide to experiment with a traditional or innovative form, and then find the subject to use in it.

Claire Thomson, of Alfreton, Derbyshire, had this experience when she read about the triolet in the context of a Writing Magazine competition. She explains that she usually writes in rhyming couplets, but was immediately inspired by the triolet. This means, of course, that experimenting with the triolet would put a severe limit to the number of lines allowed. A poem in rhyming couplets, although it’s a fiendishly difficult form to write well, can be of any length, as long as it has an even number of lines. A triolet has eight, and two of those lines are repeated – one of them twice, as her poem demonstrates. Unfortunately, Claire’s poem didn’t get as far as the competition. Life intervened in the way it does, and she never found the time to redraft or edit it into something she liked enough to enter. But she had taken the one precaution so essential for writers: she kept a copy, so she could go back to it at any time.