I’ve recently begun planning a poetry workshop with a friend for a few poets we both know, and we’ve decided to focus on traditional poetic forms, addressing a different form in each workshop. We are reading and working with a text, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000); we read about the form prior to each session, and then we write a poem using the form. We began with the villanelle (which I’ve written about in another post) which was chosen as one of the forms to address by the participants. The second form we will focus on is the pantoum.
Pantoums can be fun to write; they use repetition, like villanelles, but in a different way. Each stanza is a quatrain and the second and fourth lines of one become the first and third lines of the next on and on until the poet comes to an end, returning to use the first and third lines of the first stanza in reverse order in the final stanza as the second and fourth lines. The length of a pantoum is up to the poet. I find that I can keep the stanzas coming for quite a while before it feels as if the end is nigh, and wrapping things up might be the best thing for the poem, and the poet. For further definition of the pantoum, the Poetry Foundation has supplied us with examples and an entry in their glossary.
Strand and Boland point out, “Like the villanelle, like the sestina, these forms attract poets because, within the requirements and demands of repetitions, there are possibilities for the making and evoking of time past that are not found in straightforward narrative and not entirely in lyric either” (44).
They expand on the idea of moving back and forth through time, which intrigues me most about the pantoum. There is a kind of an echo in each stanza that takes the reader back to repeating something in the stanza that came before. It gives the reader (and the poet) the chance to reflect on those lines and allow the lines to lead them on through the poem. There is a rhythm that inevitably instills itself, and some poets choose to use rhyme which increases the chances that a beat will make itself known in the reading or writing of the pantoum (45).
I’ve written a few pantoums, one of which you can find in the summer 2013 poetry issue of Sixfold. I’m looking forward to trying this form again.
There are a number of wonderful pantoums from great poets. “Incident” by Natasha Tretheway amazes with this pantoum that manages to tell a story using repetition to emphasize what happened. Pantoums don’t usually rely on narratives, but a story most certainly emanates from the lyric lines repeated in Tretheway’s pantoum. Other poets who have produced pantoums are Carolyn Kizer, John Ashbery, and Donald Justice. A particular favorite of mine that I haven’t been able to locate the text of online is “All the Slaves” by Thomas Lux.
Pantoums have an ominous quality that I’m drawn to and would love to master as a poet. There is something suspenseful in the repeated lines that urge the reader to find out where this is all going.