Daniel Sluman’s 5-Day Writing Challenge – Day 5
Exploding Form
One of the most exciting areas of contemporary poetry has been the constant innovation, reinterpretation, and reimagining of form. Form not only affects the way the reader accesses the words on the page, but (in ways that can be subtle, or explicit) reinforces or contradicts the meaning of the work. In today’s exercise, we will take one of the pieces you have created on a previous day and experiment with the form of those words on the page.
I want you to paste your work into a new document and explore not only the vertical, but the horizontal space on the page, and really stretch the limits of how this content works. You may even want to do a few different versions to see how much you can change the way the piece can be read. I’ve included some examples in the links below of poetry where form radically changes the way we encounter the poem, as well as Charles Olsen’s key essay ‘Projective Verse’.
Examples of poems which disrupt form:
Projective Verse by Charles Olson
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) E. E. Cummings