The Gift of Form: A Pocket Guide to Formal Poetry

John Brantingham’s epiphany about formal poetry created six basic premises about how and why to write it. These premises are also the premises of this book: Writing formal poetry is intellectual game play. It should be fun. Formal poetry gives poets tools to say something meaningful. No one can really fail at writing a formal poem. Writing formal poetry strengthens writers’ free verse and prose. A formal poem does not have to sound like an old poem. A poet should never have to sacrifice meaning to stay inside the form.