Language as Form
In our series Language as Form, we’ve invited poets to write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.

The poem that would eventually become “Paradise Lost” first appeared as a much longer and more robust poem under the title “from Lost” in a 2021 issue of Ploughshares; but even that poem was a fragment of a 124-line poem I was working on for a book-length sequence called Lost. The idea was to engage with Milton’s epic through a process of re-imagining—much like Max Richter with Vivaldi, Víkingur Ólafsson with Bach, or Miles Davis with Rodrigo—where the act of creation becomes both homage and reinvention. What remains of the original work, and what transforms through the artist's interpretation?
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I wanted the poems so close to you (respectfully) that we would be two strands of a helix, standing in the same place. Another way to say it is that this cosmos and poetics that I imagine is a fantasy of never being alone, of being "held/ By a word just behind" me in the warp and weft of dark matter when urgency, vigilance, and fear would demand I lean forward. So, I wanted to feel language, to sensitize my body as reparation and as part of a quantum entanglement where we could join forces. That's why often the work of setting up my scene, the vantage from which I would narrate the poem to you across some distance mostly feels contrived—stagecraft when poetry never asked for a stage. I wanted to do what my friend Phil Pardi says some scholars say about Emily Dickinson: that she wrote intimately, but rarely personally. I wanted to get that close that fast.

I can gaze at horizons or the ground with admiration like I do with certain paintings or at the people I love. I could stand in place for hours taking it in almost as a lyric subject if ever I’d have the time. At the same time, I recognize that while I stand in place in my room in Southwest Virginia, I also exist in Florida where I’ve sent my mother flowers, and in Pittsburgh where I’ve just texted my friend Luke. Technology and commerce cast all of us across the globe because place is no longer coherent or homogenous. Place is a process with past(s), present(s), and future(s), that according to geographer Doreen Massey can be fragmented, dislocated, forgotten and reformed. Massey’s thinking through place in this era of super speedy space-time compression helps shape my sense of a poem’s ability to attend to place as an unending yet impermanent entity. A poem is a place where space-time compression must occur...

Pero the décima is important to me beyond my impulse to resist cultural hegemony. I am drawn toward the décima not just because it is a Latin American form created by mi gente. I am drawn toward the décima because of the way it makes music.

Form is, of course, at the heart of poetry, and it’s that friction between the laws of a form and the fresh take on it that provokes frisson, that outpouring of feeling in us.

Grief the weather over my desk as I wrote some of these poems. Grief fogging up the windowpanes in particular poems. Grief came with its own weird chant, grief that strange emotion where you know what you miss before you understand why.

We are left instead with anti-image. With possibility of/some great coiled energy. Anti-image, ironically, makes real the possibility, and possibility the real.

The way a poet turns their life into an artifact, paginated evidence of having lived… one of the key masterstrokes of this poem is that its form enacts the realities of its making, of the position that the poet, over and over, finds themselves in: that one must constantly unearth one’s life if one wants to keep it whole. The present falls onto the poet’s past like shovelfuls of dirt. If you want to take life with you where you’re going, you have to dig it out yourself.

I love a poem that is about everything. Bhanu Kapil’s tender “Seven Poems for Seven Flowers and Love in All Its Forms” is this way, both about flowers and about not flowers, expansive and contracting in its scope.

Repetition often has an incantatory effect. Nursery rhymes use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to grant the wish laid upon the first star. Despite this magical aura of naming and claiming, wishing evokes passivity. Wishes are childhood's epistemological firmament, they are part of the structures of intimacy available to children in a world controlled and administered by adults.

All this time, the vow held me and asked me to return to it with answers; “you” had become “I,” and “again” and “more” implied I’d been here before. What was I asking myself for? The rest of the poem? Myself? I’d hoped to depict an answer in passing material. But the wish itself was the world.

In “Some Things I Said,” Ferry turns[...] to his own work: both his poems and his translations[...], and draws forth a new poem, an assemblage of fragments, a portmanteau, found lines sometimes presented almost exactly as they were in the original and sometimes much-altered.

In stripping away misapprehension and projection, this poem hopes to encounter the reality of the other, and of the otherness within. It’s a poem that begins by opening to the dark, and the force of that mystery persists, for me at least. Though the night is “dark / as the future,” the poem moves forward into it, into whatever it represents. We will never quite be able to say how those inscrutable experiences transform us, and yet they have come to me to seem poetry’s very source.

Another generative bit of language emerged (and reproduced itself at different moments in the poem) when I found myself looking for a phrase to indicate the numerical “opposite” of one vote (“a flock of votes”? “a pride of votes”? “a murder of votes”?). The evocative collective nouns that have developed for groups of animals began leaping to mind and helped me punningly suggest a few ways that a large number of votes together might be understood, depending on one’s perspective.

Persona offered a path through the unimaginable. Throughout my first book, Theophanies, I wield persona to trace a foremother’s face in the dark—Sarah, Hajar, Eve, Maryam. I cannot know them, but in the absence of definitive knowledge, I can speculate. Through speculation, through the assumption of another’s voice, I can clarify my own. Using Sarah-as-foremother as a mouthpiece doesn’t reveal anything true about her. Rather, it illuminates my own inclinations, biases, and assumptions, long-obscured and buried. However frightening, however troubling. By braiding together multiple voices in a contrapuntal, I can better locate my own.

My father was a young man when we left the Philippines after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. He was in his twenties and had very little money. I should think that weighing the decision to break a five-dollar bill and buying junk food for his kid could and should expand our notion of what is of epic and heroic concern.