Chapter 12

Don’t Worry – Form Doesn’t Matter

Often students come into a class believing that poems have to rhyme and that only poems that rhyme are real poems. I want you to think of poetry as a very elastic form. The line between poetry and prose has eroded so that a poem can be one word on a line or ten-word lines or twenty-word lines or it can be blocked out so it looks like a square paragraph. Try not to concentrate on form, but rather on content. Let the poem be what it wants to be. Get that first draft down on paper. This advice also applies to personal essays, memoir, and even to English compositions. The first and most important thing is to get the content on paper.

Sometimes in a composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

You might be more articulate in speaking about your experiences than you are in writing them. At some point in your life, you lost confidence in yourself and the written word. I want to restore that confidence, the confidence that you can write, to get you past the block that keeps you staring at that blank page for 20 minutes before you can put down the first word. I want you to get past the point in which you are so frozen with fear that your pen remains stiff in your hands, and you are unable to write even one sentence without changing and crossing out your words.

To get past this point, you need to try the 20-minute focus. You need to spend 20 minutes putting pen to paper, letting anything you are thinking just flow onto the page. If you’ll let go, if you stop trying to control the secret writer inside you, you will be able to say what you need to say in 20 minutes. If you find yourself correcting and crossing out, stop immediately and just let the words flow from your pen without judgment.