When I saw Drenthe, in deep February snow, I knew I had to write about it. The thatched farmhouses, the brick roads lined with leafless poplars, the linseed mill, the frozen canals: all made a deep impression. For days after I returned I tried to find the right form. I wanted something quiet and plain – something that suited the horizontal landscape, and the land that seemed so perdurable yet was so clearly under threat. I thought I’d try a syllabic, for the discipline of it. But it was only when I came upon the hook-and-eye slantrhymes that I knew I had a poem.
Form need not be a constraint. It is a partner to spar with. Rules can be broken or bent. Patterns can be distorted, perverted, transformed. But the form must fit the thought. Even in free verse this is true. Closed forms simply require more manoeuvres. There is more to take on, or to fight against.
I wrote ‘Fixed Form’ (which is partly about the Snow Queen, and partly about Hans Christian Andersen, that cold-eyed master of psychological cruelty) in answer to those who accuse the ‘new formalists’ of living in a prison of their own making. Do they want to escape? Should they? Who can say?