The craft
Traditional forms
A form is a machine for making decisions in advance so that, while you write, you can attend to the words. You do not have to live in one. You should know how they work, the way a carpenter knows a dovetail — even if this particular job wants screws.
Received forms are not museum pieces. They are pressure. Under pressure, language confesses what it actually thinks. Write at least one sonnet, one villanelle and one strict syllable-count poem before you declare yourself a free-verse poet. You may still declare it. You will declare it with a trained ear.
A cabinet of forms
Open a drawer:
Two main rhyme-maps in English. The Shakespearean (English) sonnet is three quatrains and a couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The turn often arrives at the couplet, which snaps the argument shut. The Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet is an octave and a sestet: ABBAABBA, then CDECDE or CDCDCD. The volta sits at line 9 — a problem in the octave, a shift in the sestet.
A Spenserian sonnet chains the quatrains (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE). A curtal sonnet (Hopkins) is a scaled 10½-line version. Fourteen lines of free verse with no rhyme and no turn is not a sonnet; it is a rectangle.
I meant to write of kings, and wrote the kettle —its ordinary whistle, ordinary steam —because the day had nothing else to settleand epic talk felt cheap beside the seamof light along the sink. Fourteen of these,and then a couplet trying to be wise:the small is not a failure of the keys.The small is where the audible form lies.