I quoted Richard Hugo in my last column as saying you have to be pretty silly to write poems at all, so that in itself is probably a good enough explanation for why anyone would try to write in a really restrictive form.

It’s a challenge, yes. It’s a way of showing off, and let’s face it, writing poetry is just another way of saying “Look at me!” It’s a pretty convoluted way, in that no one can actually look at you while you’re doing it, which makes it a lot safer than, say, standup comedy. Emily Dickinson played it really safe, in that not only could nobody look at her while she was writing, nobody could look at what she wrote, and nobody could look at her while she wasn’t writing. But she was still doing it. So maybe the best way to put it is Richard Hugo’s way—you have to be pretty silly to do this at all.

Except…sometimes those tight forms give you something that nothing else can. It’s hard to imagine Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” having the same powerful effect without the gathering urgency of the repeated villanelle refrains. And the urgent power of Thomas’s rage against death threatens to burst the seams of the rigid form, growing even more urgent and more powerful in its confinement.

So, like le jongleur de Notre Dame, we offer our silliness in the service of a higher calling.

The villanelle and the sestina are the two most likely tight-tight forms of choice for the formal poet, but they aren’t the only ones. Here’s a look at a few other really really tight ones.

The epigram. This requires you to say something profound, or at least memorably witty, in one rhymed couplet. They can be a little longer, but not much. Coleridge defined the form pretty well, when he wrote:

What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

Ogden Nash combined with social commentary:

Candy
Is Dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

Or sometimes he just preferred the delights of nonsense, that genre particularly beloved by British literati:

There goes the Wapiti
Hippety-hoppity!

Dorothy Parker mixed wit with pain:

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

Or this, a little longer, but still terse enough to be epigrammatic:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

J. V. Cunningham was a much-praised literary poet. Influential critic Yvor Winters called him “the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English today, and one of the finest in the language.” His poetry was almost always succinct, and many of his best remembered poems are epigrams. He discussed this once in an interview: “I am, so to speak, a short-breathed man, and simply found that I had an almost unthought-out preference for brief definitiveness of statement, so that there was a traditional form just waiting for me to define it.”

Cunningham’s epitaph (many epitaphs are epigrams) “for Someone or Other” reads:

Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.

Lewis Turco, under his anagram/pseudonym Wesli Court, has written a book of literary epitaphs. Here’s one for the largely forgotten William Dunbar, a 15th century poet in the court of King James IV, a largely forgotten monarch:

His fellow poets were all taken,
A fact that was beyond his ken,
But he’s not likely be forsaken—
Dunbar was right: he cannot waken.

The clerihew. Not everyone has the gift of succinctness that can bring forth epigrams, but perhaps only one person was really capable of writing this variant on the epigram, so it was only fitting that he gave his own name to it. That was E. C. Bentley, a British novelist whose first novel, Trent’s Last Case, is often credited with being the first modern detective novel. Bentley also created the form of light verse called the clerihew (his middle name), which has the following attributes:

• It’s about a well-known historical figure.
• It includes biographical information, but is a little silly.
• It’s two rhymed couplets, with a loosely metrical two or three stress line.

That’s all there is to it, but somehow it also needs Bentley’s slightly daft British sense of humor. No one else has ever quite been able to pull it off (and Lord knows I’ve tried). Maybe it also helps if you’re a bright British schoolboy, as it was at that stage of life that Bentley invented the form. Here’s an example:

Said Sir Christopher Wren,
"I'm going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I'm designing St. Paul's."

Two other very short forms are the haiku and the limerick. Granted, these two are not often lumped together, but I’m yoking them here to explain why I’m leaving them out. Briefly, they’re not really really really tight forms, and they’re not that difficult to write. To write well…that’s another story. To honor the form, limericks are generally obscene, and haiku are generally images drawn from nature. To write sensitive nature-drawn limericks and obscene haiku might be a challenge, but not for today. I will, to be perverse, include a form that is syllabic like a haiku and five lines long, like a limerick:

The Cinquain. Invented by the early 20th century American poet Adelaide Crapsey, is a five-line poem of two, four, six, eight and two syllables per line. Its purpose, at least as I understand it, was to create a form that adapted the spareness of the haiku to the somewhat more discursive English language. Here are two by Crapsey:

TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.


SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS

"Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?" "For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore."

The triolet. Like the villanelle (and actually like various other intricate and intriguing forms), it is French in origin, and dates back to the thirteenth century. It has eight lines, only two rhymes, and a lot of repetition packed into a very short space: the first line is repeated, exactly, in the fourth and seventh lines, the second line in the eighth line. The Academy of American Poets’ page on the triolet mentions that while the form enjoyed a brief vogue in the late 19th century mostly as witty or light verse, Thomas Hardy was the first to ["recognize"] the possibilities for melancholy and seriousness, if the repetition could be skillfully employed to mark a shift in the meaning of repeated lines.

Here's one by Sandra McPherson.

She was in love with the same danger
everybody is. Dangerous
as it is to love a stranger,
she was in love. With that same danger
an adulteress risks a husband’s anger.
Stealthily death enters a house:
she was in love with that danger.
Everybody is dangerous.

The pantoum, described on the Academy of American Poets web page as “a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.” Tracing its lineage back to 15th century Malaysia, the form has been intermittently popular in Europe and America. Computer programmer turned poet Victoria Rivas is fond of it because it reminds her of the loops she had to create in writing programs, and maybe it is, for that reason, a form for our time. It was perhaps inevitable that it would appeal to the free-associative mind of John Ashbery. https://ashberyhouse.yale.edu/pantoum

Recently, poet-editor Marianne Szlyk had a friend who was given an assignment to write a reverse pantoum. Did I know what that was? I had no idea, and could find no reference to same. I was afraid it was a form that had to be invented.

One way was to reverse the order of the repeated lines, which meant that the first line of a stanza repeated the last line of the previous stanza, and the last line of the poem did repeat the first line. Both effects were sort of pleasing.

Or…could you write a pantoum that doubled back on itself, creating a mirror image? A palindroum?

The aragon. This is probably the tightest form I have ever encountered, and could only have been invented by someone with a lot of time on his hands. Which, in fact, was the case. The French surrealist poet, Louis Aragon, in hiding during the Occupation, purportedly invented this form to keep his mind occupied during endless days in an attic room alone. I say “purportedly,” because I ran across this story once online, and could never find it again. But I couldn’t have dreamt it. I don’t have that much imagination, and I never dream about French surrealists.

An aragon is a poem that can be read either as stanzas of six tetrameter lines or four hexameter lines, which will rhyme perfectly either way. Here is one by Victoria Rivas:

		1.
		I walk away through empty streets once full of life.
		We all now hide behind closed doors, pull up the sheets
		around our necks. All thoughts of pride now turned to strife.
		We long to ride this out, be sure our heart still beats.

		I know that it will end someday but I can’t tell
		exactly when. Uncertainty is certain. Say
		your prayers and binge watch CNN to see our hell
		today again and view what horrors lurk today.

		2.
		I walk away through empty streets
		once full of life. We all now hide
		behind closed doors, pull up the sheets
		around our necks. All thoughts of pride
		now turned to strife. We long to ride
		this out, be sure our heart still beats.

		I know that it will end someday
		but I can’t tell exactly when.
		Uncertainty is certain. Say
		your prayers and binge watch CNN
		to see our hell today again
		and view what horrors lurk today.

The paradelle. Billy Collins discovered this medieval French form, which he described as follows: “The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words."

Collins’s own paradelle appeared in American Scholar and then in his collection Picnic, Lightning. It was staggeringly amateurish and awful. This was strange for two reasons: One, Collins doesn’t write amateurish and awful poems; and two, he doesn’t write in fixed forms, demanding, or otherwise.

As it turned out, the awfulness was deliberate, and the form was a hoax, invented by Collins, his point being—I think—to prove that poems written in such convoluted forms are bound to be awful. But you have to be pretty silly to write poems at all, and a number of poets took up the challenge, either because they didn’t realize they were being hoaxed, or because they did, but they decided to trick the trickster. Ultimately, an anthology of paradelles, edited by Theresa Welford, was published by Red Hen Press.

I’ve written a couple. You have to be pretty silly to write poems at all.