I have no idea how many of our readers are of an academic bent. I am sure there are enough that to discuss form and meaning in poetry is not completely foreign, and maybe most of our readers have a better grasp of the concepts than I do. No matter, it’s my column, so I will plough through.

As many of you know, I have been writing poetry since I was five. I did this primarily as an excuse to not have to obey ANY rules of the English language. As I began to learn the rules of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and general grammar, I loved that I could get a 100% free pass on all of this by say, “it’s poetry.” And oddly, most people believed that little kid on Mona Lisa Drive in Montgomery, Alabama.

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After more than 50 years, I sometimes forget, and think I actually know how to write poetry, that I have some sort of insight. At first, I held to a few conventions, like 4 lines, with at least two of them rhyming, I tried to figure out meter, but eventually gave it up as I could not “hear” it and could not for the life of me understand why it mattered. Then I gave up rhyming as I didn’t like having to compromise what I meant to say.

Then, about 5-6 years ago, I don’t even remember, I joined a class on Coursera at the University of Pennsylvania taught by Professor Al Filreis. The course was and is Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, or ModPo.

This class not only changed my outlook on poetry, but on my life, in total. I have repeated it every year since the first. I have yet to complete the course work, in fact, I doubt I ever will. As you might imagine, I recommend the course for EVERYONE, even for people who have little interest in poetry. The reason being the professor and the 30,000+ community of online students who are exploring a rearrangement of the order of all things. All things, as in the universe, not just the universe of poetry.

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ModPo is a very subversive class, and may have the very real possibility to change the world. One of the subversive ideas that is often discussed is a statement by the professor that form dictates meaning. Not that meaning dictates form, like a 4-line rhyme for a short sweet love poem and a long skinny poem for a political rant, but that the form itself, changes the meaning of a poem. I don’t think Al invented this concept, but he is the one who introduced it to me. From a poetic standpoint, there is much to be gained from taking ModPo, at least once, but I have always been more interested in a socio-political philosophy of life, and so that is what I most see at work here.

There is always the question of sparseness, versus lushness, both in imagery as well as word count. Then there is the question of enjambment, or the running on of a line into the next line, instead of a more conventional stopping at the end of a line, as in:

Not a Common House Cat

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I chased the blue jay halfway down

the street before I realized

I was not a house cat

and stopped to clean my paws

while trying to look totally disinterested

 in squirrels in general,

and that squirrel, in particular.