I gather poetry is seldom a deliberate business for most writers, including most formalists — even Richard Wilbur says he only discovers the form of a poem as he's writing it. But it is for me, and so, although I've only written one other acrostic poem, this morning's effort is not atypical.
Last Monday I said I'd be writing a series of poems using, in order, all the forms Lewis Turco listed in his original Book of Forms. I knew then I wanted to make the first one an homage to Turco, using his name as my acrostic. That suggested two five line stanzas, and while I was in Princeton earlier this week I decided to rhyme those stanzas abcba deced, envelope stanzas linked by their middle lines.
I farted around with it a little bit on the trip, but time was short and I was immensely tired (I don't sleep well in hotels), so until this morning nothing happened. I've been trying to write tetrameter lines (and shorter) since I've written so much pentameter, and I tried this morning. While I was trying I did come up with the argument — you do what you need to do; I'll do what I need to do — but I couldn't make the rhyme-scheme work with both short lines and the initial letter constraints, and after three hours of frustration I decided to fall back on pentameter. Two hours later this version was done.
If this poem survives (meaning I one day decide to try to publish it), it will likely be only after a good deal of revision, though I really can't tell just after I finish a first draft. It may also be a long while before I try: in the last 25 years I haven't deliberately thrown any draft away, and computers make it absurdly easy to find ideas I've forgotten I'd had.
btw, Yeats sometimes wrote down the rhymes he wanted to use before he wrote a line of the poem.
5:46:53 PM 
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