Creating a New Poetry Form

On the Advantages of Constraint and Benefits of the Subconscious

Creating a New Poetry Form

Even if one wanted to ignore the horrendous politics of the day, our myriad forms of technology bring it clamoring into our lives. Attempting to turn away, at least momentarily, from the fairly awful to truly horrific news bombarding us daily, I started writing. The language launching a prose poem began as a meditation on an abstract painting I had seen in an art gallery.

I revised and rewrote several times and then began to notice an unintended pattern. The prose poem had morphed into a poem with a distinct design. Going back to the poem again and again, I started consciously working within deliberate limitations, according to the emerging structure making itself present accidentally or at least beginning in my subconscious.

Reading my poem yet again for meaning, I returned to revise. As I counted the lines, I recognized a pattern within a form. A few more changes led to new strictures, and I found I had a 39-line poem comprised of nine stanzas beginning with a tercet (three-line stanza) followed by a sestet (six-line stanza) and ending with a tercet, completing the circle.

A bit of research quickly led me to discover the 3-6-9 pattern is found in geometry and in DNA. It was not long before I came across inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla’s “universal keys” theory about the numerical coherence of 3/6/9, later used in mathematical puzzles. Tesla wrote, “If you only knew the magnificence of 3, 6, and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.” Three, six, and nine are not simply numerals; Tesla believed they suggest “hidden” frequencies.

I have long believed poetry and mathematics at the highest levels to be inextricably linked. Here I was at one of those intersections again. Going back to the beginning with my meditative response to an intricate, abstract painting, I followed a creative path into language invention and, finally, a new poetry framework. Five tercets and four sestets make up the 39-line structure of what I have decided to call my new poetry form: the Galactic.

While reading and thinking about history, about mathematics, about an engineer and inventor, in addition to language play, I had lost the feeling of oppression precipitated by the daily bombardment of terrible news. Much more happened than simply losing the weight of the awful, however; the creation of something new, a poem and a poetic form were exciting, uplifting, and life affirming.