Here’s one of my ars poeticas, written a couple years ago for a prompt.

This is written in the “garland cinquain” form. Forms of this complexity get to be not much more than parlor tricks in the wrong hands, but anything that gets people interested in poetry is, ultimately, okay by me. It features six stanzas of five lines with syllables 2,4,6,8,2. The sixth stanza is comprised of line one of the first stanza, line two of the second stanza, and so on.

The challenge of any form is not to stop at fulfilling the structural requirements, but to keep working until it rises to the level of poetry, and to keep polishing until the structure doesn’t call attention to itself. The challenge of this form is to contrive the final stanza so that

• the lines don’t call attention to themselves when they first appear, and
• the final stanza
  • reads smoothly,
  • maintains surface sense, and
  • has a feeling of summation, of adding something to the content, not just recycling those five lines.

In the present case, I think the form yielded some nice effects.