Using Received Repeating Forms

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Overview and Goals — 0:00:01

Today’s topic is received forms—forms that have existed for a long time, with established rules. Rather than surveying all formal poetry, the focus here is specifically on repeating forms: forms that use refrains, repeated lines, or repeated end-words. Villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, and the ghazal. Sonnets and other non-repeating structures are outside today’s scope.

Why use these at all? A few reasons. They can push you in directions you wouldn’t otherwise go—not by forcing you to say things you wouldn’t want to say, but by prompting different phrasings than your usual style would produce. The micro-level puzzle of making the next refrain work can quiet the more paralyzing blank-page anxiety about what to say. And the form itself can become part of the meaning: the way a poem interacts with its formal requirements can change what the poem says, or how it says it.

General Principles for Repeating Forms — 0:04:00

Because repetition is so obvious in these forms, they are easy to make sound stagnant. The key is forward movement: even if the first refrain line repeats exactly at the end, something should have changed. The poem should feel like it’s been somewhere. Think of the structure not as a circle that returns exactly to its starting point, but as a spiral—circling back, but always a little further along.

Strictly speaking, many of these forms require exact repetition. In practice, modifying repetitions slightly is almost always worth doing. It keeps things from sounding too mechanical, gives you more flexibility to integrate the repeated elements into different contexts, and makes enjambment easier to manage. How much you can vary a refrain before it stops reading as a repetition is a matter of experiment and personal taste—but 50% or 60% similarity still registers as repetition.

These forms tend to work especially well for subject matter that feels circular: obsessive thoughts, recurring memories, grief that keeps coming back, something you keep rehearsing to yourself. The formal structure enacts what the poem is about.

One practical caution: the words and phrases you choose to repeat will dominate the poem. If you’re halfway through and realize the refrain line isn’t working, it will be painful to go back and change it—but almost always worth it. Similarly, in forms that repeat individual words (like the sestina), choose words that can serve multiple parts of speech, or that have near-homophones, so you have more ways to use them.

Villanelles — 0:08:00

A villanelle is a 19-line poem with two refrain lines and two rhyming sounds throughout. It consists of five three-line stanzas followed by a closing four-line stanza. The first and third lines of the opening stanza become the alternating final lines of all subsequent stanzas, then appear together as the last two lines of the closing stanza. Only two rhyme sounds are used throughout the entire poem.

Historically, villanelles emerged from French troubadour folk songs—remarkable, given how elaborate the rules are. Two remain the best-known examples in English.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” — 0:10:00

The refrains are The art of losing isn’t hard to master and their loss is no disaster. What makes the poem extraordinary is that Bishop uses the requirements of the form as part of the poem’s argument. It begins with minor losses—door keys, a wasted hour—and expands outward through escalating scale (mother’s watch, loved houses, cities, a continent) until it reaches the worst possible loss: the you. By the time we arrive at the final stanza, the pattern is so established that we can see exactly what the form demands: the speaker must say that losing even the you is not a disaster. She cannot do it. The interjection write it breaks the surface—she is instructing herself to finish the poem, to say what the villanelle requires her to say even as every instinct resists. The speaker loses the fight against the form she invented, and that defeat is the poem’s meaning.

Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” — 0:18:00

The most famous villanelle in English. It’s excellent—of course it is—but one reading finds it slightly less successful than Bishop’s poem because the middle stanzas feel somewhat one-note. We get a series of parallel examples—wise men, good men, wild men, grave men—each discovering too late that they failed to live fully. The accumulation feels a little flat before the final shift to the speaker’s father makes the stakes suddenly personal and urgent. What Thomas does very well is the sound and momentum of the refrain lines: Do not go gentle into that good night and Rage, rage against the dying of the light have real pull, and the form gives them their driving repetitive force.

One participant raised the interesting point that knowing a poem well can change how we experience repetition—familiarity breeds tolerance, or even pleasure, where a stranger might find the form bogged down.

Michael Ryan, “Milk the Mouse” — 0:24:00

Less well known, and an excellent example of varying the refrains rather than repeating them exactly. The two refrains are he’ll pinch my pinky until the mouse starts squeaking and be strong, be tough, it is my father speaking. Over the course of the poem, those lines shift grammatically and contextually—it is my father speaking to himself, of course, arrives near the end, which changes the weight of the entire refrain. The speaker, as a child, is told this game is doing him a favor; as an adult, he understands that the father was talking to the frightened boy inside himself. The form carries the sense of something that hasn’t changed—the pinching happened, the words were said—while the meaning of those events changes entirely as we move through the poem. The slant rhymes (favor/later, chair/floor, water) also open up more freedom than strict pure rhymes would allow.

Pantoums — 0:32:00

A Malay form, old but relatively recent to English. Rather than fixed refrains that repeat throughout the whole poem, the pantoum works by passing lines between stanzas: the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next. This continues for as many stanzas as you like. The final stanza typically closes the circle by ending with the opening line of the poem, and often also incorporates the second line of the first stanza.

The mandatory rule is the staggered repetition between stanzas. The full-circle ending is strongly expected. The double-incorporation of first-stanza lines in the final stanza is optional.

Despite the different mechanism, the pantoum shares the villanelle’s circularity. It is arguably one of the hardest forms to write well precisely because everything repeats—unlike the sestina, where only end-words return. The easiest trap to fall into is a poem that feels completely static.

Audubon’s Flute — 0:35:00

A famous example, and a musically lovely poem—Audubon playing his flute by a river, the sounds of the landscape weaving through. Deer and herons pause to listen; the moon rises. The musicality is undeniable. One criticism: not much happens. The poem creates atmosphere beautifully but doesn’t travel anywhere. As a demonstration of what the form can do at its best, it’s useful; as a model, it might set the wrong target.

“Atomic Pantoum” — 0:38:00

A very different pantoum from the Cold War era—about nuclear chain reactions, written during the period when such things felt urgently close. The form becomes the subject: the poem enacts a chain reaction, each stanza triggering the next, the lines multiplying and transforming as the sequence spirals out of control. It begins with a near-clinical description of nuclear fission and ends as something close to political protest, the early lines now carrying meanings they couldn’t have carried at the start. The circle closes not on comfort but on the image of splitting nuclei. It’s a good example of a poem in which the form is genuinely content.

Teri Hairston, “Stillbirth” — 0:42:00

Perhaps the most moving example: a poem about a woman who hears someone calling the name she chose for a stillborn daughter, boards a train looking for her, finds a stranger, and is flooded with memories. The form—with its circling back, its same phrases appearing in altered contexts—is perfect for the subject. Grief returns in waves; the same thoughts cycle through at unexpected moments. The poem opens with a stranger being called and closes with the mother hearing that same call, but by then everything has changed in how we understand what’s at stake.

The repetitions in this poem are nearly exact but varied just enough: a line that first appears as dialogue returns later as a standalone statement; a fragment that first opens a thought closes a different thought entirely. One participant observed that the formal requirements seem to help manage emotionally difficult material—the reader is drawn into the structure before fully understanding what the poem is about, and by the time they realize, they’re already inside it.

Sestinas — 0:52:00

Rather than whole lines repeating, the sestina repeats only the end-words of each line, in a set spiral pattern. The form consists of exactly six six-line stanzas followed by a three-line envoi. The six end-words from the opening stanza cycle through all subsequent stanzas in a specific order—derived from a spiral that takes the last end-word of one stanza and makes it the first of the next, then spirals through the others. The pattern looks arbitrary but is geometrically consistent. In the envoi, all six words appear again, two per line.

Because it’s the same words that repeat rather than the same lines, and because the order keeps changing, the pattern is less predictable than a villanelle or pantoum—you can’t see it coming, and it’s always a small surprise where the words turn up and in what role. This also makes the form well-suited to storytelling and to sustained argument.

Choosing the right end-words matters enormously. Words that can serve as multiple parts of speech—or that have meaningful homophones—give you more freedom. Light (noun, adjective, verb), change (coins, alteration, transformation) are good examples. You don’t need to use them in all possible senses, but the possibility expands what you can say.

Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina” — 0:55:00

The six end-words are house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, and tears. The poem depicts a scene at a kitchen table—an elderly grandmother and a small child together, rain falling, the grandmother hiding her grief, the child drawing pictures. The end-words begin to feel almost like an incantation as they cycle through, accumulating emotional weight through sheer repetition. Tears appears as the grandmother’s tears, as the child’s crayons weeping, as small moons falling from the almanac. The accumulation is its own kind of meaning.

Jan Claussen, “Sestina: Winchell’s Donut House” — 1:00:00

A very different register—a woman working the overnight shift at a donut shop, describing her coworkers, the cab drivers who come in at 4 a.m., her own strange happiness in the hardest hours. The end-words are morning, alone, change, pink, light, and grease. What makes this work is how those words shift through the poem—pink as a color, as an adjective for flesh, as the early-morning sky; grease as the literal residue of the job and as a metaphor for the slipperiness of everything. Sestinas tend to feel, to one reader at least, well-suited to memory of an ongoing time—a period in one’s life rather than a single moment—and this poem captures exactly that quality: the sameness and strange intimacy of the night shift, remembered from a distance.

Tritina — 1:06:00

The same form scaled down to threes: three end-words, three three-line stanzas, and a final single line containing all three words. Much more compressed than the full sestina, and better suited to a lyric moment than to narrative. A tritina for a parent and child on a cold rocky coast illustrates the compression—the end-words cold, mouth, and child circle through three stanzas and then collapse into a final line. It’s a demanding little form even at this scale, and one worth trying if the full sestina feels like too much.

Ghazals — 1:08:00

A Persian form—ancient, but arriving in English poetry relatively recently. The ghazal is a series of couplets that are deliberately disconnected: they do not enjam, they do not tell a continuous story, they are self-contained mini-poems strung together. The first couplet ends both lines with the same word. After that, only the second line of each couplet ends with that repeated word, and a rhyming word appears just before it in each couplet (though some poets omit this rhyme). Traditionally, the poet signs their name—or a pseudonym—in the final couplet.

One useful description: a string of pearls. Each pearl is complete in itself; the string is what makes it more than a collection of beads.

Because the couplets don’t need to connect narratively, the ghazal suits a more aphoristic, lyric sensibility than the sestina or pantoum. It rewards readers who are willing to let disparate images sit beside each other and resonate without being directly explained. Michael Collier’s ghazal using home as the repeated word demonstrates this: couplets move from childhood to emigration to a newborn son to the etymology of mortgage to a memory of a neighbor’s garage—none of these connected by narrative, all of them connected by the repeated word and by the emotional gravity of what home means and doesn’t mean.

Closing Thoughts — 1:13:00

Nobody writes exclusively in these forms. But many poets write one or two of them—and even if the result isn’t something you’d publish, the act of making yourself work in a mode so unlike your usual practice works a different muscle. Something about the extreme orderliness of these forms creates an interesting tension when you bring emotionally chaotic material into them: the strictness of the form and the feeling threatening to break it apart. One participant put it well: trying a form like the pantoum on a subject you haven’t been able to write about might be a way in—and what opens up might surprise you.