At the moment form is killing me. We talked about this at a meeting the other day, one of our members asking about it–who should have known better.

Anyway, it’s something you carve away from a larger hunk, in many cases, rather than building up from something wet and clayey between your shoes. Stanzas and paragraphs, for example. They’re vulnerable to arbitrariness. In the case of stanzas, we have white space to wedge between them for the sake of sound, emphasis, rhythm, and image.

A first and last line is important. But a stanza has a first and last line, too. How to wrestle and strip them down to their focus, which the center of a circle, which has to mean something.