Playing with Form as Craft Practice
& Inspiration
One of my favorite things about generative workshops are the generous prompts from these workshop facilitators. I used to be a poet hard set against form. Like a lot of folks, I was once young and foolish. And while I don’t solely write in form, I have a greater appreciation for it and its ability to push my writing to a new place.
Poet, Sophia Dahlin, provides prompts in her generative workshops, allotting time near the end of class for all students to write. In one of these classes, a suggested prompt was to ‘write a poem in steinian syntax.’ I collect these prompts for later. At the time, I was drawn to another prompt and wrote towards that. But, I knew I would revisit this prompt again someday. And today is that day!
I have not yet read Gertrude Stein. While I will eventually get to her work, I make it a point to center my attentions toward authors of color, specifically Black and Indigenous women writers, creatives who are not given as much publicity as other demographics. Because I’m not familiar with her work, I asked Google, ‘what is steinian syntax.’ Among many things, the main rules I chose to follow were to follow an unconventional sentence structure, create repetition and pattern, and rejecting conventional punctuation. I read this and thought about my experience eavesdropping listening to conversations in Tagalog1. From that thought was born the poem “all multilingual speakers use steinian syntax di ba”:
all multilingual speakers use steinian syntax di ba
eschew commas and semicolons everything is together
anong grammar anyways anong rules para ito
we’re not always so ‘whatever’ abou these things kasi
the grammar for tagalog is sobrang mahirap if it’s not
your first language may pandiwa and you know ganyan
self-contained ba ito? filipinos in this house are experts
at nitpicking a conversation about rooms are actually
veiled attacks and somehow someway everything became
passive aggressive and icky and now i’m as mad as i was
when i was sixteen and nay ignored me for a month nay
comes into my room a different room now and breathes
relief believing she never hurt me i could never open my
mouth to the truth to her or here or to anyone in this house
maybe that’s why i am constantly clipping against words
used with no tact but have meaning everything has meaning
or am i just a scorpio stellium sigh mahirap to be this sensitive
this gusto mo bang prose poetry aling gertrude well here galing
diba experimenting with word order grammatical structures ha
aling have you tried a colonial fit no huh kasi purong languages mo
mga puti german puti french puti english puti you feel your emotions
in english you piss me off aling gertrude i want to feel my emotions in
tagalog no bisaya there were never commas or semicolons in our speech
just hands and smacking and chewing and laughing and shaking our heads
we’re not always so ‘whatever’ about these things kasi walang rules hindi the
truth is we make up the rules as we go i look back and see i made a mistake i added
a question mark in the fifth line pasensya aling gertrude i promise im trying ill do better
next time
National Poetry Month continues, and I hope have fun playing with language in form in your writing as well!
I’ve eavesdropped listened to conversations in Bisaya before, too, but Tagalog is spoken more often in my immediate home, so I have higher fluency in this language over Bisaya (much to my dismay).