For the 2025 November PAD Chapbook Challenge,
poets write a poem a day in November.
Day 11 is to write a poetic form and/or anti-form poem.
Some poetry adheres to form, like river-banks to curb a tide...
Some skim the surface for sun-pearls...
Some poetry adheres to form, like river-banks to curb a tide
That rushes like a gushing storm where folly and wisdom collide
Where we are at the mercy of the littleness of what we think
Yet wild with wonderment and love for possibilities of ink
Sometimes hunger and thirst unfurls a torrential tug of war
That foams and frets, surges and swirls like floodwaters without a shore
Until meter and form command the chaos where thought's battles wage
And resistance melts in the hand that moves between the mind and page
Long live the age-old song and dance of sonnet, ballad, villanelle
Thy iambic lyric enchants the wanderer of parchment fell
And kindles in fathoms of thought a fresh onslaught of noun and verb
To taunt Troubadour's jaunt and jot with font that only form can curb
To thee of footloose fantasy and rebel to rhythm and rhyme
Who prefer free verse odyssey to forms withstanding tests of time
Blessings on thee, but do not scorn the poetry that lilts and brims
And winds between the banks of form to storm thought's holy grail with hymns
Form is not tyranny, my friend, nor superior to the spawn
Of fine and noble prose to bend the rules that form insists upon
So, here's to every work of art wrought with humble regard for ink
And reverence for every heart touched by some littleness we think
Some poets love the challenge of surrendering to tempo-ties
Like a tango where word-impassioned lover's clash and compromise
Darling, the world of words unfurls ballrooms and oceanic sweeps
Some skim the surface for sun-pearls, some dredge its diamond-metered deeps
Janet Martin
