Breaking Form, Welcoming Evolution

with poem & prompts by Seth Leeper

How might we as poets lean into “evolution?” What does it mean to break form with intention? And what new forms emerge as we develop our voice & hone our craft?

I am awed & inspired by poets who play with form & especially those who invent their own poetic form(s). Some of my favorites include the Seussian sonnet (Diane Seuss) & the burning haibun (Torrin A. Greathouse). What a powerful way to build a poem while claiming space & agency in terms of one’s own voice & vision. My friend Seth Leeper is one of these poets! He invented a form called the pantoublock. I was thrilled when he agreed to share more about the pantoublock with my subscribers.

Check out his upcoming class at Brooklyn Poets! CLICK ON GRAPHIC TO REGISTER!

Seth Leeper is a queer poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Waxing, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, OnlyPoems, Salamander, and Sycamore Review. He holds an M.S. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He is a candidate in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Randolph College. His work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart awards. He teaches drop in and virtual workshops for Brooklyn Poets. Website // Breaking Form With Purpose // Linktree // Instagram // Bluesky

From this week’s guest writer, Seth Leeper—About the pantoublock: I started writing into the pantoublock form in order to write through my own grief process with a buffer that I felt form would afford in a way free verse would not. By merging a modified pantoum with the prose block, I found a container to hold the obsessions and controlled chaos underlying my journey.

The pantoublock is an invented form merging the pantoum with the prose block. It transforms in each of its recurrences and is dexterous with the content that can be poured into it. It makes space for narrative and overt musical play. The block is determined both by the first line break, and how each subsequent line is enjambed to create a quadrilateral, (a square or rectangular shaped box). By breaking the rules of the pantoum, such as limiting the base form to four quatrains instead of five, or an infinitesimal amount, then merging the base form with the prose block, a new form was created. In these ways, it is a queer form that leans into evolution.

Photo by Natalia Gasiorowska on Unsplash

What are some other poems that queer form and lean into evolution?

Poems that break rules with intention to push boundaries, or create new lingual bodies, fascinate me. C.T. Salazar’s River flirts with the essence of the ghazal contained in the power of its radeef, (repetition in key lines), to heighten the lyric and propel the rhythm of the couplets forward. In Megan Fernandez’s Brooklyn Sonnet, she selects which rules of the sonnet suit her poem, and innovates the form by extracting key fragments of language from the sonnet to create a new poem. Both use intentional choices to comment upon, and/or make something new from the forms they write into.

The pantoublock below was originally published in ONLYPOEMS; we will use this one to practice writing a pantoublock and generate some new poems.

So how exactly does one write a pantoublock?

Ready to write?