Introduction to my Forms Series
In this my 70th year I have begun work on projects long deferred.
What follows is necessarily partial. Some projects are collaborative and cannot yet be described in detail; others are still finding their final form, remain works in process, or await permissions beyond my control.
1. Form
Poetic form is both inheritance and constraint — a set of shapes handed down, adapted, resisted, and sometimes abandoned. Although literary history records hundreds of named forms, many are now archaic, highly localised, or bound to linguistic conditions that do not readily carry into English.
This page gathers my own selection of forms that remain viable in English today. The emphasis is practical rather than encyclopaedic: forms I write in, have written in, or could write in without distortion beyond my own choosing. These include international traditions alongside a wildly restrictive limited number of Irish forms, approached with max due restraint, aka Never..
Poetic forms are not neutral containers. They shape attention, rhythm, compression, and thought itself. Choosing a form is therefore not an aesthetic afterthought but a compositional decision — one that determines what a poem can notice, hold, or refuse.
Irish Bardic Schools
The Irish Forms Dilemma
Irish poetry possesses one of the most technically sophisticated formal traditions in Europe. That tradition was developed over centuries within the bardic schools and sustained through advanced linguistic training. For poets writing in English today, however, this inheritance presents a dilemma rather than a usable toolkit. The problem is not one of reverence or interest, but of method and language.
A fundamental error underlies much contemporary discussion of Irish poetic form: aka the English gloss
the treatment of Irish poetry as a catalogue of discrete, transferable forms, rather than as a small number of tightly related syllabic systems. This mistake is not trivial. It distorts both pedagogy and practice.
Classical Irish poetry assumes a linguistic environment characterised by predictable stress, vowel-rich morphology, and consonant mutation functioning as music.
English offers the opposite:
- unstable stress,
- consonant-heavy clusters
- and meaning-driven emphasis.
The two systems are not interchangeable. As a result, adaptation must prioritise effect over fidelity — or accept failure.
Bardic forms depend on phonological features that are structural rather than decorative:
- vowel length distinctions that carry semantic weight,
- consonant mutation as a musical device,
- predictable stress patterns,
- and inflectional endings that generate internal rhyme naturally.
Classical Irish poetry is syllabic, not accentual; architectural, not kinetic; designed for pattern recognition rather than pulse. When students are taught to hear Irish forms instead of to count them, they inevitably fail — and conclude that the form itself is artificial or unusable. The failure is pedagogical, not poetic.
This confusion is compounded by the way bardic poetry is presented in modern teaching. Bardic verse was not produced by amateurs experimenting with form.
It was written by professionally trained filí, educated over many years under rigorous conditions, often as part of a hereditary system. Removed from that context, the forms are reduced to schematic exercises — and then criticised for their rigidity. The tradition is first stripped of its scaffolding and then blamed for collapsing.
At the heart of this problem lies a category error: examining the mechanics of bardic output while remaining outside the language that generated it. This is not a minor omission.
The bardic schools operated in advanced, professional Irish, with a phonology, grammar, and sound system that cannot be approximated through English description alone. Analysing their formal mechanics without fluency in the language is akin to analysing counterpoint without hearing harmony, or describing chess strategy without knowing the rules. At best, such work produces diagrammatic knowledge; at worst, confident misunderstanding.
English / Goy go home, lol
Brief encounters with inherited Bardic form by some of our own pseudo-Ulster (Goy) poets produce aesthetic effects without assuming responsibility for preservation, explanation, or transmission.
Velocity, in such cases, functions as a form of exemption. This may be artistically valid, but it should not be mistaken for pedagogy, continuity, or anything of consequence in Bardic terms.
Accessibility
This does not mean that Irish poetry is inaccessible, nor that engagement with its forms is a lost cause. It does mean that honest limits must be acknowledged. Only a small number of Irish syllabic forms adapt cleanly into English, and those that do succeed by preserving numerical discipline and musical restraint rather than attempting full bardic replication.In most cases, the result of direct imitation is not translation but distortion — the poetic equivalent of a distant photograph of a painting: recognisable in outline, useless in substance.
With those limits acknowledged, what follows (very soon) turns to forms that can be written in English with only my distortion.
