What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Language as Form, poets write about poetic language as patterned language—how words as sound, voice, sentence, and song become elements of form. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
My father changed his cash to coins
and stuffed them in machines
to buy us food. The airport joined
my sense of father's schemes

with loud commotion. Gleaming walks
where heels click-clacked—endless
to my childish sense of things. Back
where home was, a blankness. 

The streets of Marikina crammed
behind my eye somewhere,
or lost in pockets stuffed with crumbs
of airplane crackers. Where

once a memory, only clothes 
shoved in a small valise.
And who's to say what staying close
would bring us? Father's peace?

A way to keep a self from worry?
Or did my father think
about this stack of quarters,
palmed and warm, the sunk

weight of the coins against his thigh?
The sound of the exchange
from one self to another life,
a rattle in the cage

causing the rack of a machine
to turn its gears and drop
a bag of chips, not quite a dream,
but here, for now, a stop. 
from the book THE DIASPORA SONNETS /  Liveright Publishing
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Cover of The Diaspora Sonnets
What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver de la Paz on Language as Form

"I started writing pantoums to demarcate section breaks to rectify what I saw as an imbalance in the work. I wanted to place the pantoum, which was originally a Malaysian form, against the sonnet's Western European tradition as a subtle nod to the complications that arise when attempting to adapt to a place."
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Headshot of Timmy Straw and Cover of The Thomas Salto
A Conversation with Timmy Straw

"But I also think that poetry wants an adversary, formal or actual, it doesn't really matter: a constraint, a limit, an enemy (or a friend—the best friends we can have are adversaries, kind adversaries). Reagan was probably my first adversary, both on a psychic and a structural level, and because of this, I learned a great deal from him: in a sense, I came to recognize what I loved of the world through him, because he, in turn, opposed everything I loved: everything that was free, everything that was wild, everything that could be stolen, that could be cared for, that could be lost."

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