Rob Greene
THE DEVIL FORM

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

As a graduate student, my preparations to teach poetry to undergraduates made me hyperfocus on craft, and I ultimately decided to begin with teaching how to make an image. My full understanding of the makings of lists within poems—as exemplified by Etheridge Knight, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, and Lucille Clifton—came after I developed what I call the devil form. Poems written in the devil form total thirteen words, including title, and must have a six-syllable title, six-syllable first stanza, and six-syllable second (and final) stanza. “In A Bar, You’re Alone” is an example of this form, which became one of my first published poems when it was printed in Tar River Poetry. 

In A Bar, You’re Alone

stench of citrus
vodka 

outlasts the smoke
signals.

Again, the devil form contains a thirteen word total including the title. The syllable count is 6, 6, and 6 (a six syllable title, a six syllable first stanza and a six syllable second (and final) stanza) and all the images are tightly wound within one synchronous sentence. Poets who employ this form learn to be concise and precise with their images. I developed this form by merging William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” with Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro.” The title of Ezra Pound’s poem directly inspired the title of my poem “In A Bar, You’re Alone,” while the body of a poem written in the devil form is half the size of William Carlos Williams’s poem. Ultimately, the devil form is a derivative of “In a Station of the Metro” and “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

In my lessons for my students, I create image charts for them to fill in their likes and dislikes that are specific to each of them as individuals, and I then use these questionnaire categories as a basis for images that relate to the five senses. I provide my own handmade rubric, and a brief rundown of Lorca’s essay on duende as well as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s chapter on the subject of images from The Poet’s Companion. My poem “In A Bar, You’re Alone” touches on the olfactory images of smell and directly relates to the nausea that I still feel to this day whenever I smell citrus vodka or rose wine, as those are the scents that would hit me as a small child directly before the fights that would break out when my parents were together. Given Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s quote on poetry as the “best words in the best order,” the devil form is a tool to help my students train early in their creative writing studies to be concise before they can get to expansiveness in their writing, because the correct words must be in place in work of varying lengths.

Addendum A1 – Additional original poem in the Devil Form

Addendum A2: Original Image Making Chart
Images that light up the senses mentioned in the Devil Form Essay
Fill in the image chart (20 minutes):

Freehand a poem containing some or all of these likes and dislikes, and cut it down to a Devil Form poem with a 13 word total and 6-6-6 syllable count with a 6 syllable title, 6 syllable first stanza and a 6 syllable second (and final) stanza.

Addendum A3: Rubrify Me Original Rubric Mentioned in the Devil Form Essay

Rob Greene is the founder of Raleigh Review and a father of four. He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham in England and his BSc in microbiology and his MFA from NC State University, where he taught as a graduate student. Rob Greene also previously taught at Louisburg College and SAU.

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