Open Form

Open form is a concept developed by American poet Charles Olson in 1950. Opposing it to such so-called “closed forms” as the sonnet, Olson proposed a new poetry that gave itself over to momentary sensations and associations, in which the process of the poem's composition, rather than being concealed beneath an ordered, finished surface, made itself felt through shifts, leaps, hesitations, and fragmentation:

the thing you're after
may lie around the bend
of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!

And there (strong) thrust, the mast! Flight

(of the bird

o kylix, o

Antony of Padua

sweep low, o bless

the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones
on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart . . . (“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You,” 1953)



Central to the success of open-form poetry was the concept of the poetic line as a breath rather than a specific number of syllables or accents. This structure was reflected in the poem's appearance on the page, the varying line lengths and white space forced a reader's eye to keep pace with abrupt transitions of perception and thought. Referred to as the Black Mountain School after the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Olson taught, poets who embraced the new method included Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan. Canadians Margaret Avison, George Bowering, and Frank Davey were among a group of poets in Vancouver, British Columbia, who were also influenced by the Black Mountain poets, and in particular the effort to capture the effects of a speaking voice on the page. Though not strictly associated with the Black Mountain School, American poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler–themselves often labeled the New York School–were influenced by Olson's writings, particularly the notion of the poem as a record of its own making.