Poetry Magazine | May 2026

Editor: Adrian Matejka

Publisher: Poetry Foundation (2026)

Back in February, while many were still eating discounted heart-shaped chocolates, I attended the Symposium on Poetic Form at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. This biannual conference, created by poet and scholar David Caplan, was a chance to spend time with poetry scholars, readers, and practitioners, including recent Poetry contributors Katie Condon, Camille T. Dungy, Mag Gabbert, Ada Limón, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, as well as former contributor and guest editor Srikanth Reddy. As its title suggests, the gathering focused on form’s sometimes stringent history and how it appears in contemporary poetry.

The conversations about stanzaic form and metrical verse took me back to my first attempt at writing in form as an undergraduate at Indiana University in 1991. The professor wrote a line of iambic pentameter on the chalkboard, and adorned it with accents and breves. He then said, “and that’s how iambic pentameter works,” and that was the entirety of his explanation. Most of the seminar nodded as if he’d handed them the key to prosody. I hadn’t overcome my nervousness about asking questions back then, so I nodded along with the rest of the crowd.

The assignment: write a sonnet in iambic pentameter. As was my way, I went straight to the library and read every example I could find (thank you, Norton Anthology of English Literature), but it might as well have been calculus. Not even Alexander Pope could help me hear an iamb. It was the drummer in a band I wrote (bad) lyrics for who finally demystified it: “It’s like making a beat on the lunchroom table,” he said. “Your knuckles are the snare. The bass happens when you switch to the meaty part.” He then drummed out iambic pentameter—boom, tap, boom, tap—on the table, and an entire metric world was revealed.

There’s no consistently iambic verse in the May issue, but there is—as always—form. Tracy K. Smith’s graceful tercets in “God of Song” gesture toward form’s storytelling possibilities. Carl Phillips turns to cinquains in “Sir” to consider “the fleet of questions,/the waves that clarify,/the ones that deepen.” Maria Zoccola’s “ithaca” returns to Odysseus in steady quatrains, while Saddiq Dzukogi approaches the epic through twin sectional poems titled “Egress.” Together, these works—like the conversations in Dallas—show that poetry’s traditions remain alive, enacted by contemporary poets who find their way to them, whether chalkboarded by a teacher or by a garage-rock drummer tapping a table like a tom.