Unbroken Line: Writing in the Lineage of Poetry
Sherman Asher Publishing, 1999
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"The poems used as examples in this book are all the work of people I know--living poets of New Mexico... There are already more than enough books on the market that draw their poetic models from the standard academically admired poets. I wanted my models to be from working poets I knew. I suspect that if asked many of the poets included here would define themselves as Romantics, working in the euphoric emotional tradition, and yet their poems were chosen as examples of traditional poetic form. There need be no contradiction between the two."
--from the Appendix

Chapter 7: The Pantoum
Certain forms also lend themselves to the exploration of obsessional material. The best of these is probably the pantoum. The pantoum comes into English from the Malayan. Like the ballad, the pantoum is written in quatrains, and was first oral--a form that derived from fishing songs--before it was written down. The pantoum, or pantoun as it is called in Malayan was first picked up in Europe by the French poets, including Charles Baudelaire. The New York school poet John Ashberry introduced it into the American mainstream in the mid 1950's, when he began publishing and teaching the form. I learned the form from Jane Shore, who had learned it under Ashberry's influence, when I studied with her as an undergraduate. I was immediately fascinated by its seemingly endless repetition. I teach it in every writing group I lead, and students love it because it is an instant--if highly spontaneous--way to give a poem a sophisticated, musical, and pleasing form.

Here is the grid for the start of the pantoum:

____________________ (Line A)
____________________ (Line B)
____________________ (Line C)
____________________ (Line D)

____________________ (Line B)
____________________ (Line E)
____________________ (Line D)
____________________ (Line F)

____________________ (Line E)
____________________ (Line G)
____________________ (Line F)
____________________ (Line H)
And so on for as many stanzas as you want to write until the last, which has its own special form.

Download a pdf of the full text, Chapter 7: The Pantoum by clicking below:
The Pantoum by Miriam Sagan (84k pdf)